Modest expectations – Joel

Given that our prime Minister loves to immerse himself in a biblical toga, this quote from the first book of Joel, which is incidentally the 29th book in the Old Testament and thus reflects the fact that this is my 29th blog that had its genesis 29 weeks ago, seems appropriate.

The vine is dried up, and the fig tree languisheth; the pomegranate tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree, even all the trees of the field, are withered: because joy is withered away from the sons of men. 

The problem is that the drought conditions have not affected Australia equally. In fact if you look at the agricultural forecast, the crops in Victoria, South Australia and West Australia seem to be doing nicely thank you very much. There is a small caveat on there being spring rains.

Darling River

Where Australia is in drought is in NSW and Queensland where the Murray-Darling basin has been wrecked and where the National Party holds most of the electorates lining the river.

The cotton industry has been particularly greedy when it comes to use of water, but the cowboys who have played around with the water rights have not helped, and there has been one disaster piled upon another as the rivers have dried up.

I, as an Australian, have been appalled by revelations about the Basin, but then what would I know? I am just a city dweller sitting on the coastline of Australia looking out on the Parramatta River. Nevertheless, like the rest of us I am inflicted with the fatuous comments of our politicians in relation to climate change.

One lesson, which does not seem to have penetrated the skulls of these politicians, is the lessons learnt from the past.

I have travelled extensively around Australia during a time when I was responsible for the rural stock take on health 20 years ago. Even then I was amazed by the extent of the open dams, which had been created to harvest water from the Darling and its tributaries. There were a few seasons when the rains came, the water flowed and everybody lost focus on the fact that this is a dry, dry land.

However, travel to South Australia and there is a line named after a very meticulous gentleman called Goyder who determined that below the line he had drawn, cropping could be undertaken with a degree of surety and above it not. Below the line the farmer can be assured of a mean of 240mm rain a year.

In fact testimony to the accuracy of his observations one can see the abandoned farm houses of those who did farm above the line. With climate change Goyder’s Line has been moving south and farming in South Australia has adjusted to the shift. South Australia produces 20 per cent of the country’s grain; most of it is grown without irrigation. In fact the Yorke Peninsula, where the best malting barley is grown, has no rivers at all. However, like its companion Eyre Peninsula, one can see the line metaphorically as it crosses these two areas. The farmers respect its scientific basis.

South Australia does not have any National party members elected to its bicameral legislature. South Australia is a desert state. I remember sitting on a verandah in Clare having a glass of that distinctive Clare riesling, when my host asked whether I knew I was 90 minutes from Adelaide and yet 90 minutes from Oororoo, which is above the Goyder line on the fringe of the desert. Increasingly Australia has to adjust to the degradation of the Murray-Darling Basin. Queensland and NSW will become desert states; however they await their George Goyder to show them how to cope.

David Littleproud

As the plane makes its descent, the local member scans the surrounding country, pointing enthusiastically to patches of water adjacent the many streams cutting across the verdant plain.

“It’s where the creeks have spread out,” he remarks. “It’s the best I’ve seen it in a long time.”

How things change! These words were uttered by Mr Littleproud in 2016 as he flew into his constituent town of Tambo.

Switch to last Sunday and there he was on television defending the allocation of one million dollars to the Moyne Shire for drought relief.

Now I know something about the Moyne Shire having once been a ratepayer in the Borough of Port Fairy before it was absorbed into the Moyne Shire. I also know quite a bit about the Moira Shire in Northern Victoria, having worked in Cobram, Yarrawonga , Numurkah and Nathalia for a decade.

That is where the departmental stuff up has occurred. The names have been confused. Moira Shire has been the centre of dairying in Northern Victoria along the Murray River. In this Shire Murray Goulburn dairying co-operative had a large factory complex, the travails of which I had a front row seat over a number of years.

Hence Moira Shire is a substantial dairying area together with a declining number of orchards, both industries requiring much water. Its rainfall this year is well below that of the mean rainfall.

So the simple solution for Littleproud was to admit the stuff up. But not this not very little proud “duck” – to coin a phrase. He stood on his dig and said that the northern part of the Moyne council was in drought. Consulting the map the most northerly part of the Shire is around Hexham and Woorndoo. The rainfall here is about the mean at this time of the year – 40 cm – hardly drought conditions. In any event the major dairying area is in the south of the Shire near the coast. I wonder whether the Minister has ever visited (or will visit) either Shire to assess the validity of his comment about the drought in the Moyne Shire, rather than making silly statements as he did this week.

For my part I have enjoyed a very pleasant sausage sizzle in the Minister’s town of his birth, Chinchilla, as I watched the coal train rumble by through the centre of town. We were on our way to Eromanga, so we had a view of the progressively dry microclimates along the way.

Littleproud has been a lucky man. His father was a National party Bjelke Peterson era minister and, as was the custom with the National Party, Littleproud has been the beneficiary of inheriting the increasingly arid electorate of Maranoa.

The rainfall in this part of Australia is half the average up to this point and a quarter of the rain was received on one day in March. However, how much relevance that has to a man of the country who now lives in Warwick, two hours closer to the coast than Chinchilla, I would not know.

I have read about the water scams, the gouging, the incompetence, bodgie water right transactions, the alleged criminality of stealing water from the McIntyre by Mr Cotton-Farmer-of -the-Year, John Norman, the sly allusion of his distant relationship to Littleproud’s wife, the subversion of the Culgoa River by the Sino-Japanese owned Cubbie station, not to mention the draining of the entire Darling River and its reduction to pools of algae infested toxin.

All that – but the water has gone. There is no more and of course the Coal Vandals are loose and want to pollute all the aquifers by mining sensitive areas throughout Queensland and NSW.

As I said, Littleproud has been a lucky man. He is also lucky because he followed Barnaby Joyce, who probably vies for the sash of the Champion incompetent bull politician ever.

So Littleproud could be lucky if he would be more proactive and seek remedies quickly and not be wedged by the climate change deniers.

However, Littleproud’s performance thus far does not augur well, and one may predict that Chinchilla, his hometown could soon be a mining town in a desert, as its water supply diminishes.

Thus, where is the National water policy; as usual caught up in the pass-the-parcel policy, which is translated into massive inaction.

Prayer and rain dancing is the substitute and if rain comes, then who wants the discipline of a water policy beyond “miracle wishes”?

Perhaps in the interim Mr Littleproud may like to move from Warwick to Roxby Downs to get a taste of what awaits his current policy unless rain dancing bears mean raindrops falling on his head.

As he knows, Roxby Downs in South Australia is a major mining area producing both copper and uranium. Like Chinchilla, profitable mining. Currently this year Roxby Downs has had 4 cm of rain against a yearly average up to October of 12 cm. It requires the water to be desalinated and the population depends on the aquifers.

Spaghetti Maranoa, anybody?

A tale of two athletes

Guest Blogger:  Janine Sargeant*

Wednesday the 9th was Peter Norman Day.

Dawn Fraser was suspended for 10 years (shortened to four years) for her alleged flag-stealing effort at the 1964 Olympic Games; Australia considered her a hero. Among her honours, she was Australian of the year in 1964 (the “flag” year), inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1965, awarded an MBE in 1967, appointed an AO in 1998 and an AC in 2018; bearer of the Olympic Torch in the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony 2000. She has a swimming pool named after her – just down the road from where I am writing this.

But Dawn Fraser has lacked one thing – grace and nobility of spirit. She was rewarded for being a genuine woman larrikin, who could swim fast.

You know the true blue Aussie who is quoted as saying: “I used to do some terrible things in the marshaling area to upset my rivals.”

Compare this to Peter Norman. He ran the fastest 200 metres ever by an Australian to win a silver medal at the Olympic Games in Mexico City in 1968 – his time of 20.06 seconds still stands as the Australian record – 51 years later. But because he supported two black athletes in their support of black rights (that Carlos and Smith defined as human rights) and, as a Christian stood up for human rights, he wore a badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, he was shunned by the athletic establishment in Australia – that is a remarkably strong word “shunned” – it has so many overtones and undertones.

Remember the American Avery Brundage was then the Olympic head honcho – a man who had been lavish in his praise of Hitler before the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He threw the black Carlos and Smith out of the Games.

The pervasive authoritarian right wing culture permeated Australia. Wilfrid Kent Hughes, dripping knighthoods, was still alive in 1968. He not only had identified very clearly with fascism before the War but also had run the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne. One can imagine in the denizens of the Melbourne Club, this “disgraceful” Norman being discussed.

Unsurprisingly, Norman was not selected for the 1972 Olympic team, despite running qualifying times. The Australian Olympic Committee to this day disputes all claims that he was ostracised – a claim made during the annual pig fly-past.

Unlike Dawn Fraser, Peter Norman had both grace and nobility of spirit. He was not a larrikin, but he ran fast.

The two black athletes he supported – John Carlos and Tommie Smith – have not forgotten him. They were pallbearers at Peter Norman’s funeral on 9 October 2006

Belatedly, long after he had receive the accolade from his black brothers, in 2012, the Australian House of Representatives passed an official apology motion recognising Peter Norman’s achievements and his bravery in wearing the Olympic Project for Human Rights badge in solidarity with Tommie Smith and John Carlos. The House apologised for the treatment Peter Norman received on his return to Australia and, belatedly, recognised the powerful role that he had played in furthering racial equality.

Peter Norman was recognised with his induction into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Athletics Australia Hall of Fame in 2010, awarded an Australian Sports Medal in 2000 and an Order of Merit from the Australian Olympic Committee in 2018 – all of this, assuaging our collective guilt.

A bronze statue honouring Peter Norman at the Albert Park athletics track in Melbourne was unveiled this week on the 13th anniversary of his funeral.

As he said to Carlos and Smith “I will stand with you.”

Now Peter Norman stands with us all.

Janine Sargeant both swam and ran … but the Olympics never beckoned. She runs a medical association in the not-for-profit sector.

An affair of the heart

Senator Bernard Sanders has had a heart attack. He has been treated but it is unclear whether he suffered any permanent damage to his heart, or whether they thrombolysed him and stented him so the muscle was not deprived of oxygenated blood so the coronary arteries could be unblocked. Almost as good as new.

Bernie Sanders

Now Sanders is one sturdy post-vintage model in the automobile parlance, where running boards and crank handles are still provided. Yet would I be dependent on one such car? Perhaps on a quiet road without much traffic, and with a mechanic in the back seat.

When Bernie and I were young graduates on different continents, the treatment for a heart attack was to put you up on chocks in bed to rest, and if there were any squeaks to give you pain relief with morphine and if the engine was failing give you digoxin and if the engine was not running regularly try and correct the rhythm by drug or by electric shock.

Then came the specialised garages called coronary care units and things have become so sophisticated that the modern-day, post-vintage Bernie can leave hospital after a few days, re-bored for his next foray in winning over the American electorate.

There is a debate about “ageism” and whether it is wise to have a large number of the post-vintage vying for the most important post in the Western World. People can hark back to the fact that Eisenhower had a heart attack while President but that was near the end of his eight years and there was little resistance to Nixon taking over. The same may be said for Churchill, who was already 65 at the outbreak of World war 11 and was still puddling around as Prime Minister far beyond his use-by date in the 1950s.

So in the USA, the current situation is that all the leading contenders for the nomination are 70 years of age and above. When I reached 70 it was cited as the new 50. However, that does not mean that age has stalled – and I doubt 80 is the new 55 or 60. In any event, Trump is showing disturbing neurological signs and symptoms; Biden has been revealed as a serial plagiarist which never augurs well; Sanders has had his go last time; which leaves as a “newbie” of the 70 and over brigade, Elizabeth Warren.

I have never seen her in person, but on TV she is hard-working, articulate, intelligent, engaging, humorous – all the qualities which a misogynistic electorate will ignore at best and hate at worst.

Trump, even through the fog of impending dementia, knows he has Biden’s measure, because he will continue to bully and berate until Biden will have had enough of the abuse – this guy who frankly has little to him and certainly not the destructive firepower of Trump.

As for Bernie Sanders, he has to survive. Trump does not know how to deal with him. Crazy Bernie. Really? Pretty pathetic, Donald, you old canard.

If Sanders does survive then maybe, just maybe, we will be singing Moonlight in Vermont, but somehow given the 14 month grind ahead, the Democrats will probably end up with a younger candidate.

As for Warren, the Clinton burden is considerable.

This coming year will be long year for the President and his challengers as we may expect the stress and physical demands play out on the older contenders to the Presidential crown. Maybe, beggar the thought, it could all prove too much and we could have four funerals without a wedding.

Mouse whisper

In 1977 when one of the referendum questions put to the Australian electorate was whether it would agree to a retirement age placed on all Federal judges including High Court judges of 70 years, the “yes” vote was the highest recorded in any referendum with all states voting for and over 80 per cent of the electorate over all.

As one learned source stated: It appears that in Australia, age provokes a reaction of vacation rather than reverence, and the electorate saw no reason to make an exception of High Court judges.

I like that unusual use of “vacation” – the judges were encouraged to get on their bikes when they turned 70 and to have a “vacation vacation”.

On their bikes …

Modest expectations – Parrot

I want children growing up in Australia to feel positive about their future, and I think it is important we give them that confidence that they will not only have a wonderful country and pristine environment to live in, that they will also have an economy to live in as well. I don’t want our children to have anxieties about these issues.”  

The antidote for such anxieties?

 Religion is the opium of the People.

 You get good Marx for that solution. 

The safety valve

I never thought when I was challenged to write a blog, which I’m sure among the cacophonies of ideas and opinions may be read by one or two, looking for a murine apparatus and getting the spelling wrong. However, the blog is a safety valve. It allows one to shower cyberspace with words – and since cyberspace is self cleaning then you do not pollute but leave, in one’s own mind, priceless gems hanging like lanterns lighting humanity as they get swallowed by the uroboros.

However as the twilight glimmers, one of the only facilities left to me now is writing. Assuming that this is my skill, I am writing as if there is no tomorrow so that there is a legacy for what it is worth. I always listened to Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America every week when he was alive; there was always a reason for saying what he did. The book of his travel around America when he was a young man inspired me to see as much as I could, since that axiom that one is a long time dead rings so true – despite one’s affirmation of life everlasting in the Apostolic Creed. The problem is that these Creeds were hatched when 40 years was the life expectancy; thus before one realised the horror of old age and being cast into the Life Everlasting nursing home.

Rockchoppers revisited – A Weapon of Mass Destruction

I read Rockchoppers just after it was released in 1982. It was written by a Roman Catholic priest, Edmund Campion and in the wake of what I thought was the awakening of the Roman Catholic Church following Vatican II and with it the growth of the worker-priest movement. It was a brilliant book.

Chartres Cathedral Rose Window

His description of Chartres cathedral – there is none better. To stand, kneel whatever your stance in Chartres Cathedral the cathedral is, the nearest I myself have ever felt of being in a divine presence. Edmund Campion put my inchoate thoughts in print elegantly, compellingly. He quotes those stirring words of Fulbert, one of the Bishops of Chartres.

We are as dwarfs on the shoulders of giants. We can see more and farther than they, not because we have keener eyesight or because we are taller than they, but because we are raised up and held aloft by their grandeur. 

Yet as I clear my library of books accumulated over more than half a century, I wonder how Campion feels today about his Church beset by a tidal wave of child molestation, unacknowledged children of priests and the indefensible maintenance of the seal of confession in cases of child rape, the non recognition of woman as priests, the hurt and harm to so many of the flock over which these men in frocks and silly hats have presided. Shepherds they ain’t, although they do carry a crosier – representing the shape of a crook.

Corpus Christi College in Victoria, a seminary, has been revealed as a cesspool breeding pederasts. On re-reading his book, Campion is very chatty about his early life, except for the time he spent in the Manly seminary studying for the priesthood. He dismisses it in a few lines – “for years I would have nightmares that I was back inside those walls”. That is all, and his book then pursues the doctrinal-political pathway of a man whose beliefs are in line with those of the worker priest at a time when Santamaria was in ascendency. Yet he must have known about the increasing social dysfunctionality of the Church – he is too astute and sensitive not to have known.

However, this week watching these Roman Catholic apologists wheeled out for the courteous Lisa Millar and Geraldine Doogue to interview, there are the masks of geniality that are difficult to challenge, especially if you have been conditioned since childhood with a sense of guilt. You can never be rude to the Church. The Church would never send in the current Archbishop of Melbourne for interview as the public relations front – just get a good ol’ empathetic face of a Father Brown understudy with a purple vest to pour on the paternal charm.

This is the Roman Catholic Church in delay, delay and delay mode; the creed of Catholicism, as it is with many religions, is secrecy and rearguard. The description of church architecture to over the centuries as described by Campion designed to increasingly separate the congregation for the priest to enhance the impenetrable secrecy should be standard reading as should be his antidote in Chartres.

Personally I am pessimistic and the Campion book holds the clue of why that is. Within all religion there is a reactionary group fearful of change which intelligent unscrupulous populists like Santamaria can exploit, as he did through the DLP before it was effectively destroyed in the 1974 Federal election.

However, it is not only the conservative Roman Catholics, but also in Newt Gingrich’s cleverly exploitation in harnessing the political clout of the evangelical Christian movement in 1990s. There are two forces – fear and the authoritarian personality, which oppose the forces that Campion wanted unleashed to liberalise the Catholic church. Therefore, to protect the base the traditionalists are prepared – if not to condone the despicable behaviour outlined above – then to look the other way or throw a blanket of sophistry over it.

Richmond – A Reflected Glow

I am not a Richmond supporter. However, I easily could have been if the kids on the corner of the street where I lived when I was five had not been Essendon supporters. Deeply impressionable, I became a passionate Essendon supporter, a support that was transferred to my sons and their children.

Michael Egan, Major of Richmond

However, my great grandfather, Michael Egan was Mayor of Richmond in the early 1870s and there is even a street named after him in Richmond. He distinguished himself by biffing another councillor who dared to disagree with him, but many of his other achievements as a councillor have been lost when at some time later the Council records were incinerated – some say suspiciously.

Michael Egan made a fortune with a wood yard, initially at the end of Rowena Parade and then transferred to Punt Road, where the Yarra River was convenient for transporting the wood. Anyway most of the wood ended up in the goldfield diggings, and when the great Crash of the 1890s came, I was always told that he survived because his money was in the Bank of NSW.

During the 1970s I frequented the Vaucluse Hotel in Richmond where we had monthly meetings, and this was time when the licensee, Graeme Richmond, was one of the geniuses behind that golden period when Richmond was last a powerhouse football team; and mine wasn’t. However, despite the horror of the period I did not change my colour from red sash to yellow.

Then Kevin Sheedy came along, a Richmond champion footballer as coach of Essendon in 1981. I thought Sheedy a dirty player and remembered him breaking Des Tuddenham’s leg, another ferocious footballer of that era, who had gone to Essendon as playing coach from Collingwood.

Now this Sheedy had come to Essendon as coach, and there was a perverse satisfaction in him losing five out of the first six games as coach such that he contemplated putting on the boots and coming back as a playing coach.

Then the Sheedy era blossomed. Essendon won 15 games in succession until it lost the very last game of the season to Geelong to Geelong and subsequently the 1981 elimination final. In three years though, Sheedy achieved his first premiership with my team – the first since 1965 – and during this time it turned out that Sheedy had been an Essendon supporter as a kid.

The tide was turning. Sheedy in my eyes now had been a fearless, uncompromising player, who brought the best out of his players instilling that intense fearlessness, of which the current Richmond coach, Damien Hardwick, as one of his protégés was a beneficiary.

One day Sheedy had also stopped to play cricket with my sons who were practising on one of those malthoid wickets in Yarra Park close to the Richmond Cricket Ground. How good was that for two teenage boys forever devoted to the Essendon red and black! Richmond and Essendon were thus forever closely intertwined.

However, even before Sheedy was appointed, I did make amends in relation to the yellow and black when in 1979 I moved to Balmain – Richmond on the Parramatta River as I called it – and became a very strong rugby league supporter of the then Balmain Tigers.

Balmain colours were orange and black. But what is there in a different shade of colour?

But then that is another story. 

Trudeau or Scheer. Scheer who?

It’s colder; they play ice hockey more; their bacon is really ham; and their obsession with maple syrup products borders on unhealthy. So penned a BBC reporter in an introduction to an article about the Canadian versus American political system.

The Canadians go to the polls on 21 October with 338 ridings up for grabs. Next week, the leaders of the various parties face the media in a Quebec venue – one in English –the other in French before audiences presumably who can understand “pollyspeak” in two languages.

There seem to be six parties in the electoral campaign, although two of the parties have two and one member each – the Greens, two on the Vancouver islands and a one-man party led by a LePen-like character who holds a Quebec seat. This leaves the left-of-centre New Democratic Party under its leader, Jagmeet Singh, struggling to repeat its 2015 successes. The Bloc Québécois Leader, Yves-François Blanchet, seems more secure and concentrates on the francophone areas, and it is the loyalty of his constituency that will probably determine whether Trudeau can wrest seats and be re-elected.

Trudeau thus will have to win seats in Quebec, an aim helped by the fact that the Conservative leader, Andrew Scheer, who represents a riding in Saskatchewan, does not speak French well.

Saskatchewan

However, the end result of the election should be interesting. We Australians pay scant attention to Canadian politics, only mentioning briefly Justin Trudeau’s travails, when he had been embarrassed by his appearance in blackface on several occasions when young, well before politics beckoned. These antics have been portrayed by the right-wing media as though they were a mortal sin. However, given the rise of social media and the tendency apparently to trade intimate and potentially embarrassing images, maybe this minor transgression by Trudeau will be magnified in future elections for aspiring politicians as the “sins of the past” are paraded as “weapons of mass destruction”.

What is important about our future relations with Canada is that both countries for their size and GDP have substantial pension/superannuation funds, with the potential for investment. An example of this is the joint arrangement announced in August between Australian Super, Australia’s largest industry superannuation fund, and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Canada’s largest single-profession pension plan, to invest $1 billion each in the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) of India’s Master Fund.

Then this week, Webster Ltd, Australia’s monopoly grower of walnuts, signed a deal for an AUD854 million takeover, yet to be ratified, by PSP Investments, Canada’s huge public service pension fund. The same fund has funded the Hewitt Cattle Company to expand its holdings in the Northern Territory. PSP Investments also owns 25 per cent of the NorthConnex tunnel, 25 per cent of the Westlink M7 toll road, 33 per cent of the rail freight company, Pacific National and a large slice of BAI Communications – in political terms all highly strategic.

The problem with the two countries is that in addition to being far away from one another, they traditionally excel in different sports (unlike other countries in the British Commonwealth). So the two countries exist in parallel. Any communication between Morrison and Trudeau one can guess has been minimal; perhaps if Scheer becomes Prime Minister there will be more evidence of shared vision in a common adulation of Trump, given the way their political careers have slid forward.

Politicians are great followers and perhaps the investment profiles of the large superannuation/pension funds of each country may guide them to pool their common interests so there is a potential third force in this increasingly polarised world.

And one great advantage Canada has over Australia is the lack of the Murdoch shadow. It should be noted that James Murdoch has purchased a property in a remote part of British Columbia, but then does he count? After all, he has been caught providing funding for democratic aspirants for the U.S. Presidency.

Mouse whisper

Mentioning “Boof”. It may have been 2010 … with apologies to A.A. Milne.

Scott Scott Morrison Morrison whether a matter for glee,

Took great care of his bear, though he was forty-three.

Scott Scott said to the Rupert: “Rupert, ” he said, said he.

“Don’t ever go up to the top of the town if you don’t go up with me …

and look what happened – Scott2 Morrison2 has another bear called Lachlan.

Modest Expectations – Julia

Looking at this young woman Greta Thunberg, her face contorted with rage, one has to ask what is the next step?

Rosa Luxemburg’s comment may be relevant and somewhat re-assuring:

The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.

Yet what happened to Rosa Luxemburg, who is one of my admired people, as is Dietrich Bonhoffer? She was killed by the Freicorps in 1919, as was Bonhoeffer – hanged by the sons of the Friekorps at Flossenburg in 1945. They both spoke their mind. They challenged the equivalent to today’s violent alt-right. Both had a form of courage, I wonder whether I could ever emulate; probably not.

But back to Thunberg. What is her next step? She has confronted her Armageddon in a unique way. Yet her following may yet be ephemeral. How many of those who demonstrated last week believe that when the Sun rises tomorrow it will incinerate our Planet in a cloud of carbon dioxide.

Greta Thunberg, in her speech, was full of venom. She is confronting a world that is full of hatred stirred up by the newly-minted demagogues. She is no longer a schoolgirl; to these demagogues she is a revolutionary – a dangerous person. Sweden has a history of assassination. Remember Olof Palme. His killer has never been caught. I do hope Greta has good security.

The Man of Coal gets a Shiny Coating

The Prime Minister has come out of his visit to the United States with a new moniker – a Man of Titanium.

Titanium Man

Whether that sticks depends on whether the various spin doctors see any value in ridicule or defence emphasising the properties of titanium. Who knows? However, what else? Maybe some trivial contribution to Trump’s Mars Venture, a couple of speeches, opening a Pratt factory in Ohio in front of what looked liked a bikie convention. Wandering around the United States Morrison, despite all the flattery and pomp, presented a marginalised world figure.

Meanwhile, as well as the speech at the UN climate summit, Jacinda Ardern has given a headline speech at the UN Secretary General’s climate action summit private sector forum. She has been pushing her initiative, the Christchurch call to block extremism on the social media outlet; she has met with Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube and Brad Smith, president of Microsoft.

Her aim was to cement the Christchurch Call, during a roundtable with the tech companies including Microsoft, Google/Youtube, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook. Maybe the call will become an echo, but in our terms with the new crisis response protocol and the preparedness of Google to test it later this year, she’s giving it a red hot go – and what’s more, she is very relevant to what is occurring in the world.

She may not have been able to feast on Dover sole and apple charlotte with such luminaries as the Honorable Rudy Giuliani or the Honorable Katherine Henderson the other night, but Trump wanted to speak to her and it should be noted that Trump suddenly made time to drop by the Climate Summit – no show without Punch.

By contrast, our Prime Minister didn’t entrance everybody with his talk to the United Nations this week.

However, Morrison is not the tosser that some like to portray. I was thinking about what his next move with Ms Liu will be now that he has the Chinese well offside, and there seems to be some pushback by the Victorian Liberals.

Looking though the guest list for his dinner with Trump there was no Arthur Sinodinos – maybe a bit odd. But when the Niblick from North Shore who was at the dinner, comes home, he will be replaced by an envoy not tarnished by a Trump association; hopefully Sinodinos will be somebody who will be amenable to the Democrats. Just an errant thought chipped out of a cranial bunker.

Stop mucking about

One of the problems the health system faces is how to manage the aged person when their chronic condition develops into an impairment that requires varying levels of ongoing care, particularly institutional care. The health care system is faced with paying for custodial care – and preferably not in high-cost, state-managed acute hospital beds.

To the central Commonwealth agencies the imperative is to keep the aged brain and limbs working, for the forecast is that unless this is done there will not be enough people working to sustain the economy without extensive immigration.

This imperative to keep us working is an ironic outcome, given that the Commonwealth allowed the development of a superannuation scheme that required its own employees to retire on the eve of their 55th birthday. Under the terms of the scheme it was not worth working beyond that age. Moreover, there were financial penalties if you did.

That scheme has been retired, along with a lot of 55 year old public servants, but it illustrates a shift in thinking. It is not that long ago that the futurist chatter was about an increase in leisure time and the expectation of retiring to a recreational middle age. Given the imminent workforce problems, that is not an option for government planners. Therefore the workforce has to be healthy if it is to prolong its usefulness. After all, healthy life expectation starts from intra-uterine life.

The fact is that we have the technology to prolong existence. Whether that existence translates into the kind of life a person would care to be encased is a matter of personal value judgment. To many, though, the primacy of the individual is a societal norm.

So what about this question of an aged care health benefit under Medicare? The Commonwealth already has the power to legislate for a sickness benefit. Also, the Constitution picks out, in addition to the doctors and dentists, benefits for hospital care and pharmaceuticals.

In all the discussions of the Commonwealth’s powers, it was only the passage of the 1946 amendment that enabled the Commonwealth to intervene directly in health financing.

It then created successively the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (1950), the Pensioner Medical Service (1951), the Hospital Benefits Scheme (1952) and finally the Medical Benefits Scheme (1953).

It might be argued that the Pensioner Medical Service was an embryonic attempt at an Aged Health Benefits Scheme. But it was a very limited attempt, restricted to some services provided by general practitioners to eligible pensioners and their dependants.

The matter of Commonwealth powers is relation to health was one of the terms of reference in the first major review of the Constitution established in 1927.

In its report two years later the Royal Commission, which undertook the review, revealed a strong difference of opinion on where responsibility should lie. The majority view supported a “softly, softly” approach, which would have health as a Commonwealth power but well fettered by the states and even local government.

What emerged strongly in the report was a recognition of the strong sense of co-operation between the Commonwealth and the States. But here the discussion was about quarantine and the promotion of public health. The fact that co-operation had failed under the “stress of epidemics” of smallpox in 1913, influenza in 1919, and plague in 1921, was seen by the Royal Commission as the reason for even more co-operation between the various governments, not less!

In fact, the Commonwealth Department of Health was created as a result of the influenza epidemic and problems arising from the return of large numbers of troops from the First World War. From the national approach to episodes, such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and the Swine Flu epidemic are evidence that co-operation in this area has continued to the present.

But health financing is another matter. It is interesting to note that when the Constitution was next comprehensively reviewed in 1959, health was not mentioned in the deliberations. The Constitutional amendments of 1946 had resulted in the changes welcomed when the world was experiencing the advent of the “wonder drug” era. The cost of the health system was not a political issue.

So what has happened since?

John Deeble

As the late John Deeble, one of the architects of first the Medibank scheme of universal care (1974) and then Medicare (1983), identified over 30 years ago, from 1972 onwards the average wage level of public hospital employees started to rise far faster than both average weekly earnings and medical practitioner incomes. The impetus for this was, in his words, “a compulsory arbitration system which takes almost no account of the ability to pay and was completely unaffected by financing arrangements”.

A number of strategies have been employed to try to contain the cost of the health system since this trend became very apparent in the early 1980s. But in the end, when the smoke clears from any round of Commonwealth-State conversations on health, the problems foreshadowed in tailoring a health care system to projected demographic changes will persist. Yet near the end of the Howard era, there was an explosion of Medicare benefits, expansion of the Medicare Safety Net and the reintroduction of the private health insurance rebate.

One wonders, then, whether it would be best if there were some consolidation of the power of the Commonwealth, such that it assumed complete control of aged health care and, by implication, total control of health. Alternatively, should the Commonwealth simply retire from health care? This debate has achieved currency periodically, although with the number of reviews, which have been entered into from Rudd to Morrison, the debate has become rather muted waiting for the deliberations of these committees. The time that the Robinson Review has been allowed to meander needs to be curtailed as I mentioned before; and who knows where the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, constituted at the beginning of the year and due to release an interim report at the end of October, will end up.

There remains a need to stimulate discussion on how best to address the issue of providing for an aged health care benefit.

At first blush, advocacy of such a benefit would appear to be for “health care” after age 65. Any person, whether in the guise of “patient”, “client” or just plain “consumer”, would have the discretion to use that government-funded benefit how he or she thinks fit.

Such a libertarian solution is immediately hedged with all the provisos that abound in that “dark and pessimistic world we inhabit” – a state of affairs we might expect if we listen to those who try to ensure that any freedom of action is hung on a line of conditional discretion for our own protection.

This is the dilemma: the tug-of-war between freedom to do what you want and the imposition of the fiat of “what is good for you”.

And so the level of knowledge about the various courses of action that are available becomes crucial when determining the outcome of this tug-of-war in relation to the individual complaint.

It is the power of asymmetric knowledge. The provider has knowledge, which the consumer generally does not.

Constitutionally, the Commonwealth may have the power to establish an aged care benefit which could, for instance, be just a redefinition of the power to set “sickness benefits” (which is mentioned in the 1946 amendment).

The fact that so few referenda are passed is testament to the conservatism of the electorate. But it also indicates that the same electorate takes change seriously.

There have been four referenda since the one in 1946. The consequences? Aboriginal people have been given the right to vote; price and income control has not been conceded to the Commonwealth Government; and the Republic has been denied. A number of constitutional anomalies were clarified in the 1977 referendum.

The financing of aged health care is another major issue.

The prospect of a referendum will draw out the vested interests, to be tested in the glow of debate. And that is the point! It is the vested interest who may feel that such a debate would not be fruitful because it is too hard to change the system. But in the end it would be academic. Referenda are expensive, and in the current economic climate seen as a luxury; nor would the cession of powers attract much interest.

But if one level of government does not at least have the unequivocal power for health care of the aged then the proposition of a consolidated benefit for aged care will never be tested. The optometric scheme was introduced in 1974, and the sleight of hand used to assure Constitutionality was to deem the optometrist service as “medical”. In any event, the Commonwealth was providing a fixed benefit for a limited range of services. The optometrist had to accept the benefit amount.

This is very different from the medical benefit, where the benefit is the Government’s contribution to the overall medical fee, which remains at the discretion of the doctor. The Commonwealth has progressively tried to cap the Medicare expenditures and at the same time maintain the gap payments at an accepted level; hence the expanded Medicare safety net and bulk billing provisions, which are increasingly working less well and there is a rising concern between benefit and actual fee proceduralists, in particular, charge. Given his craving for publicity maybe it could be called the Teo effect after the cavalier neurosurgeon of the same name.

The language of the majority opinion in the 1929 Royal Commission report still resonates as a challenge to this nation to consolidate the health power in that sense of co-operation, which has been apparent in public health matters since Federation.

So let us play with the theme – directing the whole of our approach to health care, from conception onwards, towards conferring an aged care health benefit – but under a single power conferred by the Constitution. However, if the definition of “sickness benefit” is expanded then it may enable the benefit scheme to be extended to those health professionals that the current language of the Constitution excludes. There is for instance no provision for “a nursing fee for Medicare benefit”, unless you pursue the optometrist option – and I doubt whether either doctor or nurses would be happy that nursing services being deemed “medical” to attract a patient benefit

If that can be done without a referendum, there will be much saving of time and expense. But there is no doubt that referenda and the prospects thereof do focus the collective community mind.

Mouse Whisper

I love the story about an Australian bushranger called Charles Rutherford who was illiterate and lurked around the Lower Darling in the early nineteenth century. When he robbed a coach, he asked the passengers to read out the value of each cheque that he intended taking. Talk about honour among thieves. But there was more. He used to take his captives to a near-by hotel for drinks and lunch at which Rutherford, presided gun in hand.

Modest Expectations – Theodore R

I repeat what I said last week, eye gouging – or whatever euphemism is used in the charge – should result in the player being banned for life and the police called in.

Two weeks in a row – the one player. “Of no moment”, one cries, with a carefree flick of the polo stick. Is the AFL going to wait until a player is blinded?

At least despite pressure he has got a one week suspension. Hardly enough.

It is disappointing to say the least that the ophthalmologists of all people have not weighed in – at least it does not appear to be so on the web site.

They call it Molly

Back in the mists of time when the Neanderthals walked Australian soil I, as a male post-graduate researcher, had a regular task. I had to climb a ladder and, on the top of a long Sephadex column encased in lead bricks, had responsibility for the purification of two radioactive iodine isotopes – I125 and I131.

The first of these isotopes had a half-life of about a month but the second isotope that of about ten days. Therefore for the research work, I131 had to be made frequently because as it decayed it lost both strength and purity for the work the laboratory was undertaking. Over the period, since we needed to be checked after each procedure, I labelled myself as well twice, which meant I had to take a dose of iodine to wash my thyroid out. Let me say that there are few worse punishments for laboratory carelessness than a dose of iodine. It sure defines bitterness.

So when I look at the latest problem that ANSTO is having with the supply of radioactive molybdenum (Mo99) then I have great sympathy for when things go wrong.

For the community, nuclear reactors mean enriched uranium and the possibility of bombs and big power stations. But OPAL (Open-Pool Australian Lightwater Reactor) at Lucas Heights does none of those things. However, its role is equally important, as the low grade uranium fission in the reactor has been producing a significant supply of the world Mo99 which in turn generates technetium (Tc99m). If you to identify the most important function of the reactor, this is it.

The ANSTO reactor has been having production problems with Mo99 since June last year. First there was a problem with generation of the technetium, which meant Mo99 had to be sent to Boston for Tc99m generation, and given the half-life of the isotope and the turnaround time for the Tc99m there needed to be spot-on timing to minimise the loss through decay of Mo99 in transit.

Now it is a more serious problem. A faulty valve in the dissolution cell means that while Mo99 can be made, it cannot be extracted to produce the Tc99m. There is already a huge shortage around the world as a number of reactors that did make the isotopes have closed down in recent years.

Before you all shrug your shoulders and say reducing radiation is good thing, everyone has to realise that this isotope Tc99m is the mainstay of detection for cancer, bone disease and some cardiac conditions. Without it, this area is like a blank black TV screen. With the TV, you expect to be able to switch on, the screen to light up and you then settle in for a good night of relaxation. The same is true for the specialty of nuclear medicine and diagnostic imaging in general, you expect not have any interruption in the program.

Currently, the ANSTO boffins are scratching their heads about how best to proceed, given there is an great amount of highly radioactive material unable to be removed before the repairs can be started – the equivalent of how to stop Rome burning.

Elsewhere everybody in the industry and relevant parts of medical profession have got off their backsides to scour the world for any spare Mo99 (there apparently isn’t much) and thus realistically searching for substitute tracer material which is generally more expensive. This substitute material has to be priced so as to ensure the industry does not go down because Medicare cannot adjust to pay the real cost of using the substitute radiopharmaceuticals.

The Government is very conscious about price and that is reflected in the precise definition of MBS item descriptors. It is an exercise in keeping the smallest number of moving parts operational – and when the crisis is passed then there can be what the dreamy educators would say – a time for reflection.

However, this whole period with ANSTO and its cascading troubles may need a great amount of investment to correct – and to many, nuclear reactor is equated to Chernobyl. Therefore, politicians get nervous, and if we could call it “fluffy duck” they may then be prepared to immediately stump up the money to fix the source of last year’s problem.

Having said that, this year’s problem has occurred in ANSTO’s newest world-class production facility. It might be a one in 10 or 15 years’ problem, but it is a major one and it has occurred very early in that 10 to 15 years.

The sector has responded as well as it can with emergency provisions being put in place very early on and a cooperative approach being taken. It will be a challenge to keep a smile on the face of the specialty if the shortage drags on.

The Lucas Heights reactor is a vital cog in assuring the community’s health if for nothing more than the detection of the conditions named above. What happens if an unfriendly country corners the world market for Mo99 even by default because Australia can’t get Mo99 out of ANSTO?

Morrison – the Funambulist

Morrison is about to go and participate in one of those tawdry Trump events – called a State dinner with all the trappings of Mar-a-Casablanca chic. An Australian Prime Minister can hardly turn down what no other World leader except Macron has been afforded – Trump with full garnish. Morrison knows that as a middle order leader, he has to be able to genuflect to both the USA and China almost simultaneously without either getting the legs crossed or suffering from a case of morderte en el trasero.

To avoid the latter condition and given he has an electoral mandate until 2022, Morrison will be banking on either a Trump re-election or the aspiring Democrats not noticing or caring who is and what he has said. After all, “A gunboat short? No worries – just ring Australia.”

However, keeping sweet with the Chinese is a different matter. To counter any perception that he is a total American sycophant, Morrison has been very strong in the defense of the member for Chisholm, whose links to the Chinese government seem like a tapeworm – you can see the head but extracting the total worm is a tortuous, long drawn out task. An official Chinese publication has risen to the bait, by praising him, but there is a great deal of unraveling before the Prime Minister is invited to a banquet in Beijing.

At the same time the media are having a field day not just on the member for Chisholm, but also all the Chinese donations appearing in modern variations of the brown paper bags. What it tells me is that the Chinese never miss an opportunity. If they see a line of politicians and bureaucrats with their noses in the trough, why not feed them?

However the Chinese government cares not a jot about the media – they care about who is in government, and it is better to get your way without having to use brute force. As the Japanese found out, Australia was not the easy target to conquer that Malaya and the Dutch East Indies were. However, in the minds of some Australians there are still remnants of “White Australia” and the “Yellow Peril”; even now when over one million Australians have Chinese heritage. So for the Australian government, the Chinese government presents a problem, especially when you can hardly see the problem through a blizzard of bank notes.

However, one of the most interesting Morrison appointments which has not gone unnoticed is Graham Fletcher as the Ambassador to Beijing. As one of his predecessors noted, Fletcher is the most fluent Mandarin speaker sent in this role and has in fact lived for periods in China. Contrast him with the moustachioed Iowan Terry Bransted, the American Ambassador, lauded by Trump as a great friend of China because Bransted apparently casually met Xi Jinping many years ago when the latter was a minor official on an agricultural delegation to the Mid-west. Great credentials when placed against those of our new Ambassador. I think not.

However, whether the member for Chisholm is a Chinese Government operative or not, Morrison is showing a degree of solidarity with her that has not been lost on Beijing. It is hard to believe that the advice Turnbull received which made him shy away from the then candidate for Chisholm would differ from the advice received by Morrison about the member for Chisholm. And yet there is the Prime Minister unabashedly defending her.

The ALP missed their opportunity to send the Chisholm electorate result to the Court of Disputed returns, challenging the Liberal party’s advertising as scandalous and deceptive. Had they done so it is probable that this episode would have been played out in a more frosty, less emotionally charged atmosphere. However, the billy has been kept boiling by the maverick Oliver Yates, who has the member for Kooyong in his sights also in his appeal to the High Court.

Anyway, in amongst all the activity, the Prime Minister in his actions in relation to the member for Chisholm is addressing Beijing without appearing to genuflect. He has already a semaphore from the Chinese. It now depends on what he says in Washington – probably no “on the stump with Donald Trump” would be a good starter

As I said above I hope the Prime Minister will avoid treatment for a bad case of morderte en el trasero.

Jacques Miller

Very briefly: Congratulations to Jacques Miller on co-sharing the Lasker award this year with Max Cooper, although in its announcement, the NYT put the Yank’s name first. They really can’t help themselves, given that the research giant was Miller, then a 30 year old when he made his initial discovery about the role of the thymus, that gland in the neck which few of us have ever contemplated. His work was seminal to modern immunology. Miller is now 88.

For God’s sake, you Swedes, he has deserved the Nobel Prize for years. Gus Nossal’ s elegant panegyric written eight years ago says it all. How many of us have been touched by his work – his genius.

Let Professor Nossal’s succinctness remind you of the impact of the discovery:

Miller is the last person to discover the function of a human organ — the thymus — and not a single chapter of immunology has been untouched by the discovery.

T cells became even more prominent when it became clear that they were the chief target of the AIDS virus. Miller continued to make discoveries about the thymus and T cells for many decades, including gaining important insights into:

  • how the immune system discriminates between self and non-self;
  • how it goes wrong in autoimmune diseases; and
  • how the whole orchestra of the immune system is regulated.

Enough said.

Mouse Whisper

We all know about Shanghai Sam – he is the guy the Prime Minister did not name as such – 17 times.

Perhaps though, without reference to the black kettle, we can now call the Prime Minister “Chinese Morrison No 2.”

“Chinese Morrison No 1” was also famous in his time – an Australian born in Sydney. George Morrison was a journalist who, as a correspondent for the London Times in the then Peking, had an important role in the defense of the various legations during the 55-day siege of the Boxer Uprising in 1900, the year of the Rat. Then, as adviser to the fledgling Chinese Government, he was a pivotal figure in the fall of the last Emperor and the birth of the Chinese Republic.

“Chinese Morrison No 2” should remember that 2019 is the Year of Pig – to the Chinese a symbol of wealth not necessarily with its head in the trough.

Modest Expectations – Klinefelters

Robert Mugabe, that unpleasant man from Zimbabwe, died recently at 95. I remember one of those Rhodesian types, I could see him elegant in a safari suit sipping a Pimms in a Bulawayo club in the days when Cecil was a remembered name. This guy voiced what I had wondered about for some time. He said that it was an open secret that Mugabe suffered from tertiary syphilis – or in more specific terms that variation known as general paralysis of the insane.

For some years after he assumed power in the new Zimbabwe carved out of the old Southern Rhodesia, Mugabe was viewed as a being a reasonable ruler of an emerging country but slowly over the years he was transformed into a tyrannical paranoid despot prone to grandiose ideas – and it was also noticeable that he was increasingly having difficulty with his balance.

The problem is that dementia has many manifestations, as does syphilis, which in its clinical manifestations is the great chameleon. While primary syphilis is relatively easy to diagnose, as the causative spirochete agent then wanders away from its genital base through the body and across the blood-brain barrier, syphilis can manifest itself clinically in many ways.

In a post-graduate examination may years ago, I was presented with a specimen of a large aortic aneurysm, which fortunately in my discussion I said could be a tertiary manifestation of syphilis – not the paretic but the luetic form. My examiners then launched into a thorough menu to find out how much I knew about syphilis. The specimen was just the amuse-bouche.

Syphilis is very well treated by penicillin if diagnosed, as the spirochaete does not or cannot conjure up any defence against the drug. However, the disease can disguise itself well, once the primary focus is healed. One of my recollections is that of a guy bought into the emergency department comatose and with these strange lumps over his body. One was biopsied and showed masses of plasma cells and then when stained appropriately, there was coil upon coil of spirochete. Syphilis unmasked and I believe once penicillin was administered he lost his lumps and became alert. Syphilis cured. However, it showed how deceptive syphilis can be.

However, penicillin availability has not cured the disease. Syphilis still prowls the community often strand in strand with the HIV virus.

Once upon time in the 1950s and 1960s, if Australians wanted a US visa, they needed to have a Wasserman test to show they were free of the spirochete; and before World War 11 some of states of the US, at the urging of the then Surgeon General, instituted mandatory testing for syphilis before a marriage license could be issued. How that was enforced is an area of speculation, but data did show that those about to marry was not necessarily the area where the Surgeon General should have been looking.

Now the Amazon behemoth is moving into heath care data collection with Alexa chirruping from the Bezos hip pocket. So what happens now if the data find the deceptive spirochete coiled up the policy maker brain? What of this person? Increasingly irrational you say – maybe we should wait till the person in question starts to fall over – literally. Then Mr Bezos may have the answer for us.

Not on my Kisser

I have always preferred shaking hands when greeting anybody, but I was taught as a boy to shake hands with a person of the opposite sex only when she proffered her hand. Relatives were different. As a small boy they would come at one at different angles to kiss me. Apparently, that was an acceptable trespass.

I agree very strongly with Leigh Sales about the unwanted kiss, especially when it lands on the lips whether dry or oozing with saliva. However, it applies for both sexes. As presumably Leigh Sales does, I like to control my personal space – those that come into it are only licensed to do so. Personal space varies; you know roughly how much you have. For me, it varies with the mount of grog I have drunk; and thus when one drinks too much that space is more easily invaded and vice versa.

I not only dislike being kissed by someone where the feeling is not reciprocated, but I also avoid the hug as much as possible. The hug makes me feel very uncomfortable, and here again personal space is violated unless it is consensual. In one TV chat program I watched, someone proudly said she was a hugger as though that gave her a complete license to do so.

Personal space I found out long ago is variable. Having tested it, if someone comes up to me, and wants to shake my hand, I have no problem with distance of the outstretched hand. I have been known to grasp the arm to regulate the greeting distance. If someone comes up to me aggressively, I generally do not back away.

People coming up behind me whether putting their hand on my shoulder or not do not worry me, but this is one area of personal space where many people feel most vulnerable and hate the person coming up behind them and touching them.

And of course it depends on the venue – a back lane at 3.00 am or an office at 10.00 am are somewhat different. Therefore, context is always important.

Being male gives one an advantage in maintaining personal space integrity. You develop strategies, but I would imagine a high profile person as Leigh Sales is, has many, but the ambush is difficult to manage especially if the assailant is someone you believe should have known better.

Eye Gouging

The National Rugby League recently inflicted an eight-week penalty for eye gouging on a Canberra Raider, but the Australian Football League slapped the wrist of a GWS player with a fine. Irrespective of the history of this player on the field, I found the defence by his captain ironic. He is alleged to have said, in reference to his colleague: “sometimes that means people look at stuff that he’s involved in in a light that’s probably not neutral”.

I agree if the eye gouging had resulted in blindness his victim would be in a light that was probably not neutral. He would be blind.

I am not an ophthalmologist but perhaps such a specialist could more eloquently tell the community of eye gouging leading to retinal tears, dislocation of the lens, vitreous haemorrhage, globe rupture, traumatic optic neuropathy or fracture of the orbital floor – and of course blindness is always an option.

I have a simple remedy. Ban eye gougers for life from the sport and call in the police.

After all, look at the penalty meted out for sandpapering a cricket ball. A cricket ball versus an eye!

Caribbean storm

This time it is the Bahamas; last time Puerto Rico. These are high profile remnants of hurricane fury. Battered by hurricanes of increasing intensity, the Caribbean is increasing liable to become a tropical rubbish dump.

The funny thing is that these events seem to be increasing in intensity while the climate changer Canutes are clustered on the shores of their indoor swimming pools sipping their strawberry daiquiris and watching the clouds roll by.

This troubling development is not going away, as these micro-nations, which are exploited either as reservoirs for the black economy whether money laundering or drug trafficking or for the tourist playground. There is a huge discrepancy between the living standards of the tourists and the ordinary citizens with many living as little more than subsistence farmers.

Climate change is real, and in countries which are as vulnerable as most of those in the Caribbean, these events of Nature, whether they be hurricanes or volcanic eruption like the one which destroyed most of Montserrat, have not the financial capacity to do much.

Then Haiti is the classic failed State. Ruthlessly exploited by the Duvalier regime, classically described by Graham Greene in The Comedians, Haiti was subject to a massive earthquake in 2010 which killed 300,000; followed by a cholera epidemic; followed by two hurricanes. What chance has that country got to be anything but a pile of impoverished rubble. In my recent visit to Chile, I noted a number of black people roaming the streets obviously in low paid work. They were Haitian refugees. There are over 150,000 of them in Chile alone, about 10 per cent of the immigrant population.

However, only in one Caribbean country can you detect any systematic response to what will become a regular summer hazard – and unsurprisingly that is Cuba. In an article after hurricane Irma in 2017 devastated a 300 kilometres swathe across the island, affecting 90 per cent of the population, Jon Anderson noted in an article in the NYT:

Taking part in preparations for the defense of the island from the vicissitudes of hurricane season may have a practical imperative, but this, too, is framed as a revolutionary duty. For decades, beginning under Raúl’s late brother Fidel, Cubans have conducted annual drills to prepare for hurricanes, resulting in a national disaster-response system that has saved many lives during past storms. 

As another source noted about Cuba: These attributes are: (1) actively learning and incorporating lessons from past disaster events, (2) integrating healthcare and public health professionals on the frontlines of disaster response, (3) proactively engaging the public in disaster preparedness, (4) incorporating technology into disaster risk reduction, and (5) infusing science into risk planning.

None of the other countries have invested the way Cuba has in guarding against Nature’s invasion. There is no doubt that in disaster planning centralised control has its advantages as long as the people are part of that control. Cuba has had to live within constricted means because of the United States’ embargo. Although, like a growing number of people, I have visited Cuba, but for my part as a “working tourist” on an American delegation flying out of Miami in an unmarked Delta jet. I have sampled Cuban tourism, but it is not the mainstay as it is in the legitimate economy of other Caribbean nations.

Granted that Cuba is the biggest island but only 25 per cent more in land mass than Hispaniola which is shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. So size does not necessarily equate to economic stability.

Tourism is a fickle contributor to the economic health of the community. You can see the consequences of damaged resorts left to rot after experiencing a weather catastrophe. Nearer to home, just wander up the Queensland Coast. In the case of the Caribbean countries, which country of the G20, say, is prepared to go guarantor to rebuild after Nature has had her way? Certainly not the United States, the nearest and wealthiest neighbour. One just has to see the continuing plight of Puerto Rico, which has been left as a wreck by Trump – despite the fact that it is part of the United States, with even one non-voting resident commissioner in the US Congress.

In other words, the Caribbean is very much going to be the bellweather of climate as small nation after small nation is knocked over until even those of us reaching for a third daiquiri may be concerned that the increasing pile of rubble is blocking the view – and then there is that stench from a decayed economy!

But then it will be too late to do anything, and we, the generation who have caused it, have gone on our way out of earshot from the curses of the future generations for the legacy that we have left.

Mouse Whisper

The Modest Reflector loves conundra, and the title is Klinefelters – you know, the syndrome where people who can look a bit like women because they have XX sex chromosome, in fact have the attributes of men through their “Y” chromosome. And one Y trumps XX when it comes to sex.

Klinefelter’s syndrome has caused all sorts of problems in working out in which gender a sporting person with the XXY chromosome should compete. There is some suggestion before chromosomal testing was available, that a number may have competed as females in various Olympic Games, despite having the male sex chromosome.

Well, why is modest reflections Klinefelters? 25 is XXV in Roman numerals. Now take the stalk off the Y … not even original and he promises not to do it again.

“Babe” Didrikson Zaharias – “The Texas Tomboy”

Modest expectation – Hourglass

The member for Dickson, that doyen of child care ownership, is showing all the compassion that we have come to expect, and for which the good burghers of Dickson rewarded him with an increased majority at the last election. However, it was not all high fives out at Mount Nebo, where 75 per cent of the votes cast there were for the Labor candidate.

Overlooking the promised land, from Mount Nebo

It is not that the member for Dickson is not without compassion. He has a daughter born out of wedlock, whom he seems proud to have as part of his family with his second wife. Therefore I find it difficult to know why he is rejecting these two Australian children who are part of the growing multicultural nation family, because they happen to have Tamil parents.

Perhaps some of that affection he has extended to his daughter should rub off in a decision to enable these two little Australian citizens to remain.

But he won’t. He was trained as a Queensland copper to be tough, unrelenting, a man very much into leather. After all, any criticism in his home state is strangled by the Murdoch Press. He cannot stand loss of face. He has had so much of that over the past year. Yet his electorate apparently love him – the May election would have been a good ego stroke for his basic insecurities.

Why can’t these politicians stand loss of face? They are pitiable, but as I said, 53,000 of Dicksers love him.

However, I pity the children far more – and if they want to come back to Australia, they should be given passports like anybody else born in this country, including the Member for Dickson – notwithstanding any change in the Australian Citizenship Act 33 years ago. 

Rhiannan Iffland. Who?

I always think I know generally what goes on the sports pages. So it was somewhat surprising when television surfing in a non-English speaking country far from Australia, to come upon Red Bull-sponsored cliff diving. There are seven events this year where the contestants dive off cliffs mostly with temporary platforms jutting out over the sea. I have always associated this daredevil idiocy with the young Mexican divers at Acapulco.

However, now it is an organised sport which allegedly attracts 60,000 to 80,000 spectators, and the Australian, Rhiannan Iffland, who has combined her diving and trampolining into an extraordinary skill, is far and away the best female cliff diver in the world. At her last appearance – diving from the famous restored bridge at Mostar in Bosnia Herzegovina – she achieved straight tens.

Rhiannan Iffland

The last competition for 2019 is at Bilbao on 14th September where the competitors dive from the La Salve Bridge, 24 metres down into the River Nervion, in full sight of the Guggenheim museum. Majestic daredevilry. The sight of this young woman twisting and somersaulting, slicing into the water feet first is indeed breath-taking. The danger of this diving is underscored by the number of frogmen swimming around in the water waiting for the mishap.

I do not know if anybody can be bothered showing it to an Australian audience, but we are strangely unknowing about this woman’s extraordinary talent, given the fact that women’s sport overall is attracting more and more interest. Perhaps it is because she is so good, that even we Australians get bored with those who win all the time. We just expect it. Do we remember Heather Mackay who won the British open squash title for 16 years in a row before winning the inaugural world championship and then retiring? We certainly remember Winx, quite a female performer.

Rural Health

One of the repeated catchcries is the lack of rural health services in Australia. My response has always been that one has to actively transfer intellectual capital to the “regional, rural and remote areas” to encourage a positive outcome. In this blog, “rural” will be used to encompass all.

One of the most important developments in the medical system, amid all the jeremiads over the past two decades, has been the new medical schools with a rural emphasis, the rural clinical schools and the university departments of rural health.

These teaching institutions have facilitated transfer of intellectual capital to rural areas. Medical teaching has been shown to occur more than adequately outside the metropolitan teaching hospitals; and significant intellectual capital exists already in both the larger and the smaller rural hospitals.

Without this innovation, the health education system would have had great difficulty in handling the increase in medical students that occurred in the decade following the introduction of these new rural facilities.

However, this rural dispersal needs good medical management, and especially with the Government’s obsession with Regional Training Hubs, as though the basic structure does not already exist.

One inspiration underpinning the recommendations of my Rural Stocktake in 1999, which led to Government funding for the establishment of rural clinical schools and university departments of rural health, was the story of the Mayo Clinic and visits made to both to the Rochester Minnesota and Scottsdale Arizona campuses some years before I did the Stocktake.

The Mayo Clinic was formed by the Mayos – father and sons – in Rochester in the 19th century and to me has always exemplified that excellence is not confined to the largest conurbations. The Mayos proved to be very good managers and developed intellectual capital involving a wide range of skills, in the “wilds of Minnesota”.

Then one also remembers the story of a gifted doctor named Samuel Fitzpatrick, who was based in Hamilton in Western Victoria. He was a world authority on the surgery of hydatid disease, then a major affliction – particularly in Western Victoria where sheep farming was a major component of the local economy. The disease was of such importance that the then Royal Australian College of Surgeons established a national hydatid registry in 1926 that, until its cessation in 1950, identified over 2,000 cases. Such attention helped in the campaigns to reduce the incidence of hydatid infection in humans – the intersection of Fitzpatrick the surgeon and Fitzpatrick the public health doctor.

At the height of his practice Dr Fitzpatrick dreamt that this niche disease could propel Hamilton into having its own Australian version of the Mayo Clinic. However hydatid disease lessened as a major disease and, unlike that of his Mayo exemplar, Fitzpatrick’s dream faded. While Hamilton doctors have maintained a high reputation for medical care and procedural competence, this remained a country practice in Victoria.

The surgical virtuosos of the bush, like Fitzpatrick – the doctor who was that generalist with an equal ability to treat any disease or condition – increasingly disappeared. The intellectual capital that they possessed was not translated into major teaching and research facilities in rural Australia, let alone centres for public health as had occurred with the Mayos and their stake in rural America.

The rise of specialist medicine and then sub-specialist medicine, together with their resultant perceived skills and knowledge, concentrated teaching and learning in metropolitan teaching hospitals, and in so doing emphasised the importance of the individual at the expense of the total population denominator.

Public health was dismissed in some quarters as surveillance of “tips and drains” Yet public health training for many years was concentrated in the School of Public Health in the University of Sydney. Public health education as a medical specialty was invigorated by a consultant physician, Sue Morey, and a number of like-minded people following the Kerr White report. Dr Morey headed the resultant Faculty of Public Health Medicine, which ended up within the Royal Australasian College of Physicians.

One of the important outcomes of the growth of rural medical education has been the opportunity to be both director of medical service and director of clinical training. I was able test this association personally and found it fruitful, being involved in the establishment of a medical intern program that requires the interns to undertake 20 weeks in rural general practice, plus the mandatory hospital terms. Health education (rather than medical education per se) has been attached to a group of academics primarily in traditional teaching hospitals. I was lucky with having forward thinking CEOs in a number of rural health care services.

They realised that what I called small teaching services, where the general practitioners have provided a variety of services, are rich teaching environments. I term these health services as “teaching services”. My argument is that by having a series of interns each year, you give the local doctors the opportunity to teach without the layered bureaucracy of the medical colleges telling you what to do.

Hence the 20 weeks in general practice as an intern and the concept of rotating interns ‘in’ to the regional or teaching hospital, not “out “ from those same hospitals. In other words, the small teaching service are allocated the interns; not having to depend on the big hospitals.

That was the core of the M2M program which has been rolled out in across Victoria and, to conform to the commonwealth funding provisions rather than the intent of the program, then called “Rural Medical Generalist Program”. The Rural medical Generalist program is an Queensland concoction of the ACRRM.

It aims to provide a training program for that College and really a reason for that College to exist. Simply put it aims to skill general practitioners to work in the country. A very good thing, but for it to work well it has to have a defined connection with the rural clinical schools – and that was the aim of the intern training program.

Nevertheless, there is this major barrier to this program – the attitude of some senior members of the university hierarchy and their teaching hospitals – not all I would emphasis – who could not care a jot about rural Australia – the major universities are there to perpetuate elitism. You measure that by research dollars not by the benefit you may provide to rural Australia.

Medical education is one of those areas that, in the undergraduate field, have been attached to universities and the post-graduate qualifications left to the various Colleges. As I found out this leaves a gap in the first two post-graduate hospital years as intern and resident medical officer when there is often a high level of angst. There is a need for expertise and experience to assist the doctor in those first two years.

I realised this need for pastoral help with the interns – surely an accompaniment of an empathetic educational environment . Taken seriously medical education without forgetting the importance of public health should be a major concern of any university, which considers itself to have a pastoral role rather than a treasury for the fees of international students. If the university adopt that pastoral challenge just as the Mayos and Samuel Fitzpatrick did, then this whole exercise of having rural clinical schools, defined educational programs in the first two years of post-graduate life as a doctor is still relevant despite being in a different era

As one famous person once said: “Before you capture the citadels, secure the fields first!” Therefore, for the young doctor think of gaining experience in a rural post before tackling, rather than being absorbed into, the “citadel culture” of the urban teaching hospitals.

The Brethren

Back in the 1970s while fresh from his exploits in hastening the departure of Richard Nixon, Woodward wrote a book with Scott Armstrong about the United States Supreme Court from the 1969 term to 1975 term. This was the time when the Court was moving from the liberal court of Earl Warren to the more conservative court of Warren Burger. Earl Warren had resigned in the belief that he would be succeeded by somebody cut from his legislative cloth.

This did not occur, and instead the court became the plaything for Nixon appointees. Not only did Nixon appoint the new Chief Justice in Burger but also three other justices, only one of which – William Rehnquist – fitted what Nixon hoped the court would become – a bastion of conservatism. As with the current Chief Justice French, Burger was elevated directly to Chief Justice with all the administrative load that entailed, without any experience as a Justice of the Supreme Court.

What is fascinating about the book when read against the churning turmoil of the Trump presidency is how complicated are the politics of the Supreme Court. Not for nothing is the book named The Brethren for all the religious overtones that the name implies.

It deals with all the machinations of Roe vs Wade, which is where Trump supporters and the Roman Catholic Church want repealed. It should be realised that seven out of the nine judges concurred with the proposition that including three of the Nixon appointees including Chief Justice Burger voted for the proposition that the United States Constitution protects the rights of a pregnant woman to have an abortion.

Only the newly appointed William Rehnquist, later to become Chief Justice and Byron White, the only Kennedy nominee dissented. So despite the howls of the anti-abortioners, this decision represented a very diverse cross-section of men of different political persuasion.

However, the most chilling aspect of the book was its conclusion when it summarises four cases which hinged on the court’s interpretation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Fourth Amendment states: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

In each case the decided that day in July 1975, the court ruled in favour of government rather then for the individual citizen. The final line says: “the center had won”, which can be roughly translated into “the right were gaining ascendency”.

It had been a short time between 1973 when the Roe vs Wade decision and July 1975 – the so-called Black Tuesday. When The Brethren was published in 1979, the composition of the court remained the same as it was in 1975.

However, changes were afoot with the very intelligent but ideologically driven Rhenquist in the wings awaiting his ascension into the Chief Justice role. In 1981, with the retirement of Burger the die was cast; the die which contains the court ruling in favour of Bush over Gore; the deviousness of McConnell in denying an Obama nominee, and the sad sight of Ruth Bader Ginsberg hoping her pancreatic cancer does not kill her before the next Presidential election -in other words outlasting Trump. Such is the state of American democracy. 

Mouse Whisper

An interesting comment overheard in the back streets of Whroo.

Every year, there is a change in the education curriculum in Hong Kong, so eventually the education program between the children of China and Hong Kong will be indistinguishable. The level of information manipulation will be the same.

By the time, the total absorption of Hong Kong into China occurs in 2047, who among those of the “one country, two systems” will have heard of the riots of 2019.

Talk about the long game …

The umbrella protest

Modest expectations – Mali

In my heyday

Young men wrote to me

Everybody seemed to have time to devote to me

Everyone I saw all swore they knew me

Once upon a song

Main attraction, couldn’t buy a seat

The celebrity, celebrities were dying to meet

I’ve had every accolade bestowed on me

And so you see

If I never sing another song

It wouldn’t bother me

I had my share of fame

You know my name

This was the last recorded song of Matt Monro when he was dying of cancer. Matt who? Frank Sinatra recognised him as his equal in voice and ability to connect with his audience. However, there is a plaintive quality – you know my name. Really, you, Mr Monro have been a long time dead – and there is limited space in a nation’s collective memory for anyone, even if a superb crooner such as yourself.

The problem is that you may know my name but the passage of time will dull and obliterate it.

That is unless you make sure that there is a memorial, where its message is relevant to an ongoing generation, and not just to remember “my name”.

For me, the muffled sound and grainy sight of Salvatore Allende crying out “Larga vida a Chile”, and the fact that his cousin, Isabel has been such a prominent author, has meant the name has stuck around, as a romantic standard bearer for the oppressed – something South America has in droves.

Museum of Memories and Human Rights, Chile

I have recently returned from Santiago where I made a point of visiting the Museum of Memories and Human Rights. This was the brainchild of President Michelle Bachelet, to ensure that one memory sticks in the mind of the Chilean people. On a wall on the first floor are myriad photographs of Chileans murdered by the Pinochet regime – 130,000, probably more.

People who are just an anonymous as Mr Monro may be now, but they exist, not by names but as a powerful dark photographic reminder of the cruelty of Chilean to Chilean; in other words, you may be nameless, but collectively you are not forgotten and that is due to the overarching forgiveness led by this remarkable woman. After all, her father was killed by Pinochet’s thugs and she and her mother tortured.

Perhaps this memorial will serve the people of Chile and remind them to never abandon democracy again. Never, never. Ask Chileans of the age what they were doing on the 11 September 1973, when the military forces were unleashed on the democratic institution and they know, as well as those of my age know what they were doing when we heard John Kennedy was assassinated.

On the surface, Chile is now a stable country with a reasonable economy, the most robust in South America. Some may say its economy is built on copper, but Chile is increasingly diversified. Santiago could even be a Spanish speaking Australia city if it was not for the appalling slums that litter its outskirts.

But what of the forces behind the public face of the Chilean coup and the lugubrious Augusto Pinochet on 11 September 1973, during which the legitimate President, Salvatore Allende, was probably assassinated? That ghastly horn-rimmed Kissinger and his President Nixon, who also gave us the Killing Fields of Cambodia; only worth remembering for the cold-blooded approach to their fellow humans.

Unlike Michelle Bachelet who has gone some way towards rectifying one of the injustices they perpetrated.

Pain 

Opium poppies, northern Tasmania

One of the most unexpected sights is driving around northern Tasmania in early summer is seeing field after field of opium poppies with their delicate pale mauve flowers giving such an innocent touch to the sinister drug industry which is dependent on its supply from this one of few legal areas for opium cultivation.

I am not one to unnecessarily applaud anyone, but I do applaud the Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, for sending out 5,000 letters to doctors who have a profile of high prescription of opioids. That letter elicited the usual aggrieved response, particularly as it was sent to so many doctors. The problem with many doctors, even in a climate of increasing peer review, is this natural reaction to being questioned on “infallibility”.

Even if the letters implicate those who have a legitimate excuse, it should flush out those who are just drug dealers with a medical degree. Let us get one matter straight, this letter relates to chronic usage – not acute usage. There are times when complaints have been made of the under usage of such drugs where the need is acute.

I well remember the country doctor who was well known to government for over-servicing which, among other misdemeanours, involved handing out opioid prescriptions. When this particular doctor died, his funeral procession through the town streets was lined by grateful dependent patients. It was an ironic way to end one’s days, with a town, which had become addicted to this one doctor.

I hope that the Murphy initiative ends with a marked decline in the chronic prescription of opioids – it is a strange state of affairs that doctors are reportedly suddenly afraid to prescribe opioids because of the letter rather than fearlessly continue to exert their clinical judgement as to whether opioid use in a patient are justified.

For my part I have an auto-immune disease in which pain has figured so prominently that I was taking the maximum dose of paracetamol each day and counting the hours until my next dose. However, I eschewed opioids because of the fact that I feared addiction, given how long I would gave to take them. Just hankering for my next paracetamol tablets was warning enough. I survived the time without resorting to opioid, and fortunately my need for analgesia has abated.

It was interesting to note that the recommended maximum dose of paracetamol in the USA is lower than in Australia. I wonder whether this had any effect on its use and the substitution to opioids.

The other problem is exemplified by the woman who claims to have been prescribed opioids for 25 years for pain and now her prescription base has dried up. I make no judgement on any individual case but it is not difficult to hypothesise that there is a cohort of people who have become addicted because of doctors, who act as drug dealers rather than as medical practitioners.

I do hope that Dr Murphy’s action will lead to this cohort of medical practitioners being exposed and appropriate action taken. The medical profession will be well rid of them.

In the USA, as usual with the vigilante approach long after the wrong has happened, they are lynching the drug companies without solving the problem. The drug addicts are there; the overdoses are there. Making the drug companies pay does not solve the problem. However, when combined with an initiative such as being prosecuted by Murphy, it just may work. Keep it up, Doctor so that its success will be celebrated as part of Murphy’s lore.

Where do we go from here?

The ABC has produced a four part series Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds; it is modeled in some degree on a BBC series of the same name.

Lucy Mangan wrote in the Guardian about the BBC version (sic):  The show continues to tread the fine line between heart and sentimentality, between reporting on measures involving vulnerable groups without patronising them … and that at the very least the sociological gubbins should be let fade into the background instead of the makers trying to paint a scientific gloss on the commonsense appreciation that anyone’s mood, mobility and memory will improve if you throw activities, new experiences, a few highly supervised hours with some charming infants and the money to pay for it all at them.

I am somewhat uneasy at the sight of four year olds being led into an old people’s home to play with the residents. To me, the children could just as well be going to the zoo. These are strange creatures to the very young; and the carefully depicted interaction predictably elicited parental clucks by the commentariat at the wonder of it all. Annabel Crabbe is the ideal presenter.

However, where is it all leading after the cameras are turned off and the academics drift away to write their papers? The numbers participating are few and given that the camera cannot be a continuous record but one determined by the selectivity of the director, then the temptation is to have the cutest cuts and leave out the scenes that do not correspond to the producer’s definition of bliss.

There have been other experiments, such as the Seattle one where a preschool was placed in an old people’s home. It has been locally successful if one can believe the reports. However, it is just one example; but what does a policy maker do with such a project to make it generalisable? The other factor is the enthusiasm of those who initiated the transfer of concept to action. They have a vested interest in making it work, but times change, enthusiasm wanes. These sort of projects need a wider support base not only to be sustainable but more importantly generalisable.

The actual conduct of the operation probably requires a high level of supervision, because one is dealing with the interaction of two groups where there is both dependence and yet a high level of unpredictability. One group will soon move to another age group and perhaps will be left with a positive view, while the other group are about to die and leave their trace on a filmed archive only.

I remember when I was a small boy and following my father as he went around a ward full of war veterans. At one bed while my father saw other patients I got talking to a patient – a soldier. He was friendly and he talked so that I understood what his life had been, without any sense of self-pity. I remember saying I would see him next week. He smiled, called me “Blue” and patted my arm.

Later, (I cannot remember the time gap) I came back with my father and went straight to his bed. I don’t remember whether it was empty or if there was another person in the bed. However when I asked about “my friend”, the reply came back that he had died. I could not believe it. I think it was my first experience of loss. Whether this was experienced by any of the children in this “experiment”, coming back to see one of the old people only to find they have died. For me the memory has stayed tucked away for years.

Why do you tell stories as you get older? Nostalgia is the province of the elderly and the benefit of this type of interaction is that the elderly have an audience – admittedly a very fleeting, easily distracted audience to which to tell your tale. Perhaps in the end the ability of old people to tell a tale where the audience still has the flush of wonderment is a good thing. But loneliness is a 24-hour experience.

However, if the attempt of mixing the groups is just voyeuristic – “been there; done that”; then I believe the makers of this series have probably done a disservice to all involved if nothing further eventuates.

Old age is an increasing societal challenge. It should not be just a case of waste management. Yet I fear that is happening – and David Attenborough-like explorations of human foibles and cuteness should not replace serious consideration of what can be done.

The clue is in the series – get the elderly to tell their stories, whether they have a four year old audience or not. After all, it gives you a sense of relevance, even when you may be the only one listening. However even one child listening and responding with questions is a bonus. After all, I believe we are all storytellers.

Mouse whisper

I don’t know what I will be able to squeal and the Press to write once they silence Trump, but this quote from the New York Times has a degree of murine richness. And I thus thank Mr Krugman for the quote.

At that point you might expect an intervention from the grown ups in the room – but there aren’t any. In any other administration the Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a.k.a. the Lego Batman guy, would be considered a ridiculous figure; these days, however, he’s as close as we get to a voice of economic rationality. But whenever he tries to talk sense, as he apparently did over the issue of currency manipulation by the Chinese, he gets overruled.

Protectionism is bad; erratic protectionism, imposed by an unstable leader with an insecure ego, is worse. But that’s what we’ll have as long as Trump remains in office.

Modest expectations – Duckworth

We may be in our lounge room in Sydney or in a hotel room overlooking the Iguaçu Falls in Brazil, but there is a timeless quality surrounding mass murder in the United States. The latest atrocity was in El Paso. There is Fox television glued to nothingness – just the front of a supermarket. It is like an Andy Warhol movie. However the commentary tries to make up for the lack of action by repeating the same nothingness in that urgent tone of expectancy. Later there are clips of law enforcement officers rugged up like escapees from a video program. You know the video violence which is attracting million of dollars of sponsorship so that the male youth of the world can be warriors without the pain but with the smell of vicarious power.

It does not matter how many are killed in El Paso. The more killed or maimed the better the news story. After all the Gilroy incident in California only resulted in three deaths, hardly worth recording. Now there are a score or more dead in this Texas border town. The social media graphics start to trickle in – the snaps of bodies, the picture of the supposed offending AK rifle – it is only a matter of time before the loony manifesto of the perpetrator will turn upon social media. This delusionary detritus of humanity who wants to be recognised – the profile of a young white male consumed by his own self-loathing egged on by a society where hate is increasingly the norm.

Then hours later, we have the tawdry spectacle led by the Texan governor praising the law enforcement officers’ quick response. Six minutes. In the meantime two score or more are shot dead or wounded. Then from these officials comes the outpouring of pious platitudes about prayers and “hug your family”. After the Governor, the Mayor and so on in a paean of self-congratulations where tragedy is a backdrop to self-aggrandisement, telling us nothing except the “shooter was disarmed and is now in custody”. Not a word about gun control from anyone – not a word. Just everyone wants to be re-elected.

And a macabre copycat dessert occurs not long after – Dayton Ohio.

And somewhere in the distance one hears a presidential bleat about change in the rules – and then predictably welshes on what he has promised to do.

The Real Amazon

One of the problems with any short-term visit, you only scrape the surface. It is a four-hour flight to get from Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro to Manaus. That is for starters and the South American airlines are very basic, jammed into the small Airbus. Manaus is the starting point for a five-day trip up the Amazon. Really the Iberostar does not travel far – 100 kilometres at the most, up a river, which is nearly 7,000 kilometres in length, arising in the Peruvian Andes and emptying into the Atlantic Ocean, where its water is still fresh.

Pink River Dolphin in the Amazon

Living in a big country as we do, immensity of land mass for Australians is nothing new although a river which is twenty-three kilometres across in some places makes one realise that Brazil is a serious bulwark against global warming – for now. This huge river is the jungle artery – endless jungle traced with tributaries of the Rio Enorme. There is a very occasional settlement; so different from the port of Manaus which is a mixture of modernity and of a long past. With two million people it is a significant Amazonian presence. Yet this lively port still has the overtones of a pre-container ship existence.

Unlike Australia where 25 million people occupy the country, Brazil has 220 million people. The cultural heritage is a roll call of European countries, but there also is a large population of black people, the descendants of a massive importation of West Africans, as slaves, in Brazil’s early years. After all, the Portuguese were the first major European colonisers after the Romans. Today there seems to be sensitivity to these past wrongs as the word for black shuffles between “preto” and “negro”.

Then there are native Amazonian Indians, which the current government seems intent on strangling – little settlements where currently every body looks healthy, but who knows with this current President, a man with the mien of warthog.

The Portuguese language may seem to us the most insignificant of the Romantic languages, on a par with Romanian. After all it is only spoken in Portugal and in a few former Portuguese colonies, including Timor- Leste close to home. However, one of the former colonies is Brazil, potentially a major power in killing this planet if the current government deforests the Amazon Basin, a gargantuan task given that Australia could be swallowed up in it. However, do not underestimate the madness of the human race.

If you are going to travel there, while it still exists, it is useful to have a working knowledge of Portuguese. It is not an easy language as the pronunciation is confounding.

The Brazilians appreciate you attempting to speak the language, and knowing even a few words opens up many of the cultural links. However, when you are a tourist, who is not a backpacker as my son was years ago in Brazil and was robbed, we live in the comfort zone of care. Luckily thus we have been looked after well.

However, the downside is alleviated if you learn some Portuguese before you embark on such a trip on the Amazon.

And the currency “real(s) is pronounced “hay-il”or in the plural “hay-eesh”. Get it?

Uruguay – the place where the Italians colonised

Now everybody knows that Uruguay is the place where man for man, they have the most successful futebol team in the world. I say man for man as the game for women is just stirring.

Uruguay is not large. It has been described as a thumbprint between Brazil and Argentina. Consider, it has a population of just over 3 million and just over a million of them live in Montevideo and just over 300,000 live in condominiums in two of its suburbs overlooking the River Plate. For an Australian comparison, Tasmania is about 40 per cent the size of Uruguay

Not that the River Plate is a river, it is an estuary which defines the limits of the country to the south, and as you drive along coast, the meeting of the Plate and the Atlantic Ocean is not as clear today as it apparently can be – the sea is all too civilised where the waves are mere frills on the rocky coast line here.

Beaches of Uruguay

This is a country where it is increasingly the beach resort for wealthy South Americans, and where such wealth is denoted by high fences around large estates. It is interesting to note that the Uruguayans have strengthened by consolidating their money laundering laws as of last year.

The Uruguayan law establishes “that certain high-level public officials, such as the president and vice president of the Republic, national senators and representatives, ministers and under-secretaries of State, general secretariat directors at ministries, directors of autonomous entities, decentralized services, non-State public entities and holders of any political or trust position cannot be shareholders, ultimate beneficiaries or have any relationship with commercial companies domiciled in no- or low-tax jurisdictions while holding public office.” The devil is in the detail of this last proviso, and one of the ingredients of this small state is that the ruling elite is not corrupt.

Elections are underway and billboards for candidates dot the landscape. The biggest billboard high on one of the condominiums simply has Luis in huge letters, apparently the presidential candidate for the white party, the support base of which is rural and moderately conservative. This party together with the red party which is central and the ruling left wing Popular Front are striving for the run off, assuming the unlikely results of one candidate getting over 50 per cent in the first round. All very civilised.

For the size of country, Uruguay has a long coastline and a substantial border with Brazil. Argentina is just across the River Plate, two and half-hours will take one there by ferry. They have to tread carefully and although their international trade is denominated in US dollars, there is always currency instability in the area. Last week the Argentinian peso fell dramatically in response to the presidential elections and the return of Peronistas. There will be an inevitable effect on Uruguay.

Uruguay is a land of beaches and a summer that is not dissimilar to ours. Resorts line the River Plate; the expectation is to overlook the River Plate in the east and the mouth of the River Plate and the Atlantic Ocean in the west.

But this is also an agricultural country. Being next to Argentina the expectation is for beef cattle, and although, it is an important part of the economy, Uruguay is more diversified.

Driving through the countryside either east or west from Montevideo could be the western district of Victoria – just scattered population amid rolling countryside without a mountain in sight.

Uruguay farmland

Here our car passes through the potato growing area. There are dairy cows on either side of the double carriageway. All sorts of cheese are freely available to buy by the side of the road, as are apples and mandarins. On the side of one the undulating landscape is a large spread of canola. Soya beans and rice are big exports. However, the biggest export is probably wood chips, and plantations of eucalypts are also a prominent feature of the countryside.

Cannabis Medicinal

Cannabis is now a legal product in Uruguay – for registered Uruguayans. Shops openly market the weed and the associated paraphernalia. However, hemp as such is not grown here, and these cannabis outlets rely on Asian imports of hemp. The colourful backpack prominently states that it was made in Nepal, and given the loosening of restrictions in this part of South America, those with the inclination or need for this substance may start wandering across the Pacific.

The only useful quirk is that if you pay your bill by credit card you get a 15 per cent plus discount. Covers the tip anyway!

Colonia

Uruguay will never see many Australian tourists because it is so similar to Australia apart from Spanish/Portuguese heritage, particularly evident in the city of Colonia. But it is a long way to go for quaintness – unless you are thinking of having a quiet life away from scrutiny in this country.

And if you want to get away from Alan Jones… 

A Case to Answer

Mentioning this individual, even in Buenos Aires you cannot get away from the poisonous splinters that break off from this individual when anybody displeases him. Making a comment inciting the Australian Prime Minister to murder the New Zealand Prime Minister by shoving a sock down her throat is so disgusting it is amazing that it has not caused this individual to be charged. One of the characteristics of women who have socks thrust down their throat is that they die terrible deaths where the sock down the throat is accompanied by mutilation and unspeakable depravity.

By saying that it was a re-interpretation of a saying “put a sock in it” as an excuse fails on two grounds. The first is that it is an admonition for someone to use a sock to put in “it” however defined. The term is not applied to inciting attack by a third party. Here Jones defined “it” as the New Zealand Prime Minister’s throat, and he was not saying that she put the sock down her own throat. He was inciting the Australian Prime Minister to do so.

To say that the Prime minister was disappointed shows how much this popinjay inspires fear. Instead, if I had been in Morrison’s socks, I would have sought legal advice on the offence of inciting a crime. Such an action as I understand it has also been legislated in the Crimes Prevention Act 1916 (NSW) (‘the Act’) and s11.4 of the Criminal Code 1995. The Act is extremely brief, and therefore it should not be difficult to get an opinion. There are also specific offences within the Crimes Act 1900 that include ‘inciting’ as an element of the offence – murder (s26), suicide (s31C) and sexual assaults (s80G). Nobody – just nobody – even this person, has the right I would have thought to ask me to kill the New Zealand Prime Minister.

The reason is that I would have not been just “disappointed” – I would have seen if criminal charges were warranted, and that course of action remains open to the Australian Prime Minister.

Withdrawal of sponsorship for his program is tacit disgust by his money trail. Although don’t forget that they signed up to advertise on his program in the first place …

Yet this sponsor displeasure and the outraged responses in social media starkly contrast with the attitude and behaviour of Jones’ employer. A slap on his sock is his retribution.

And sending a sock to Costello? If that is true, what form of pointless “smart-arsery” is that? This man Jones should have his day in court if the legal advice confirms he has a case to answer.

Mouse Whisper

Heard from a pulpit in Petersham:

In Portuguese, the word for share is dividir. Thinking about that word, sharing is indeed dividing, but not with a sense of equity. The problem is that “divide” has come to be a synonym for the meanness of the human spirit.

Modest Expectations – Majority

When I was writing a book funded by the Commonwealth Department of Health to celebrate the bicentenary of Australia in 1988, the idea behind the book would be to take a number of people of various backgrounds in the health field and ask them why they were there at that particular time – 1988.

I had very few refusals. One I would have liked to include had terminal cancer, as I learnt later. Most of them I knew to some degree personally, but for some, like Vivian Statham nee Bullwinkel, it was a matter of cold calling. She must have liked what I wrote because she sent me a nice note. Others, like Professor “Pansy Wright”, sent back his annotated chapter with typical pithy oblique yet amusing marginalia. He never said anything was wrong, mind you.

In 2004, “Who do you think you are“ appeared on BBC television. Bill Oddie was the first, but most of the subjects have been entertainers or sportspeople because they trained professionally to run the gamut of faux-emotion when the insights are “magically” opened up for them. Judging by the longevity in the series, it is great theatre and being copied in other countries, such as our own.

Business is booming in the whole ancestry business. The growth of analysing the individual DNA for racial heritage is alive – wonderful to know that one has a smudge of Lithuanian with a nuance of Savoyard barbecued on the heritage grill with a smidgen of Genghis Khan.

I do not know why we do it, apart from the fact that we live in a world of self-absorption where “I” overwhelms anything else in the alphabet.

However, who am I to talk? I have always been fascinated by my mother’s Irish heritage.

Crossard is on a hill about three kilometres north of Corofin and one km from Kilnaboy (the Catholic parish). Corofin in turn is about 16 kilometres north of Ennis in County Clare.

I have visited Crossard where John Egan, my great-great grandfather was born about 1770. All that remains of the 18th century Crossard is one stone wall of the Moravian Church, where one of the local families, the Burtons, helped 100 Moravian refugees from Central Europe establish a community at Crossard.

After the Moravians left, the building survived for a number of years, becoming a Catholic Church in the 1830s before falling into disuse. In addition to the remains of the Moravian Church and one stone ruin there are four modern stucco-rendered houses, one unfinished plus a farm called “Crossard Cottage”.

The Moravian Church at Crossard

Crossard is near the river Fergus, and here John Egan was a flour miller, and the flourmill building still exists at Clifden about two kilometres from Crossard on Lough Inchiquin. The Burton family had a large house on the Lough in the 18th and 19th centuries.

I had driven the narrow raised track towards Clifden knowing that would have been the route along which John Egan probably went to work. I have been on better roads, especially when confronted by a large piece of farm machinery travelling in the opposite direction. The road was on the edge of a substantial drop to the river plain. Having to reverse back down the muddy track was a deterrent to plunging back down that road – or off the road.

John Egan married Margaret McNamara and there are still both Egans and McNamaras in Corofin. In fact the McNamaras have a 200 year tradition of being the doctors in Corofin. And as for the Egans, there is a saying “if there are fish in Lough Inchiquin, there will be Egans in Corofin”. Lough Inchiquin is the local lake which lies below Crossard.

His son, my great-grand father Michael Egan migrated to Australia in 1848, and first went to Kapunda in South Australia, as did a number of the Blood family. That settlement was where the first commercial copper mine had been opened, antedating the gold rush. The Bloods, Burtons and Bindons were prominent Protestant landowners around Corofin and I had an idea that Michael Egan was employed by the Blood family as a young man in Ireland. Even to this day there is a Clare castle pub in the main street of Kapunda.

Eventually, Michael Egan was to become a very wealthy man in early Melbourne, benefiting from the gold rush as a wood merchant.

The Corofin Genealogy Centre was very helpful, but records in the National Library only go back as far as 1819. Searches could be undertaken in parish records to try and trace our lineage back further, as John Egan would have been born a Catholic in 1770. It could cost up to 500 euro for an extensive search of remaining baptismal and land records to find out more. These are matters that you intend to do, but I am closer to being a heritage listing and further puddling in baptismal records. My descendants may wish to do so.

I really just wanted to see what type of countryside our ancestors left to assure our existence. Although close to the Burren, it was very arable, but was particularly badly hit by the potato famine. This eventually was the reason the Egans came to Australia, but that is another story.

The Roo Revenge

Charlie McMahon concludes his time in the Western Desert 

Nicholas who had been in much strife at Kintore, was no trouble and was keen to use tools, particularly the screw drills. Charlie Tjakamarra who always wore a men’s red headband was staunch, cheerful and worked with me, always offering to lighten my load. Henry reckoned Charlie stayed close to me because he thought me to be in too much of a hurry (which was probably true), and worried I was likely to harm myself. There was no racial divide, none of the troubles of drink when you are two days drive out from the nearest boozer.  

In my four and a half years in the Western Desert there was not a drop drunk. I did keep an emergency flask of Chateau Tanunda brandy behind the passenger seat but never had to call on it. In the evenings Venus flickered between red and blue on the Western horizon and if I woke at night, the stars of the Southern sky told the time in the cloudless winter dry season, skies so clear that they looked not so much black as a faint blue. Frequent meteor streaks evoked trepidation among the fellas as they were thought to be the spirit of someone who had died far from their home.  

Everyone was pleased to see Minyina aka Anatari Number 3 and his wife, whose name I cannot recall, turn up one day with young Andrew Tjakamarra who was about 16 and the driver, a cheerful lad who immediately moved to camp with us while Minyina set up the first humpy at Kiwirrkurra about 100 meters to the north of us, an indication they must have lived out to the north BTT (before trouser time) because desert people always choose to camp in a spot adjacent to their country.  

They relished hunting fresh terrain, bringing a cooked cat (the one that I described earlier) to our campfire. Three weeks into the job the bush food was well received. With more hands than planned for, the town supplies were running low. We were down to flour, a few cans of bean and we had run out out of tea and sugar.  

The crew saved the day one afternoon returning with a fair sized roo and smaller one that were cooked immediately the Pintubi way. One had a poor little joey in pouch that the crew had some fun with, watching Danger nudge it to try to make it run, but I couldn’t stand to see it suffer and knocked it on the head. With a lot of care and special milk joeys can be nurtured but this was a work camp.  

I was tempted to do a dash to Kintore store for food but it was a day’s drive there and back and with only three days to finish the job I didn’t really want to. Henry dared me to make it through eating roo. The meat didn’t go off in the dry air stashed in a tree. We ate smoked and dried roo for the duration. I imagined how good a counter lunch at the Stuart Arms was going to taste in a few days. I got the runs, which no one else had. So I put it down to me being unaccustomed to roo meat. Still it was a good feeling to have finished the preparatory work so that the next month the windmill and tank could be erected. Henry drove and with no load it was a relatively quick trip but I was a mess when we pulled into Kintore at sunset and came across Jim Dooley at Steve and Kerry’s camp. Dooley had just dropped off freight there. Dooley was a funny bugger always joking, and my predicament was ammunition – I became the butt.’

“Welly welly Charlie Hook has gotten a crook belly playing at being a Pintubi”, he proclaimed.

“Henry, you trying to make a black fella out of Charlie?”  

“Shit you stink, Charlie and you will reek of roo for days.”

“Easy on mate, I’m rat shit!” I said.

Dooley’s kindness was my lucky break. Henry drove my vehicle to the loading ramp, onto the deck of Jim’s truck. Danger and I rode into town through the night in the sleeping bay with a few “crap stops”. Occasional farts erupted and smelt so bad that Dooley’s Jack Russell on the front seat would whimper, looking at me with ears down with forlorn, yet not reproachful face that dogs do so well. My odour did not worry Henry and Dooley. They just yarned all the way to town.

After a few days I recovered though Dooley was correct, the smell stayed with me. I could tell by reactions of the dogs. A yard guard dog had a go at me but turned tail when Danger responded in defending me. Since then I invariably get a vomit reflex when I smell wild roo meat. I am OK with the premium young doe roo meat that supermarkets sell as it has hardly any stench and in a spicy stew with onions I have no worries.

A brief note on Prohibition

Some years I was invited to a social function on a U.S naval vessel. It was a beautiful Sydney night. I had forgotten that there was no alcohol on US naval ships, with few exceptions. For instance, if a vessel has been at sea for 45 consecutive days or more, sailors are allowed to have two beers, on a one-time basis. However, it was salutary to attend an evening function without alcohol and only Kool Aid on offer. The function was pleasant and it was good to wake up the next morning and not regret the previous evening.

I was put in mind of the recent medical shock and horror at the alcohol industry’s response to the recent furore about alcohol and the recognition that alcohol is a part of our daily life.

Everybody knows that alcohol in excess is a poison, but whether lecturing the community is the best way to get the message through is probably problematical.

However, what the medical and other health professions could do is to emulate the US navy and ban alcohol at all official functions – all dinners. There would be mocktail receptions for distinguished guests. No more wine and food society functions under the auspices of medical groups – more than two glasses of booze a day contravenes the NH&MRC warning.

It is after all somewhat hypocritical to have happy snaps of health professionals at dinner with glass of wine in hand, if one is excoriating the alcohol industry at the same time for its collective irresponsibility.

Therefore, if the medical profession were really serious it would implement a total ban on alcohol being served at any sponsored dinner, and check the guests for hip flasks as they arrived.

It would also test whether anybody really wants to go to these functions, where self-aggrandisement is no longer an essential ingredient nor alcohol the essential lubricant. 

Mouse Whisper

Overheard in the Classics department of the University of Chipping Tarcoola.

“You know Scott Morrison has a Shakespearean connection. His name is Scottish-Irish, a derivation from the Latin word “Mauritius” – meaning a bloke from Mauretania – that is, a Moor. Not sure he would have liked to be known as Othello Morrison. Hate to know who he would pick to be Desdemona though.”

Modest Expectations – The Dark Blue

When you read this I shall be far away, floating down the Amazon where the piranhas are actually fish. One of the diseases of the Americas that gets very little airplay is Chagas disease, named for the Brazilian doctor, Carlos Justiniano Ribeiro Chagas. With the globalisation of disease, which is impervious to political shenanigans, cases are turning up in Australia. However, while it has the acute manifestation of any infectious diseases, it is the long-term insidious effects on the cardiovascular system.

Trypanosoma cruzi

It is said that Charles Darwin picked up Chagas disease as a young man when he was “Beagling” his way around South America. It would explain why an outgoing young adventurer increasingly became a reclusive invalid as he grew older, never again venturing from Great Britain.

Chagas disease is caused by Trypanosoma cruzi, a protozoa which is carried by a particular bug, commonly called the ‘kissing bug’, so called because of how it cuddles up to you, sucking your blood and letting the protozoa bug into the blood stream. There are drugs to treat the trypanosoma but the course is long and hazardous as one may be strewn with complications.

However, given its insidious nature and that the fact that when backpacking it is romantic to sleep under thatch or in adobe, remember to have that mosquito net, however inconvenient it may be, and a good amount of insect repellent.

The Lancet has said in a sobering statement: “Chagas disease has been considered a neglected disease, without fully effective drug treatment to avoid the chronic stage.”

Australian figures on its prevalence are scanty, but undoubtedly it is there as I noted above. After all, disease is a free market.

I shall keep reminding myself of that as the Amazon drifts by. 

Setting down Bores

Charlie McMahon continues his reminisces …

We took the smoothest route via Papunya but that was still a rough corrugated dirt road for 600 of the 750 km drive. There was one lane of good tarred bitumen up the middle of the road so that you drove half on the dirt shoulder when either overtaking or accommodating oncoming traffic.

Near the Mount Zeil plain we came up to overtake a fully loaded “3 dog” road train doing about 90 kmph to our 100. I reckoned it looked safe enough to overtake with the road ahead dead straight. The truckie was not likely to go half on the shoulder to ease our passage and I indicated my intention to pass with high beam flashes and came up beside the road train driving entirely on the shoulder, which slowed us a bit. I was going OK till about a quarter away from passing the road train, a huge hump appeared on the edge of the shoulder, a blasted drainage gully that the dust swirled up by the road train had obscured. I slowed but still hit it at speed. Up and over we went with the load and fellas on the back bounced around. Danger barked, shouts of dismay and Henry with me in the front woke from his snooze looked back and “oh-ho jingiles, lucky one, Murra Hook. They all there still” was all he said. We barrelled on and made to pass the road train again. The truckie congratulated us with the road train horn blaring. “More better I drive ilta” (true questioningly) Henry said. So he took over at the Papunya turn off. Had Henry been driving he would have seen the bump long before I did and we drove on into the night without incident to camp at the halfway point west of Mt Liebig.

On the way the next day we found Freddy West and his family of six camped 100 km before Kiwirrkurra at the Moying Bore near Tjiterong. They were there as an expression of his eagerness to move to Kiwirrkurra, his traditional land. He waved us over, offering a billy of warm sweet tea and put his son Nicholas on board telling him ‘work karriantjku’ (go work with them). Nicholas had been in a lot of trouble sniffing petrol, breaking into places at Kintore – his ability with locks astonished everyone for a child with zero formal education.

On arrival our Kiwirrkurra camp appeared pretty much as we had left it, though the Vinnie’s bag of clothes had been dragged about. “Lotta myall dog been here”, Charlie reckoned and there was much discussion about tracks the crew saw as they gave the place the once over and the first timers showed elation at being on ancestral ground, old hands pointing to and naming places near and distant.

Danger, the dog, got a good sniff of some scent and bolted off not to be seen again till dark. I took a quick shower and said to Henry “you’re next” as well as suggesting to Charlie that since he had been sitting next to Henry for two days he would do well to have one too. I dried off beside the fire as the crew had started. I got out the scabies oil for Henry. As Aboriginals do, he showers with his clothes on. Whether he was shy or just efficient I didn’t bother to ask but handed him fresh clothes from the Vinnie’s bag.

August was perfect work weather. After about two weeks we were well into the job with the four 1x2sq metre-footing holes for the windmill tower legs dug with crowbar and shovel. The John Deer tractor had a bucket and ripper, good for pipeline trenching, and a trailer for carting water and aggregate but without a backhoe for deep holes. The fairly soft soil of Kiwirrkurra made digging easier, which was one of the reasons for choosing the place, so the proper job pit dunny was finished in three days. It was a design called the Blair Ventilated Pit Toilet, shown to me by Steve Pattman at the Centre for Appropriate Technology.

To briefly describe it, a 2 x 2 meter mesh reinforced concrete slab is poured with an off centre “crap hole”, another near the edge for a vent pipe and left to set while the hole is dug 1.8 metres or more deep. The slab is dragged over the hole and the shelter fastened to it with the vent pipe painted dark running up the exterior of the sunny sidewall. An insect mesh cap goes on top of the vent pipe. The dunny building has a hall type entrance to darken the inside so that when you look down into the “crap hole” there’s a circle of light on the bottom of the pit from the vent pipe. Any flies that enter invariably seek the light to leave and drawn by the draft up the sun warmed vent pipe, get stopped at the mesh. Walla! An odourless fly trap and having a proper dunny was a treat for in two years work at Kintore I had to do with a shallow trench – there was always too much to do and the quartz rock subsoil would have been a very hard dunny pit to dig.

We did not listen to the radio so the outside world mattered little. We worked every day and no one bothered with the time or names of days. Sometimes in the evening we turned on the Codan SSB radio tuned into a frequency used by locals, so that the crew would have great fun telling other clans away of the new place they were building. I heard amazing tales of doings in life out there in the days they laughingly called ‘before trouser time’. They would mix up dreaming stories with actual ones and I gave up asking ‘ilta’ (true) ‘did it really happen’ after realising they were often unsure themselves of what was myth and what wasn’t. The young fellas liked to hear Henry’s take on things and looking at the moon one night he asked me to confirm the moon trips “Tjpangarti (my skin name) true int it, some white fella been longa moon, been leave house and car there too”. We cooked and ate together. A coil of black one-inch pipe on the roof of the half walled shed we had built gave us the luxury of warm showers. It pleased me to see the crew (except for Charlie) use them fully dressed so body and clothes got washed in one go. Bathing was not an option for desert people and living around a fire tends to cure or cover their bodies with smoke.

The missing Horse

One reads brochures about Slovenia and they all say you can get horse and foal meat in some of the restaurants. Intriguing, I thought.

Slovenia is a tiny country nestling between Croatia, Italy and Austria, with the Alps forming a crescentic barrier in the north. In the south, Slovenia has a narrow coastline on the Adriatic Sea, with Trieste nearby.

We travelled to Slovenia by car from Venice headed for Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. We were told to get a vinjete before the border. This is the only way to pay the road toll in Slovenia (15 euros for a week). We were warned that the Slovenian police wait just across the border, and the fine for not having the vinjete is substantial, 300 euros.

Otherwise the passage across the border is seamless. One moment the signs are in Italian, the next in Slovene – transition from the Romantic to the Slavic.

However we are travelling in a more north-easterly direction towards the capital of Slovenia. Ljubljana is a trap for the new arrival because of its central hill; the tunnel through it, the shortcut to the north but not to the city centre, can fool even the GPS. Ljubljana is one tricky place to navigate, to coin a phrase.

The Antiq Palace Hotel turns out to be a rambling allegedly 16th century building. We are piloted to the room up stairs, via a lift, along a series of corridors bending and twisting until we are on a landing overlooking an internal courtyard. Here we are greeted with music, its source unseen. There is singing, then a horn; a violin struggling to escape; a cacophony of variable quality. Apparently there is a music school in the building on the other side of the courtyard.

The room turns out to be a suite. There is a huge dining room, a lounge area, a bedroom and a bathroom dominated by a huge spa bath. Over the bed in this white painted room was a painting which seemed to indicate that if you had difficulty with nightmares this would ensure you would get one – a weird sylvan scene.

The centre of Ljubljana has been preserved in its pre-World War One architectural attire. Its Austro-Hungarian past is evident in the two-storey houses with gabled roofs, stuccoed walls and large windows lining Ljubljanica River. One early evening when the sky was still blue and the streetlights were lit, you could be forgiven for thinking that this city was the inspiration for Magritte’s series of Dominion of Light paintings.

The problem with the food started on the first night after a meal of kranski and sauerkraut. Whether it was that or a roll I had earlier bought from a motorway food barn, I had a generous bout of food poisoning. I could not blame the horse. My first day in Slovenia thus was spent recovering, but she roamed the streets far and wide, photographing the Triple bridge and beyond.

The narrow Ključavničarska (The Locksmith) Street in the medieval part of the town, connecting Cankarjevo nabrežje (Cankar Quay) with the Mestni Trg (Town Square), contained a surprise. The central gutter was full of bronze heads about the size of billiard balls, most looking at you, as the water trickles over them. Oddball does not do them justice. These are the work of Jacov Brdar, whose work is scattered around the city. It has a Tolkien feel – with the heads looking like members of the Gollum family. They are featured above in the heading of this Blog.

In many ways, walking from bridge to bridge is a reminder of walking along the Seine in Paris, but without the cars streaking alongside.

Ljubljana and the Ljubljanica River – Photo: Janine Sargeant

The river lies just down the hill from the Antiq Hotel and acts as a magnet – so much so that until the last day we did not use the green coloured electric cars, which circle the inner city and are reserved for the disabled and the elderly and their carers. They are called “cavalier”, the name being adapted from the Slovenian for “gentleman”.

On our last night in Ljubljana we used the transport to a traditional restaurant on the outskirts of the old city – the Taverna Tatyana. It was away from the tourists and the bar was full of locals quaffing their beer. It was all brown beams and low ceilings and homely hosts, who spoke passable English. It allegedly had horse and foal on the menu. Not so. Instead they provided a Dalmatian stew and grilled pork with wild mushrooms and after the main course, the magnificent strudel. Slovenian wine is a cheap and good accompaniment as is the complimentary glass of the local honey brandy called medica.

The electric car was there promptly to take us back to the hotel – I wished I had used it more given that my ability to walk was limited –no longer able to roam far and wide. However, the bridge near the hotel was always a site of “a happening” – tonight there was a pumpkin-shaped carriage, which fitted in well with this fairy tale backdrop.

On another night the bridge provided the dance floor for a group of young people elegantly executing the tango. We watched the precisely executed movements while sitting on a granite bench, consuming a cornet of freshly roasted chestnuts.

Yet for all these fairy tale qualities, Ljubljana is a university city. Those walking past are predominantly young and fashionable. The restaurant in the riverfront, overflowing with young people, labelled itself Mexican but the food was “pancake parlour” and the service was poor; yet nobody seemed to care as they oscillated between conversation and iPhone – or just sat, concentrating on their screens, tapping away ensuring future thumb disorders as they decoded life.

The lack of transport and reliance on foot and bicycles accentuates that this is a place for youth. The elderly lady dressed all in white struggling with her bicycle was an exception. She stood out in this world where it was the young who cycled.

We did travel elsewhere – but a full description of our “Cook’s Tour” could well become a Clog. But not a sign of horse on the menu.

When I asked my adviser on Slovenian food about the “missing horse”, he looked at me and asked me whether we had gone to the Tivoli Gardens as he had suggested. Apparently horse burgers are available in the Tivoli Gardens – at least I can confront my vegetarian friends with somewhat of a clear conscience.

But as for the survival of Slovenia, a tiny remnant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which survived Tito and the break up of Yugoslavia with which it, I am reminded of what that wise observer of human nature, whose writing appears above, Charlie McMahon has said about small countries and survival of language: “Learning a language from a culture where the core practices are gone is really only good for that.” The Slovenes have never let their culture be destroyed, and hence they have a vibrant language with all the blossoms that that will bring.

Still, there is this matter of konjsko meso. 

Mouse Whisper

To further annoy the occasional reader of a vegan persuasion, overheard in a restaurant in Swakopmund in Namibia, after perusing the menu she was heard to say, “I think I’ll try the zebra.”

Not a laughing matter …         Photo: Janine Sargeant

To which the waiter impeccably replied ‘Black or white stripes, madam?”

No, it was not an exchange of hoarse whispers, but in fact it was true, (with apologies to Mr Brydon).