The Best Mouse Tap

Modest Expectations – Nandyal

My elder son is called Paul.

He was named after St Paul. It caused some consternation on one side of the family. Where did that name come from? “Bit Catholic” was one typical comment. Belying this comment, in Sydney there are 10 Anglican St Paul’s in addition to the Anglican St Paul’s College at the University of Sydney and only three Roman Catholic St Paul’s. In addition, there are two Lutheran Churches of that name, and shared names with St Anthony in the Coptic Church and with St Peter in the Russian Orthodox Church. Thus, recognition of St Paul is eclectic, but strongly Anglican in the Diocese of Sydney. I’m sure he would be bemused about the naming rights.

To me, St Paul was integral to the propagation of the Christian faith – the original missionary. But he is also the traditional convert who become far more wedded to the Christian cause as he did because of the fateful episode that the then Saul, a violent Anti-Christian, had that one day on the road to Damascus. I recognise that converts are often weird and fanatical but driven. In St Paul’s case, his conversion was so completely a positive event for the Church which his subsequent actions confirmed. Yet Paul did not work alone. He had supportive people by his side, for instance, Barnabas and Silas, when he made his three major tours through the Mediterranean countries. Even St Luke was present to witness his travels. St Paul attests to that in his second letter to Timothy, where Luke seems to be Paul’s only companion.

He was “a bloke” – so far from some of the modern Church ministers of religion, where raiment and the arcane trumps everything. No, he would have eschewed such frippery, despite him being painted as some balding bearded man in flowing robes. He was the archetype worker priest. He was plainspoken and yet some of his words have been so often repeated that their force is lost as a cliché.

How many times has “Through a glass darkly” been quoted; but what an image such words provoke!

St Paul was undoubtedly authoritarian – always telling the people to whom he wrote his letters what to do – probably inciting dread in the early Christian community. “Paul is coming next month. We better clean the house.”

He was a misogynist, but in his defence, it reflected the mores current at the time. In other words, he was not some alien person, who floated round the Mediterranean as some ethereal figure without sin.

That was the great quality of this Man – a person driven by a desire to change the world by word not sword. He projected a powerful message; and as I have always said I define my own ideal companion as a person whom I can trust but not necessarily a person who will always agree with me. Those I suspect, because if one can be as disagreeable as St Paul was on occasion, one must generate animosity even if, as can be detected in the Pauline writing, there is compassion underpinning his interpersonal relationships.

My reaction to this restless man is not unique. Other authors have noted his missionary zeal. Essentially these words in his Letter to the Philippians reveal a man, who has a firm moral code, to which he can be called to account.

Finally, brethren whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there to be any praise, think on these things.

Preceding this call for meditation are those words which have become the conventional benediction for many Christians.

And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

And that about says it all, except to mention that recently I prayed to St Paul for his intervention, and my prayers were answered. I have always found comfort in the above words which I whispered to myself on this occasion.

I Must Report

My grandfather may have described himself as a mercer rather than working in schmutter aka “the rag trade”. Notwithstanding one must call it as it is – a man in a bowler hat, detachable wing collar, handmade shirts and suit, bow tie, waistcoat with fob watch and of course spats. (Memoirs of a watcher over a Toorak stuccoed stone fence)

There are two meals that stick in my memory. Given that I have regularly devoted parts of my blog to personal observation, I thought it important for me for me to write up these two meals. They did not occur overlooking the sea or high on mountain tops; nor were these meals in elegant places with silver service and the light glinting on crystal glasses.

The first was sometime in the 1940s when there was still rationing in place. As I have written about my father’s nomadic need to travel before, once he had a car, he would often try to get away for a weekend with my mother and myself. There were no motels and therefore we depended on the availability of local hotels to have a bed. Towns had the Railway Hotel and the Commercial hotels to reflect where they were built and who inhabited them during the week. And Strathmerton did not disappoint – there was a low-slung Railway Hotel. Strathmerton was a small dairying town just south of the Murray River on the edge of the Goulburn Valley.

Remember, this was a time before credit cards, and payment was restricted to cash or cheque.

Now why do I remember this place. In the morning, the breakfast was something I had never experienced: sausages, steak and eggs, and the bacon. I still can picture those rashers of bacon. The toast was thick, warm and buttery.

This was a time when rationing of some food items was still in place, meat and tea. Eggs, milk and particularly butter were in restricted supply – sugar was removed from rationing in 1947. I had only experienced brown sugar, so white sugar was a novelty. Chocolate was non-existent, except in Laxettes.

None of these restrictions meant much because, until I was six, I had never lived in a country not at war. When I stayed in the country then with my aunts there were eggs and milk. I did not like milk anyway. But eggs … and Marmite; that was something else.

This breakfast was so different – a full on delicious Australian breakfast. I have always enjoyed big breakfasts since, but unfortunately in growing older self-rationing becomes de rigeur.

The second memorable meal came in the second year after graduation. It was the first time we had a car. I was married and our first child was on his way; yet we had no car. I had a job at Geelong Hospital, but my wife was working as a post-graduate research scholar at the University of Melbourne. My mate, Don Edgar had been recently ordained and he had a locum posting in Tallangatta in North-east Victoria.

We had not seen him for a while, and he invited us up to stay with him. But we could not have chosen a worse night to drive. It was a time when a car may have had a heater but was not air conditioned, where the car did not have the safety features of the modern cars, and the Hume Highway was still mostly two-lane. The weather was bitterly cold, it was winter, and at times we encountered sleet.

I remember bringing a bottle of Moyston claret to drink with Don if and when we got there. In a time before mobile phones, and a disinclination to venture out into the weather to ring him from a phone box, we pressed on.

Tallangatta is a village on the shores of the Hume Weir, which had been rebuilt once the original township was sacrificed to be swallowed when the Murray River was dammed.

Once we arrived in Tallangatta it took us time to find where Don was living. Eventually, we saw the light in the window, and there was Don at the door, appropriately rugged up.

He ushered us inside, where he had built a roaring fire. The residence was basic but coming in after such a stressful drive it was a palace. The claret was warmed; the soup was robust, and the bread rolls were fine. This was almost biblical, but fish was not on the menu.

A Forgotten Observer

They were familiar not only with the grass seed they so laboriously gathered and ground into flour, but with many bulbs and herbs and underground nuts and tubers also, the native carrot and native onion, the edible yam, which is so like our floury potatoes and a much sought-after food all over the continent. The quandong, too, sometimes called the wild peach, which is good eating when raw and makes a tasty jam – how easily could a tribe have planted practically unlimited number of such fruit-trees! Yet these things they never once thought of growing and cultivating during all the thousands of years they have been struggling for life in this country. And yet they carefully explain to their baby daughters all about the yam-vine from its “beginning” to its “end”, the soils the different varieties grow in, and the conditions and seasons necessary for its growth. They even explain that a few must always be left, so that with the next rain others may grow up. Yet apparently, they have never thought of planting one.

In the coastal and more favoured areas of the continent, if they had thought of such a thing they might have said, “Everything grows in plenty for us here, in a good season anyway, then why should we toil to grow it?” But over the far greater area of the continent, with its recurring harsh times, that they never thought to improve their food supply by growing edible seeds and plants and fruits is a puzzle in the progress of human life.

Ion Idriess was a prolific author, writing 50 novels about this country of ours. He has lost the popularity he once had, but for a man born in Sydney in 1889 and dying 90 years later in Sydney in the intervening years he was very busy. There was an extraordinary litany of achievements through various occupations – opal, tin, gold miner, buffalo and dingo shooter, shearer, boundary rider – in diverse parts of Northern Australia. He encountered many Indigenous people, both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

His perspective in the above has, to my mind, never been introduced into the confused debate of whether the Aboriginal people ever embraced the agricultural revolution.

His writing at times makes one react as if he was scratching his fingernail across a blackboard. The use of “Stone Age” as a description is not acceptable, because clearly the Aboriginal people are not. The use of inappropriate language in one context does not destroy the validity of his interpretation of some of his observations. In the face of these observations what sophistry would Bruce Pascoe use to justify his thesis? What I have found irritating in all this debate, given all the literature available, is how much has been ignored, such as that of Idriess.

Idriess, because of his times and his language in relation to Aboriginal contact, might jar. Nevertheless he had a clear eye, and in days before the taboos were well articulated said he was able to “bribe a ‘witch doctor’ ” into showing his sacred objects. Again, the Aboriginal “witch doctor” may have double-crossed him about the nature of what he revealed, but the observation may have been just as valid.

It is just that I once was given the privilege of seeing sacred objects, which only men are allowed to see. His observations did not tally with mine. However, the diversity of these individual tribes should never be underestimated, and every time I look at my collection of paintings and other artefacts, it just reinforces the diversity among these Aboriginal mobs. Idriess travelled extensively and that is why his descriptions ring true. He was an observer, admittedly culturally insensitive, but nevertheless historically valuable in being able to describe situations that now are hidden by cultural taboos, whether confected or not.

One of Idriess’ strengths was that he effortlessly mingled with Aboriginal people, but never “went native”. Like me, he did not have the genes which had been coursing through Aboriginal people for thousands of years. I retain the ultimate regard for the heritage of Aboriginal people.

If there were to be an honest appraisal of the actual achievements not the constant blame as if it were totally one-sided; the persistent talk without action (so-called “conversations” in different exotically attractive venues across the continent, also a form of expensive, diversional therapy for whitefellas able to afford the entry and travel costs or paid courtesy of the government), then I would without question vote “Yes”.

There is so much humbug floating around.

Try a “conversation” in the Tanami desert in January, Prime Minister.

Malevich – Remarkable Painter

The Athletes also concerns the artist’s own metaphysics, which are quite distinct from that of the stablished church. He has erased all particular detail in order to bring to the fore his vision of humanity’s connection to the cosmos …The removal of facial features and the lowering and flattening of the horizon graphically emphasise the figures’ tenuous connection with the earth. Their feet on the coloured ground, their heads in the infinite white heavens – their half-white heads – all express the dualistic nature of natural beings and their evolving destiny.

I was sorry that we were unable to visit the Vermeer exhibition this year in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Vermeer, together with Magritte and Malevich, are the three painters whose exhibitions, in normal circumstances, I would have made every effort to travel anywhere to see.

We did so in 1998 for the exhibition in Brussels to celebrate the centenary of Magritte’s birth. I have written about the hoops we had to jump through to gain entry into that exhibition. This escapade has stuck in my memory; it was a good story, especially as it ended up in the “happily ever after” box.

But what of Malevich, the third of “my must see” painters?

I stare hard at the figurine of one of the Athletes in the painting by Kazimir Malevich. I purchased the figurine as a memento of the Malevich exhibition. It was the one with half the head coloured red the other side white. The rest of the figurine is a mixture of red and black. It doesn’t look like an Athlete, but I read the explanation, with which I headed this piece. I also have a coffee table book which shows most of his paintings, as well as a set of Malevich postcards and a large poster titled The Carpenter, which was painted and reflects very much the style he used in The Athletes.

Kazimir Malevich, the man born near Kiev in 1878, spent most of his life in Russia. His professional career was counterpointed by the 1917 October Revolution and the growth of the Soviet Union. He died in the then Leningrad in 1935. Only on two occasions did he leave Russia, having been given permission to go to Poland and Germany in the 20s. Most of his works therefore are retained in Russian Galleries, but there was an exhibition of his paintings a decade ago at the Tate Gallery in London.

He was the central figure in the Supremacist movement and there is a great force in his paintings – notably in his originality in style. He is the one painter, whose work I could gaze at for hours. For most galleries I just breeze around absorbing image after image without stopping for long in front of each work. Yes, I admit Guernica, Picasso’s painting makes me want to sit and have a longer look. Otherwise, Picasso does not provoke the same level of interest as Malevich; Picasso had this great facility to dash off a figure with an almost impeccable facility, but they do not connect emotionally.

But Malevich, with his ability to break form down to component and colour, appropriately and deftly lays a beautiful tableau. Even the definition of the principles of Suprematism to reject any form of realism and paint simple shapes such as the circle, square and triangles forces one to recast your view of the world. They also used these shapes as vessels to explain and communicate themselves to the public or the viewer without any use of words or typography. There was limited use of colour in the palette with only basic colours such as red, yellow, blue and green, in addition to white and black.

This colour minimalism is shown by a series of diagrammatic paintings, with anonymous numbering of most of them. What I find fascinating is they seem to be architectural drawings if viewed casually, perfectly outlined rectangles, circles, squares – the architect of the cosmos. The juxtaposition of the components seems to be in harmony; I frankly don’t know why and thus if I try to articulate what they mean I’ll end up in a tangle of words. There is one of these Supremacist works which he links to an aeroplane taking off. The reference point to this are several red lines – he would deny that the red line was the horizon, just a guide to his black and yellow rectangles and oblongs, the plane about to fly off the page.

The solid black painting is the signature of the Supremacist movement – just a pure Black Square. As though in a dark place we are seeing a lunar eclipse at the time when the Moon is closest to the earth (perigee), but paradoxically The Black Square is boxed in by a frame, and it is always hung in a corner of the gallery where normally in the Russian household an icon is hung. I can see what Malevich is trying to do, but that painting is easily mocked by others, including the Australian painter who replicated the Black Square by inserting a combination lock into his version of the Black Square. It brought contemplation of this Malevich work back to Earth.

On Malevich’s gravestone there is a Black Square, with a generous white concrete border.

Malevich went through post-impressionist, cubism, fauvism phases. After his Supremacist period, he reverted to folk artist primitivism, which persisted up to his death. Given how uncertain life was under Stalin, in a period where purges had continued that Russian propensity for pogroms, Malevich may have gone back to folk art as a Survival phase, but he did not live to the Great Terror of 1937. Yet one of the enigmas surrounding Malevich is his sudden cessation of Supremacist painting and reversion to folk art. Why? Perhaps he could not progress his ideas any further.

In the end, if you asked why I so am attracted to Malevich that once I was prepared to travel across the world to see a retrospective, it is his unique representation of the level of affinity and appreciation of what are essentially spatial juxtapositions, so clinical and technical; yet so original … and so difficult to articulate.

Mouse Whisper

Wrestling with concept of Suprematism?

A plane of painted colour hung on a white sheet of canvas imparts a strong sensation of space directly to our consciousness. It transports me into an endless emptiness, where all around you sense the creative nodes of the Universe.” – Kazimir Malevich.

To be read in conjunction with “Untitled (Suprematist Painting) painted in 1915 now hanging in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Modest Expectations – Taiwan and Tobacco

I can blame this reflection on an article I came across about the polymath, Adam Spencer. As far as I can ascertain, Adam Spencer and I were born 30 years apart. Both of us had a traumatic birth, although all I know about Spencer is what I have read.

He, like myself, seemed to have a congenital unilateral oculomotor nerve palsy or paresis. In my case it was a paresis, but living with a drooping eyelid and a squint I found increasingly difficult as I grew up. The only remedy available then was intensive eye muscle exercises, and as the oculomotor nerve innervates four of the ocular muscles, it was crucial to strengthen these muscles.

Nicknamed “lazy eye”, the first danger was that through non-use I would have gone blind in the eye. Because I had a squint (or its medical term strabismus) I had double vision, which I could correct. Yet I was constantly told by my father to “pull my eye round” as the left eyeball would drift outwards. Thus, those looking at me directly may have viewed my left eyeball drifting to the left, while the right looked straight ahead. A strange, unexpected phenomenon, if you did not know me.

Fortunately, the drooping eyelid called ptosis was not severe and therefore there was only a small difference between the two eyelids. Nevertheless, the result of this birth injury was that I developed monocular vision. This meant that had to fuse the images in my brain, and thus lacked stereoscopic vision. When I was tired, I found it difficult, particularly in the laboratory when, for instance, I had to pipette into a tube where I had to judge where the pipette was in relation to the test tube.

It created some social problems for me as I tended to look down avoiding eye to eye contact so people would not be confronted by my literally “wandering eye”. This was interpreted as either shyness or slyness, not compensation.

For years, I resisted having any operation, which anyway when I was a child did not exist. However, ophthalmic surgery progressed strongly about fifty years ago with the advent of cataract surgery and other procedures in repairing cranial nerves. When I arrived at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in 1971, I met the senior ophthalmologist, Dick Galbraith, who perhaps was not as widely known as Fred Hollows but was equally flamboyant, and a strong leader in terms of translating his high standards onto his colleagues. Galbraith also did much pro bono ophthalmology in the South Pacific.

From my arrival at the hospital, he badgered me to have my double vision corrected. In 1976, I eventually succumbed to his pressure and had the operation, and for nearly fifty years my strabismus with the accompanying double vision was “cured”, until recently. Now, especially when tired, I have noticed the double vision has returned, but it is not a bad outcome given the time elapsed since the operation. In the intervening years. I have since had two successful cataract operations undertaken by his son, James Galbraith.

We take so much for granted, because ophthalmic surgery is just accepted practice; a cataract operation now takes but twenty minutes to insert the perfectly sculpted replacement lens under sedation and local anaesthesia. I found the black and white picture show, while the operation was proceeding, very distracting but entertaining. My post-operative recovery was uneventful. Not only was the myopia gone but so also was my astigmatism.

I have at times been critical of the hoop-la that surrounds much of medical research, the unfulfilled expectations and the amount of fraud and plagiarism.

But here a significant advance of benefit to both Spencer and myself, although hampering me for longer because I’m older, should be acknowledged, and not taken for granted.

Some technical advances have been mirages; some have been downright dangerous – and duly get reported by the media.

But here I wish to praise – yes – praise- even though the technological advances have made the cost of the ophthalmic procedures very much less and this has not necessarily passed on to the patient – but that is the price we pay for the asymmetry of information, which dogs every doctor-patient relationship.

A Different Rainbow

Blindness – nobody wants to lose one of the senses, but I am very thankful for sight, and also for the fact that I am not colour blind. In fact, I am very lucky in that I can detect very small differences in colour. It is something, which never seems to be much discussed – that is one’s ability to detect differences in colour. This is a property of the cones in the retina.

Most people have three types of cones and are described as being “trichromatic”. Those who are colour blind have only two types of cones, making them dichromatic. And individuals with tetrachromacy have four types of cones, allowing them to see up to 9 million more colours than everyone else! One theory attributes this ability to a mutation on the X chromosome and so it is limited to women. Some estimate twelve per cent of women have these four different types of cones. They just don’t have to use this whole range.

Others have reported women naturally are better than men at colour differentiation, especially in the orange-yellow range, particularly in detecting small differences. Without much evidence, testosterone has also been implicated as a barrier, but as reported: people who work with colour – think of artists and designers – have a significantly more enhanced colour vocabulary. So, the difference between men and women might not be completely biological, but cultural. This latency would seem to agree with those with a genetic explanation.

As I look up from writing this blog, there is a cymbidium orchid in front of me on the desk. I thought about how you would describe the shapes of the flowers to a blind person – perhaps this could be done by tracing the shape on the palm of his or her hand. But how would I describe the colours of an orchid which is a light green and speckled in distinctive way with irregular deep red spots.

Therefore, describing differences in colour can be by comparison, and directly saying that is the colour light or dark. When we are not sure we add -ish to the end of the colour – greenish or yellowish as examples.

The level of a person’s ability to have the appropriate vocabulary to describe a particular colour is a limiting factor as is the respondent engaged in the description of colour. Take this exchange with my wife. I asked my wife what the red of the flower spots was. She said crimson; I had independently also labelled them crimson. Now describe “crimson”? Why is the colour not burgundy, claret, plum, magenta, maroon or just dark red? When referencing the colour to a colour chart, the flower spots were closer to “carmine” – the colour I had forgotten, although I wonder how common the word is in anybody’s vocabulary.

As coincidence would have it in a discussion of ‘reds’, Pantone’s Colour of the Year 2023 is Viva Magenta

Those who have worked with a Pantone colour chart will have an idea of nomenclature. Pantone, which every year announces a “colour of the year” to maintain its position as arbiter of world colour, differentiates only 15,000 colours, nowhere near the magic nine million.

But back to carmine and crimson: the two colours are separated by their origin. Crimson was derived from the kermes female – a scale insect with a propensity for oak; Carmine comes from the cochineal beetle. The names have come via Latin, Arabic, with the actual English words for each of these colours related to a French language iteration.

But the sobering comment is that explanation of a tetrachromat to the normal trichromat is about as incomprehensible to the latter as the trichromat trying to explain colour to the dichromat, those who are conventionally considered to be colour-blind.

Thus, to put a name on your ability to differentiate colours depends on innate ability – or just being able to read a colour chart. But nine million? Where does that figure come from?

Pony Up

Sydney’s pony racing epicentre stretched from the city to Botany Bay, with the main courses located in Rosebery, Kensington, Ascot and Victoria Park

What was pony racing? For some the name conjures images of children riding Shetland ponies in “hay-bale” hurdle races at agricultural shows. This is totally misleading; in Australia, pony racing was the name given to a sport conducted at racecourses that raced outside Australian Jockey Club and Victoria Racing Club jurisdictions and were so popular they were a constant thorn in the side to these clubs of the establishment. It was racing’s pioneering equivalent of the “Super-league” and World Series Cricket schisms. Most races at “pony” meetings were in fact contested by fully-grown thoroughbreds.

Some writers have perpetuated myths about pony racing, depicting the sport as a rough-and-ready, corrupt form of weekday racing, featuring midget horses on miniature racecourses, existing only during the Great Depression. It has been suggested that pony racing appealed to the desperate, the “needy and greedy” elements of the working class only. Sydney’s Pony Racecourses demonstrate that such assertions are without basis. The sport was one of the country’s biggest industries, with the prize money for its cup-races matching the Cox Plate. Some of its Sydney racecourses were rated second only Randwick, and for a time it was more popular on Saturdays than Australian Jockey Club racing.

The four pony racecourses between the city and Botany Bay were an integral part of Sydney life during the first half of the 20^th century. Existing histories of horse racing fail to acknowledge the contemporary importance and popularity of pony racing. This alternative history of horse racing enables pony racing to claim “[its] fair share of the past”. Wayne Peake

The above is taken from a book in which Wayne Peake blows apart the various myths and misinformation that in particular the Australian Jockey Club sowed beginning in the heyday of so-called pony racing before WWII.

The fate of the Victoria Park Racecourse which was located on reclaimed swamp land at Zetland is illustrative of the fate of racecourses when the public good wins out against vested interests. Victoria Park constitutes 25 hectares in Zetland. There were several other racecourses, located around the Sydney airport.

In relation to Victoria Park, it was requisitioned when World War II broke out. The racecourse was occupied by the Army for two years, and in 1945 was sold to Lord Nuffield to expand his automobile manufacturing empire into Australia. The company became British Motor Corporation in the 1960s and manufactured the Mini for many years. The 1970s saw a decline in the company’s fortunes, especially when the P76 was developed to compete with the existing Holden, Ford and Chrysler models. Ostensibly, the P76 design was adapted so a 44-gallon drum could be put in the boot. The company, Leyland Australia, found that sales were badly affected not only by being an ugly car with a huge boot, but also by industrial problems, fuel price increases and tariff reductions. The factory closed in 1975.

The Australian Navy took over the site in 1975 and built a large stores depot to amalgamate the many small facilities that had grown up around Sydney from World War II. The Navy eventually moved out in 1995, and the NSW Government’s Landcom land development agency purchased Victoria Park. The site was equipped with streets and basic infrastructure for residential use and then sold to developers. Today it is the site of 3,000 apartments and a shopping centre and 3.7 hectares of open space.

With all the agitation over the lack of housing, Randwick racecourse occupies 81 hectares near the centre of Sydney. It was granted to the Australian Jockey Club at a time when Randwick was sand dunes and swamp, and at the periphery of the city fifty years after the founding of Sydney.

When one sees this huge area, which lies fallow most of the year with only 45 race meetings each year, so close to the centre of Sydney with excellent transport facilities, it should be inevitable that the city planners should assess the future of all the Sydney racecourses, given how two are near the centre of city where affordable housing is at a premium.

Any attempt to resume such a plot of land, given the mystical nomenclature of “royal” combined with all the vested interests clustered around Randwick – such words as “Irish Catholics”, “Daily Telegraph and other Murdokistas” – and then all the appeal to “tradition” as a word covering “privileges” and that other powerful word “vested interests”. Currently this putative coalition against any change in the configuration of the racecourse in Sydney might probably sacrifice the Canterbury racecourse to housing development, but I would not count on it. Just trying to acquire the outside car park led nowhere, and there is a moratorium on any re-development on that site until 2027.

Given that the Government was faced down by the “dishlicker” lobby over the suggestion that dog racing had seen its day, there is a latent underground force dedicated, irrespective of the popularity, to keeping all the sports upon which a wager could be laid on the outcome of animal races. Yet what is the point of having a dog track almost in the heart of the city, when that track attracts few paying customers – in fact an average of 120 people per race meeting has been quoted – but the defence is that it generates $50m in revenue a year. This of course begs the questions of where is evidence of the $50m, and why not simply computerise all the dog racing – computerised dog racing was run in TABs years ago. The defenders talk about people who will be put out of work, without any evidence of how many would be affected. The reality is that there is an abundance of greyhounds that need homes.

Harness racing moved out from its inner suburban track at Harold Park Sydney to Menangle in the Southern Highlands. The last race meeting was held at Harold Park Paceway in December 2010. Subsequently 1300 apartments were built on 10.6 hectares with 3.8 hectares of open space. Given that the Harold Park area was about ten per cent of the size of Randwick racecourse, it indicates how much potential space there is for housing given that horse racing is hardly essential and could also be moved to the Central Highlands.

Sacrificing Randwick for the public good may be considered fanciful but is it reasonable to have such facilities so central and accessible when there is such huge pressure on housing site? The Singapore Government does not think so. The last race at the Singapore racetrack is scheduled next year and the 120 hectare site will be handed back to the Singapore Government by 2027, thus ending horse racing in Singapore, where apparently attendances have been falling over the years. The land will be used for housing.

Even the chairman of the Singapore Racing Club, which dates from 1842, has admitted, “This transition will serve to optimise land use for the greater good of the local community and future generations.”

These words should be ringing in the ears of the Prime Minister, but they won’t be. He shoves some money into a taxpayer-fed investment fund that is subject to the vagaries of the stockmarket, where the difference between this action and increasing the supply of housing is a lousy joke. Here the country has a deficit in housing, with prime land barely used by the privileged few not coming under scrutiny. Land allocated nearly two hundred years ago to horse racing should not be treated as though it is sacred, but who is listening? Certainly not a Prime Minister who wants to be loved at any cost and a set of parliamentarian freeloaders sipping Bollinger and munching canapés at The Everest race meeting.

Eighty is not the new Sixty

The easiest way to spot an absence seizure is to look for a blank stare that lasts for a few seconds. People in the midst of having an absence seizure don’t speak, listen, or appear to understand. An absence seizure doesn’t typically cause you to fall down. You could be in the middle of making dinner, walking across the room, or typing an e-mail when you have the seizure. Then suddenly you snap out of it and continue as you were before the seizure. – Johns Hopkins

Mitch McConnell, the 81 year old American Senator, who has done his best to destroy American democracy, this week demonstrated a petit mal episode. Now relabelled absence seizure, the above description describes accurately what was happening to McConnell. There was a film noir quality about how his fellow Republican politicians reacted. First, they did not seem to know what to do, then they stared at their cognitively dislocated boss. No chair was bought; he was just led away by Senator Barrasso, an orthopaedic surgeon by trade. As one used to Americans yelling 911 at the sight of any emergency, this was a quiet handover. Senator Thune, McConnell’s deputy, stepped into the breach. Some minutes later, McConnell apparently re-appeared.

In the 1977 Australian referendum, designed to clean up constitutional anomalies, a compulsory retirement age for Federal judges of 70 was passed with a substantial majority. As Mr Justice Kirby at the time said: “The Members of Parliament, who rarely saw the justices of the High Court in those itinerant days, were uniformly shocked at the Acting Chief Justice, Mr Justice Eddie McTiernan’s age and apparent feebleness. It was the sight of the octogenarian which encouraged the bipartisan support for the amendment of the constitution providing for the compulsory retirement of Federal Judges.”

Despite his increasing slowness in writing judgments, McTiernan, who had been on the High Court for 46 years, refused to retire until September 1976 when, at the age of 84, he broke his hip and the Chief Justice, Sir Garfield Barwick, refused to allow a wheelchair ramp to be installed for him at the High Court.

The vote to change the Constitution received one of the highest approvals of any Australian referendum proposals. Incidentally, McTiernan lived to 97 years.

With the advances in medical care, people are living longer but such medical advances are outpacing those improving retention of cognitive ability. The number of failed cures for senile decay, under the rubric of Alzheimer’s disease, has been disappointing. The Californian Senator Feinstein, who appears grossly cerebrally impaired, and probably unable to comprehend what she is required to do, is an example. At 90 she is the sixth oldest Senator ever to serve. Strom Thurmond was still one of the serving South Carolinian Senators at 100.

Even Popes now retire, after the spectacle of a Pope who was so mentally incapacitated that all types of shenanigans were perpetuated during his papacy. The Cardinals retain their cardinal biretta, but after 80 are excluded from the enclave and are requested to retire at 75, although recommended not dictated by papal bull.

Time for Parliamentarians to legislate for retirement dates. Simple request, Otherwise, let’s have a useful meaningful referendum to make it so, so it is not only Federal judges who are compulsorily retired. Sorry, Bob Katter, you will have to go. But 76 years has given you time for you to make an impression on your parliamentary cushion.

Mouse Whisper

Remembering the confronting Sinéad O’Connor whose son committed suicide almost a year before his mother followed him through the bardo.

Been living as undead night creature since. He was the love of my life, the lamp of my soul. We were one soul in two halves. He was the only person who ever loved me unconditionally. I am lost in the bardo without him.

A troubled talent who passed away in a week where our household also was touched by another person, who may himself have wanted time in the bardo.

Tibetan illustration of the “Peaceful and Wrathful Deities of the post-mortem intermediate state (bardo)”

Modest Expectations – James Phipps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death of the Boondoggle?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley put it perfectly:

My Name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

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

What about the Olympic Games?

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

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

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

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

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

Discovering Fire on the West Coast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What you find on YouTube

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

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

Mouse Whisper

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

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

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

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

Modest Expectations – San Xavier del Bac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aftermath of the destruction of Kharkova Dam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unless Trump is again unleashed on the World in 2025.

Does a Stone Skip or Bounce?

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

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

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

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

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

Culinary Dystopia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just One Invasion Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ourselves to Know

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

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

“Would you ever commit suicide?”

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

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

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

“I guess so.”

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

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

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

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

Mouse Whisper

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

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

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

Modest Expectations – Kingaroy

Arachibutyrophobia is the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth.

Kingaroy is the peanut growing centre of Australia. The terracotta soil is apparently excellent for the cultivation of the underground peanut, and my wife in a spirit of horticultural patriotism only buys Kingaroy peanuts.

Now Kingaroy is in Queensland and is famous for being the home for Joh Bjelke Petersen, part of a Danish Lutheran family. His grandfather, Georg and grandmother, Caroline, migrated from Southern Jutland initially to Hobart. One of their children, was Carl Georg, who became a Lutheran pastor, married Maren, another Danish immigrant, and departed to New Zealand. Joh was born here in Dannevirke in 1911.

This township was founded by Norwegian and Danish immigrants, who were brought to New Zealand by the government in 1872 to cut down the forest which covered much of southern Hawke’s Bay and then to farm the cleared land.

Carl was sickly and the family migrated back to Australia and settled in Kingaroy, established a farm and the association between Joh and the Peanut was born. One of the many Joh quirks was that he spoke Danish fluently, but when he eventually went back to Denmark, his heavily guttural rural dialect made him very difficult even for the Danes to understand. They were not the only ones, especially when he reverted to English.

I only met Joh once when, of all people, John Button, the puckish Labor senator introduced me at a reception in King’s Hall. What struck me was how dead his eyes were. Even people with the perceived deadest of eyes like Greg Norman could not compete with Joh’s level of deadness.

I have worked around Queensland, and for a period a close friend of mine worked in Kingaroy and invited us to visit.

The legacy of that visit long term was the purchase of a collared T-shirt which had been deliberately “dyed” with the soil. Over the years, the colour has faded, but I have never had to use the sachet of Kingaroy soil which came with it, to “re-dye” it. I heard that the wives of the peanut farmers always claimed that their husbands brought the soil to bed, and for those who did not wear pyjamas, it was red sheets in the sunrise.

One of the bonuses of Kingaroy is that the Bunya Mountains are close by. These Mountains are an isolated segment of the Great Dividing Range. When you drive into these mountains as we did, we entered a brooding, mist enshrouded forest area, which remains subtropical yet cooler due the thickness of the forest cover and the fact that the roads climb to nearly 1,000 metres.

Bunya pines are a member of the Araucaria family. They used to be much more widespread than they are now. One of the few remaining areas is the Bunya Mountains, the remains of an extinct volcano, ostensibly 30 million years old, where the Bunyas grow well in moist basalt soil.

Bunya Pines grow up to 50m tall, and in summer are potentially dangerous, because they have this unpredictable knack of ‘bombing’ with their nut. These nuts can weigh up to 10 kgs, so being hit with one of these is potentially lethal if one is unfortunate enough to be standing under that Bunya. Despite the dire warning, it is difficult to find any record of a person who has actually died by Bunya cone.

While we were in the Mountains, we bought five Bunya saplings. Why? When I thought about it later, I rationalised that we would nurture them and then give them away. The concept of growing five trees with the potential to grow to fifty metres in a suburban garden was more than daunting – it verged on madness. It reminded me of the story I once heard, perhaps apocryphal, of some deranged inner suburban arborist, who planted twenty-four lemon gums in a postage stamp courtyard. As a result, so much water was sucked up by the eucalypts, that all the walls of the houses lining the square were cracked.

Thus, we did not plant any of them in the garden, kept them in pots. As they grew larger and larger we offered one to our gardener, who gave it a more suitable home on his country property. We also gave one each to the sons, and kept two. One is stacked in a small pot, like a Chinese woman strapped in tiny shoes, yet has continued to grow against all the odds. We put it out in the lane, on the grounds that it would be taken and given a better home than the one we could give it. It is still there defiantly growing. Its sibling is growing slowly but robustly in the garden, still in a pot.

Time to go back into the land of the Bunya. The nuts are edible, and I once picked up a cone in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, and the cone began to unravel into a strings of these nuts. I threw the nuts away. It was the Age of Bush Tucker ignorance.

Lobster – I have Tasted Everywhere, Man!

I have had many wonderful meals of lobster, which have been taken from the sea where they live a salty existence. I write that to distinguish them from crayfish, which are freshwater.

The few times I cooked lobsters, I gave them a merciful death by drowning them in freshwater. Takes time, but I feel more at ease than the horrendous practice of throwing them into boiling water or shoving a long knife up their spine.

One of the privileges of being an Australian is the number of places around the continent where lobster is available – as a rule of thumb, lobster is available in any month which contains the letter “r”.

There are two types of Australian lobsters, the western rock lobster and the more widespread southern rock lobster. The place where we have gorged on western lobster was on the Abrolhos, the long coral reef, which lies off the Western Australia coast.

These lobsters undergo a synchronised moult in late spring, when they change their normal red shell colour to a creamy-white or pale pink. The lobsters are then known as ‘whites’, until they return to their normal red colour at the next moult a few months later. The lobsters harvested in the ocean near the Abrolhos tend to be smaller, but a fresh lobster is a fresh lobster.

The southern rock lobsters leave their signature along the Limestone Coast of South Australia, and we once ate a lobster purchased from a seafood factory, beautifully cooked. We went down to the foreshore with the lobster and chips. There is something about eating seafood overlooking the Southern Ocean, especially if you love sea gulls.

Then, the next lobster port of call is the Victorian township of Port Fairy, where we once had a country cottage. Before the days of tagging, one could go down to the fishing boat and buy a lobster directly off the boat.

Finally, there is Tasmania where, from the early days of travelling there, lobster was always available. There was a woman who even grew them in tanks. On one occasion she provided one for us free. For a time, as with Port Fairy, you could go down to the Strahan harbourside where lobster was readily available from a shop on the quay.

Then there were none. Why? Most of the catch was exported to China or ended up in high-priced local restaurants around Australia. When China banned the import of Australian lobster, for a brief period there was a glut.

Just after alighting from the plane in Hobart, one had barely left the airport before being enticed by signs on the caravan of “freshly cooked” lobster. On that visit, lobster availability was more evident than even in the days when lobsters were not tagged.

Needless to say, the underground lobster trail to Asia has re-started with intermediate stages before the ultimate Chinese destination being in places such as Singapore to conceal the Australian nature of this cretaceous contraband. As a result, the price of lobster has risen as the local supply dwindles.

But in the meantime, I have developed an allergy to lobster.

Bisque Funder

John Funder is a remarkable polymath in his own write. He and I met in first year medicine, both children swaddled in the cloth of private male schooling, both sons of doctors. He was a Xavier lad; I wasn’t. Xavier taught ancient Greek; he was well steeped in the classical; he was a glittering research scientist. As for myself, I did Latin reasonably up to year 12 and obtained a mediocre PhD in researching angiotensin I & II.

Funder was and will always be my cynosure of “perceived relevance”. Whenever he came into my life, I always knew I was going through a phase of “faux-influential” – somebody worthy of being recognised, if not courted. One of those times occurred in 1973, when he was working in Hamburger’s Laboratory in Paris. No, this was not the scientific arm of McDonalds nor was it the crucible of “French fries” science.

Jean Hamburger (OM-boo-yeh) in fact was no joke. He was an eminent renal immunologist, whose pioneering work facilitated renal transplantation; and he even coined the word “nephrology” to describe the discipline of renal medicine and naturally was père de la néphrologie.

Funder, as was his wont, was thus living in Paris. It was early summer and as part of his overseas trip, Snedden had included Paris in his itinerary. The Department had booked him into the Hotel Georges V on the Champs Elysees. The suite which was allocated to Snedden was modestly luxurious and overlooked the Champs Elysees rather than the antique plumbing, which was my view from one of the rooms at the back, presumably once part of the servants’ quarters. I always remembered how spare it was, considering what it must have cost the Australian Government.

One evening, Snedden went off on a prior engagement with one of his banker mates, and I was left to my own devices for dinner. The telephone rang. It was Funder, who had tracked me down to the Hotel. As I was about to dine on my own, I invited him over to join me for dinner.

Funder took over the menu. His intention was that the meal would do justice to the fact that he was in the Georges V, a scientist on a meagre salary who deserved the best the Georges V could provide. I was not particularly well, and a week later I was seeing a Harley Street specialist, who drained my ear of pus.

But what I remember was Funder introducing me to lobster bisque. The bisque was luxuriant and there seemed to be litres of it. But I excused myself early; Funder delicately left me with the bill. I have had bisque since, but never in Paris on the Champs Elysees – nor with John Funder.

The Book Lender

My love of books had started as my father gradually built up his collection of Penguin books. I never asked him what fascinated him about these books, but as he collected them, from an early age I was surrounded by these colourful paperbacks, beginning with the children’s series called Puffin. There were even Baby Puffin books, but I bypassed this first step on the literature ladder.

Allen Lane, the founder of these paperbacks, had always said that the Penguin book was there to entertain and the subsequent Pelican line to instruct. Lane labelled his various types of books after birds beginning with “P”. Why? Well, he took the bird idea from a line of German books published by one Albatross Press.

My wife suggested that this segment of my life be recorded for posterity. I was in a junior school and it was just after World War II, and the library in the school was full of those daring-do books which seemed to be reminiscences of men who had fought in the Boer War or were generally putting “those native chaps” back in their place. These books were daunting to pick up let alone read, encased as they were in extravagant hard covers.

My mother banned me from having comics, although I remember a period where I managed to obtain Bosun & Choclit, which provided a diet of both ageism and racism in a jocular form, an ideal socialising force for us bambini, I don’t think.

I remember buying my first Champion, an English “boy story paper” at the newsagency at Flinders Street station, and my mother relented. Then for some years I regaled myself with stories about Rockfist Rogan, a World War II air ace, Colwyn Dane, a “tec”, Danny of the Dazzlers, a football team which seemed to be modelled on Arsenal, with feeder teams such as the Glimmers to construct a hierarchy of teams based on luminosity. There was the obligatory school hero, Ginger Nutt, “the boy who took the Biscuit”.

I became steeped in Pommy argot, learning for instance that dribbling was not necessarily of sialic origin. These stories shielded one from reality; a shadow may pass across the storyline but always the stories ended in the sunlight. Life was a jolly jape, where success came to the eponymous heroes.

There were two streams of books that were popular. One was the Biggles books, with his sidekicks, Algy, Worrall and Gimlet. The others were the Swallows and Amazons series of Arthur Ransome, children’s adventures mainly on Cumbria lakes and the Norfolk Broads.

I am not sure how it started but somebody asked me for the book I was reading, and I lent it him. It was the last I saw of the book. But then I had many books, which included some that had been written with children about 8 or 9 years old in mind. I decided to set up my own lending library, and soon I was doing a roaring trade in lending my books out at threepence, tuppence or a penny. I might have asked for sixpence for the better book. I recorded each transaction in a notebook, and my classmates were remarkably honest in returning the books.

But such an enterprise only had a limited life expectancy. One day, when I was finalising a transaction on the stairs, the principal walked by and asked me what I was doing. I told him. Then he asked me to come to his office.

At a school where the sons of successful business persons roamed, I was forbidden to carry out any more trade. It was just not the done thing, you know, to earn money by exploiting my fellow classmates. He was very nice about it, but he could not have his pupils participate in trade. Heaven could wait!

In the meantime, I have accumulated books my whole life, without ever setting up a bookshop.

Haven’t I Seen You before?

Genetics put them together, and epigenetics and microbiome pulls them apart. – Dr Esteller

According to one study, the likelihood of two people sharing the exact facial features is less than 1 in 1 trillion. Put another way, there is only a one in 135 chance that a single pair of doppelgängers exists on our planet of more than 7 billion people. Yet another source says that there are six people in the world, who can be mistaken for you, excluding twins and triplets.

One Canadian photographer, François Brunelle, who happened to be a doppelgänger for Rowan Atkinson was intrigued with this whole area. He photographed an extensive portfolio of doppelgängers. Looking through his photographs, they are stunning even given that being a photographer, he would have photographed the pairs in the most favourable light.

Last year, Dr. Esteller, a Spanish scientist reported on research where he recruited 32 pairs of lookalikes from Mr. Brunelle’s photographs to take DNA tests and complete questionnaires about their lifestyles. The researchers used facial recognition software to quantify the similarities between the participants’ faces. Sixteen of those 32 pairs achieved similar overall scores to identical twins analysed by the same software. The researchers then compared the DNA of these 16 pairs of doppelgängers to see if their DNA was as similar as their faces.

Dr Esteller found that the 16 pairs who were “true” doppelgängers, sharing significantly more of their genes than the other 16 pairs that the software deemed less similar. It all came down to the more they were alike, the more they share important parts of the genome.

However, DNA alone doesn’t tell the whole story of our makeup. The epigenome, the lived experiences, and those of our ancestors, influence which of our genes are switched on or off. Then there is one’s microbiome, the microscopic accompaniment made up mostly of bacteria and viruses, which is further influenced by our environment. Thus, while the doppelgängers’ genomes were similar, their epigenomes and microbiomes were different – working in the opposite direction to the genome.

Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo, released when I was a late teenager, impressed me by the element of shock, where the one character portrayed by Kim Novak is the lookalike of herself, and where she is forced to re-enact events which had gone before – and emphasises that when the concept is artificially fused, there is a certain madness. Jimmy Stewart does madness very well as he seeks to break the fusion apart.

Thus, this area has always fascinated me – the more so when I was said to resemble Elton John. I remember a time when Elton John was touring Australia and sustained a leg injury which put him in a wheelchair. One of my associates at the time said: “Put Jack in a wheelchair with a cowboy hat and nightclubs, here we come!”

It was the time when Elton was about to marry a woman, but even so I suspect it would have been quite a ride, if we had gone through with the wheelchair tour through a confused world of gender identity.

The first time I realised that he was my look-alike was back in 1972 when two young women at a work barbecue started looking at me and then began whispering and giggling. At that stage, I had never heard of Elton John. But somebody showed me a record cover, and the similarity was immediately recognisable. When you are both mesomorph with heavy legs, wear glasses and have at certain angles, a similarity in features, then does that make one a lookalike – a sosie – a doppelgänger – a double? It may.

With me, it has never been more than a quirk, occasionally a conversation piece – but the confounding variable is lifestyle and, with time, nobody could be a genuine doppelgänger for such a unique personality as John – certainly not a retired guy called Jack without the same array of wigs. I really conform to the research findings about environmental push-back.

Mouse Whisper

There were two celebrities who looked alike. In a restaurant, one approached his doppelgänger, and before he could say anything, the first looked him up and down slowly, and said “My, you are a handsome fellow!” and without further ado got up and left.

Modest Expectations – Karnataka

I was going through my memorabilia, and I came across my sand dollar, which I remember was given to me by friends who lived on the outer islands of South Carolina, to be precise where they had a house on Fripp Island. We stayed there a few times, and one of the memories which has stayed with me was seeing the osprey in the morning, the birds appearing to wake up with dawn.

I must say I do have fond memories of South Carolina because it was the place where I came to love scallops. The Gay Fish Company had their base on a nearby island in what is termed the low country, in other words a high class swamp. Their daily harvest of scallops was caught early, and these were notably large and sweet; one had to get down there early because when the catch was sold there were no more for the day. As I said, before staying there, I was not keen on scallops, but these Gay-harvested scallops changed my mind. I doubt if since I have ever had such large scallops with such flavour.

The sand dollar is also known as the Holy Ghost Shell, essentially the skeleton of a sea urchin. In South Carolina there are stiff penalties if one removes them live, but when they die, they are left as bleached calciferous discs. They are not uncommon, but as they tend to be fragile, by the time they get to the beach most are cracked or chipped. I have two – one the natural remnant and the other made from base metal which I was given as a present. The shells are full of Christian symbolism relating to Jesus Christ.

The following is a common description of this symbolism. It is said that Christ left the sand dollar as a symbol to help the evangelists teach the faith. The five holes commemorate the five wounds of Christ, while at the centre on one side blooms the Easter Lily, and at the lily’s heart is the Star of Bethlehem. The Christmas poinsettia is etched on the other side, a reminder of Christ’s birth. According to this legend, if you break the centre, five white doves will be released to spread goodwill and peace.

Biologically, sand dollars are small invertebrates with distinctive exoskeletons sporting a star shape at the centre of their disc-like bodies. The tube feet and keratinous spines covering their bodies make living sand dollars look and feel like velvet. Common colourations of sand dollars are grey, dark purple, pink, red and charcoal. When you pick them up, they’ll exude a yellow staining substance not unlike their relation, the sea urchin. Even though I associate the sand dollar with South Carolina, they are distributed worldwide and can live for up to ten years. The sand dollar is edible, but it seems only the Japanese regularly include it in their cuisine.

Living in this low country is somewhat of a lottery because of regular hurricanes, and our friends lost a new Volvo parked under their house – the pedantic might call it an undercroft filled with water. However, that is the problem. The times we were there the sun sparkled, the unreal emerald colour shone from the fairways and the nearby picturesque Beaufort, pronounced “Bue-fort” not “Beau–fort”, had that Southern charm. The islands – a string of privileged influence, which I doubt even the mystical sand dollar can save.

Massacres of Aboriginals – The role of the Aboriginal Trooper

I always wonder how the descendants of the Indigenous troopers rationalise their ancestors’ role in the massacre of their Aboriginal brothers and sisters. Have they issued apologies – do they walk as penitents to atone for their ancestors’ action?

I have been to two of the sites where major massacres of Aboriginals occurred, and where there are monuments to those killed.

The first of these is approached on a hill above Bingara in northern New South Wales. It is a plain granite rock, and the path winds because it is supposed to represent the rainbow servant. In relation to the victims, it was a particularly savage attack by whitefellas. The victims were mainly women and children, decapitated, dismembered and burnt. Seven of the perpetrators were subsequently tried and hanged, which was itself controversial at the time. The problem was that the execution hardened colonial attitudes against the Aboriginal people, rather than creating any sympathy for them.

Previously, Major James Nunn, the Commandant of the New South Wales Mounted Police, had been sent from Sydney to lead a punitive expedition against the Aboriginal people who had killed stockmen in separate incidents. His response, however, was extreme. On 26 January 1838 Nunn and his men massacred Aboriginal people camped at Waterloo Creek. Contemporary reports were vague about the number massacred. Some suggested eight deaths, others put the figure at 40-50, while Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld, the Congregational minister and chronicler suggested it may have been more like 500.

Nunn also encouraged nearby stockmen and settlers to murder any Aboriginal person they came across. It was the opening salvo in the Myall Creek murders. I cannot find any evidence, at least not in the Threlkeld papers, that there were any Aboriginal troopers involved although Aboriginal men were recruited to the NSW Mounted Police. Rolf Boldrewood, in his reflections on his time spent as an early squatter in the Western District of Victoria, mentions the recruitment of Aboriginal troopers from the tribes around Tumut, hundreds of kilometres away. Native Police were recruited from 1837, only two years after the foundation of Melbourne and the opening up of the Port Phillip District.

Queensland, by contrast, had a strong history of Aboriginal troopers. I remember coming back from Normanton in the Gulf Country via the back road to Cloncurry. Near the hamlet of Kajabbi, there is a cairn which was dedicated by Charlie Perkins and a Kalkadoon elder, George Thorpe, in 1984. The memorial commemorates one hundred years since the battle between Aboriginal tribes, in particular the Kalkadoon, and the native Mounted Police under Sub-Inspector Fred Urquhart. For eight years he commanded a huge swathe of Far Northern Queensland including not only the Gulf but also the whole of Cape York and Thursday Island.

The Kalkadoon had been rustling the white settlers’ cattle, because the cattle had reduced the native wildlife. The Kalkadoon were used to hunting the native fauna and in its absence, the settlers’ cattle would do. The settlers called in the police and pitched battles were fought. On multiple occasions Urquhart was wounded, but this “heroism” was rewarded eventually by his becoming the head of this squad. The native police were recruited, far from where they were posted, and were known to be particularly brutal in these so-called “dispersals”.

In 1884, at least fifty Kalkadoon were killed in these so-called skirmishes.

I have been to these two places where Aboriginal people were murdered and memorials created. One was where the presence of native troopers was unproven; and probably not involved. The other there was definite involvement.

The fact is that Aboriginals in the employ of the whitefellas massacred their fellow Aboriginal people. Not the normal tribal warfare, which has pockmarked the concept of Australia of being some form of blackfella Shangri-la, if it were not for the Invaders.

The Aboriginal people love their myths. Uluru is a myth. Too much of what has happened has been airbrushed away, as the amount of meeting after meeting after meeting, with the same images – with people like Patrick Dodson trying to stir whitefella guilt by implying that Australia will lose moral authority if Australia does not vote “Yes”.

Where is the moral authority when your ancestors were murdering your fellow Aboriginal people. What do you say now about moral authority? Apologies for police actions have been undertaken by whitefellas; where is the blackfella apology?

Frederick Douglass Back on Stage

The following is a part of a text which was read out in Somerville on July 4. It comes from a speech made in 1852 by the slave emancipator, Frederick Douglass, born a slave in Maryland in 1817, but who escaped as a child.

It was on 5 July 1852 that Douglass delivered an address in the newly built Corinthian Hall in Rochester New York. This speech eventually became known as “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” One biographer called it “perhaps the greatest antislavery oration ever given”.

Like many abolitionists, Douglass believed that education would be crucial for African Americans to improve their lives; he was an early advocate for school desegregation. In the 1850s, Douglass observed that New York’s facilities and instruction for African American children were vastly inferior to those for European Americans. Douglass called for court action to open all schools to all children. He said that full inclusion within the educational system was a more pressing need for African Americans than political issues such as suffrage.

It is ironic that the Supreme Court has just struck down the affirmative action by tertiary education institutions. In the view of the Chief Justice John Roberts, the relevant part of the 14th Amendment, its equal protection clause, was meant to help bring about a colourblind society, not to support racial preferences. What is the difference when a Society is so heavily skewed to white privilege?

The Douglass speech is much longer than the speech made by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, over a decade later, but it has the same gravitas, the same call to reform while invoking the ideal of the fledging Republic. The fact that slavery persisted so long in the USA has always cast a shadow over all the “high-falutin” oratory that was spun around in those years before, during and after the Civil War, when so many Americans killed one another just epitomises the conundrum of the “killing fields” in the land of the free. Over what? An enmity which persists to the present day linked to skin colour.

In the meantime, with the delivery of this speech originally made close to the 4^th of July, for those in the audience in Somerville near Boston this week, this speech has been a reminder of the unhealed self-inflicted wounds that the Americans make on themselves.

Americans! Your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina.

You invite to your shores, fugitives of oppression from abroad, honour them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation—a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against her oppressors; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse!

You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labour; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a threepenny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard-earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. You profess to believe “that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,” and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not coloured like your own. You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.

The Virgin Armenian

Gary Sturgess has left his mark on NSW.

ICAC was his idea.

Gladys Berejiklian has left her mark on NSW with her version of Bridget Jones’s Diary, as revealed in the ICAC folio.

What else?

Well, I have kept my own diary-blog during the Plague years, in which Premier Berejiklian figures prominently – one misstep after another, her feet firmly placed in her goody-two shoes.

The culmination of the idolatry came with the AFR article in April 2021 with Phillip Coorey cooing about the Woman who Saved Australia. There she was photographed in all her understated sultriness, swathed in virginal white, incongruously perched on the green benches of the Legislative Assembly.

I never could get that “saviour” line, given that the Ruby Princess fiasco occurred under her watch. And then it went on and on – and everybody praised her handling of the epidemic.

She was the third NSW Premier to be touched by the ICAC, and none have been bought to court. In fact, Greiner and Farrell have survived handsomely. After all, New South Wales has a tradition from the earliest days of letting those convicted of misdemeanours, if not felonies, to strut free. There is a list of parliamentary dross who have been convicted, including two of murder. Notwithstanding, there had not been any convictions for forty years, until “Buckets” Rex Jackson was convicted in 1987. Since the arrival of ICAC there have been more convictions than in all the years from 1987 back to 1891 when the first misdemeanour by a parliamentarian was reported.

As reported, in July 1999 Carmen Lawrence stood in the dock in Perth District Court silently mouthing the words “thank you, thank you, thank you” across the floor to the jury. Six men and six women had spent just 45 minutes deliberating before acquitting her of perjury after a trial lasting three weeks.

Carmen Lawrence would have been the third former Western Australian Premier in less than three years to be gaoled if she had been found guilty of having given false or misleading information to the 1995 Marks Royal Commission; the charges laid under section 24 of the Royal Commission Act 1968 carried a penalty of five years imprisonment.

Former Premiers Brian Burke and Ray O’Connor and former Deputy Premier David Parker all served time behind bars in the aftermath of the WA Inc Royal Commission. Brian Burke, in addition, was sentenced to three years jail after being convicted of stealing $122,585 from the Australian Labor Party between 1984 and 1985 to fund purchases for his own private stamp collection. The former Labor leader was also gaoled in late 1994 for fraud offences, but he was released after serving only seven months of a two-year term. In keeping with the traditions of NSW, Burke survived and went onto a successful career as a pro-business lobbyist, working in partnership with former ministerial colleague Julian Grill, also investigated by the CCC of WA, charged, but subsequently found not guilty of all charges.

In February 1995 the then 69-year-old former Premier Ray O’Connor also received a prison term after being found guilty in the Perth District Court of stealing a $25,000 cheque from Bond Corporation, which had been intended for Liberal Party campaign funds. O’Connor was originally given an 18-month jail term, but he was released after serving only six months. In September 1994 David Parker was sentenced to 18 months jail after being convicted of stealing $38,000 from his campaign accounts between 1986 and 1989.

So Western Australian Premiers have been especially naughty; but in Victoria there is a certain purity, the only convictions of parliamentarians have been for drink driving. In Queensland, after the Fitzgerald Inquiry, in 1991 the former Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen was lucky that he was not convicted of perjury, largely because of the actions of the trial foreman, Luke Shaw. This person was an avowed “friend” of Bjelke-Petersen and National Party activist. Bjelke-Petersen was not re-tried because of his age and subsequent development of a form of dementia.

Berejiklian seems to have a high degree of hubris and little shame about the findings of ICAC, but here was a situation where the Commissioner could not win. Ruth McColl is a stickler for process, but she is not a practitioner of the dark arts of NSW politics. Therefore, if she takes too long, essentially a value judgement of the current NSW Premier, then there must be legislative redress to assure “the quick and dirty”. This Premier really is a piece of work. If McColl had spent less time, that group surrounding Berejiklian would have launched an assault on the Commissioner that she had given insufficient time to consider the matters under referral. Nevertheless, I doubt whether Berejiklian saying that she wanted to spend more time with her family would bring any more incredulity than the idolatrous clamour from her claque is bringing upon her already.

What will be interesting is how Optus handles the situation. Does she damage the brand so that Optus, itself with a speckled reputation, is forced to release her back to the arms of her family.

There is an obvious question of probity, not just of some sort of stained Pollyanna. There is more to come. Influential members of the media are opposed to the secretive Armenian princess, and in the forthcoming travails of Daryl McGuire, it is inconceivable that she would not be mentioned in dispatches; plus, if she challenges the ICAC finding and expects her objections to be received in secret, she is living in fairyland.

In the meantime, those who have extolled Berejiklian should look to Plan B, because she has been spared by the drawn-out process, which in fact has provided a shield. That shield has gone; the decision is in.

Teddy Bairstow’s picnic

Lordy, Lordy! I believe gin is the preferred spirit of the game, but Pimm’s No. 1 Cup is gaining rapidly.

Not the tie but the jacket and cap … checking phone for current MCC Laws of Cricket on stumping

By the way, did you note the colour of the Lord’s tie. In our youth, we used to drink advocaat and cherry brandy – known colloquially among us medical students as blood and pus. Not that I would be that revolting.

Mouse Whisper

This mouse-myth is narrated by Herodotus, an unreliable Greek historian who lived in 5^th century BC, and is said to have happened in Egypt. Whatever the truth, for we mice, it is entertaining. Sethôs was an Ethiopian priest who became the ruler of Egypt at a time when the state was under Ethiopian domination, somewhere in the early 7th century B.C. Apparently when Sethôs clambered up to the throne, he made a point of showing he couldn’t care less about the “warrior-class” of Egyptians. He thus found himself without an army when the Assyrian King Sennacherib invaded his country. Sethos fell asleep in the temple, and the god Hephæstus, appearing to him in a vision, told him that divine succour would come to the Egyptians. In the night before the battle, field-mice gnawed the quivers, the spears and the leather shield-handles of the Assyrians, who fled on finding themselves thus disarmed. “And now,” says Herodotus, “there stands a stone image of this king in the temple of Hephæstus, and in his hand a mouse, and there is this inscription, “Let who so look on me and be pious.”

Modest Expectations – Jeppe Bruun

Here we go again. The Federal Government has appointed Blair Comley PSM, “an economist and former special advisor with PwC” as the new Secretary of the Department of Health and Aged Care. As was reported in that announcement, the writer added “there is no escaping the spectre of that consultancy”.

His five-year term commences on 17 July. My concern is that, at a time when the health sector is in turmoil, a person with no experience in health has been appointed. Not that the previous incumbent has left much of a legacy and he was medically qualified, but he did achieve acclaim for his “sure hands” in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak. At least he knew the language – Health. I am one of those who do not subscribe to the notion that once a manager, the language of management overrides everything – no matter the expertise or subject matter.

I have worked my entire career in the health sector and had a business partner who was originally a transport economist and cost accountant, but who gradually developed a fluency in “health”, albeit with an accent and a limited health vocabulary. But he could negotiate his way around in the language and knew when he was being deceived by fancy “med-speak”.

What I find somewhat interesting is that in his curriculum vitae, as published, Mr Comley is vague about his age. I know that some people are sensitive about their age, but it always has a reason. What is Mr Comley’s?

He is impeccably qualified. Comley holds a first-class Honours degree in Economics and is a Master of Economics from Monash University. He holds a Graduate Diploma in Legal Studies from the Australian National University. He spent time in Treasury and three years in the OECD. Comley seems to have attracted the attention of the Labor Party and worked for the Rudd-Gillard Government, first as Secretary of the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency from 2011 and then for a short time at Resources, Energy and Tourism – appointed secretary in February 2013. He was thus well on his way to “Mandarin-hood” before, with two other Department Heads, he was sacked by Abbot on the first day Abbot took over as Prime Minister in September of that year.

It was at this time he moved to PricewaterhouseCoopers as a consultant in April 2014, a special advisor to the company’s Canberra economics and policy team. The then NSW State Premier, Mike Baird, later appointed him as the Secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet in 1914, where he lasted for three years before he was off again onto the consultant carousel, this time with Ernst & Young as Director and Partner at EY Port Jackson Partners, a strategy-focused consultancy advising leaders of business and government – in other words – a lobbyist.

In January 2012 Mr Comley was awarded a Public Service Medal for “outstanding public service in the development of public policy, particularly in the areas of carbon pricing and emissions trading, tax policy design and debt management”. But not Health!

“Mr Comley has a wealth of experience and a record of proven leadership navigating complex issues,” Mr Butler said. We’ll see. He still has potential spins on KPMG and Deloitte; to which he may say, “Come back in five years.” I prefer not, but on reflection the Australian Health system has survived the likes of Jane Halton. The problem is that these top health bureaucrats know the streets of Geneva better than those of Alice Springs. So, Mr Comley you certainly have a challenge for someone who is 53 years old (verified from another source).

One obvious question. How would you handle a national public health emergency – say Ebola or some other haemorrhagic contagion, Mr Comley? Whom would you trust?

My Little Orange Lamborghini

One of my favourite film opening sequences is that featured in “The Italian Job”. This was the thriller-comedy featuring Michael Caine and Noel Coward as leaders of a band of robbers intending to steal a large amount of gold bullion in a Turin heist.

The opening sequence features an orange Lamborghini Miura being driven up the winding Great Bernard Pass. The pass links the Aosta Valley region of north-western Italy and the Canton of Valais in Switzerland. The opening scene features Rossano Brazzi at the wheel, fag in mouth and wearing fashionable sunglasses – Ford Mustang Renauld Spectaculars. The sunglasses were specifically designed for driving, with the curved sides to stop wind coming through.

Belying the wistful opening song “On a day like today” sung by Matt Monro, the opening scene ends with the Lamborghini crashing into a front end loader hidden in the tunnel and not only that, there is also a shot of the sun glasses lying on the road being ground under a Mafia heel. Such gratuitous destruction, but as the publicists of the film said, the Miura tipped over the mountainside had already been destroyed in a previous accident in the Middle East – where else?

Oh, what a relief. I must say the fuss surrounding this car, with its numbered chassis #3586, was surprisingly lost for 50 years after its appearance in the 1969 film. When the car reappeared, it needed restoration and now resides with its owner in Liechtenstein, with a value of about US$5m.

It was the first supercar with a rear mid-engine and two-seat layout, something which other supercars have followed as a mantra ever since. Introduced in 1966, the Miura remained in production until 1973. In different forms a total of 764 were manufactured. All came powered by the 3.9-liter V12 although Lamborghini could coax out different power from different versions of the car. It was also the fastest production car of its time. While Fiat is synonymous with Turin; Lamborghini are manufactured in a small town near Bologna – Sant’Agata Bolognese – in Emilio-Romana.

I sound like a Top Gear presenter. I must stop this adulation. Yet I do remember staying in London next to a Lamborghini dealer, with these low-slung cars spilling out into the narrow street during the day seemingly immune from parking tickets. Watching them being driven hither and yon, it seemed by those driving these vehicles you needed training as a contortionist – all seemed to be athletic young men replete with what the French call “quincaillerie”.

Likewise, the signature sunglasses have been revived, available online for around AUD2,100.

Brazzi’s cameo appearance must be akin to the brief appearance of Janet Leigh in just surviving the opening credits of “Psycho”.

Yes, Turin is an impressive city, being the capital of Piedmont and once the seat of the Savoyard royalty. Thus, it has the air of a city of typical oppressive majesty, with the long colonnaded shopping centres where you can drink coffee, quaff a white Piedmontese wine and eat agnolotti while watching the Torinese walk past. However, more spectacular was sipping Negronis on the roof of the gardens with an admittedly interrupted view of the Alps, clinging to the far horizon as a spectacular backdrop to the intervening city buildings.

Turin is a sedate city, not the frenetic scene in what was a very entertaining film, and there is no doubt that Turin is one of those Northern Italian cities which is known, at least for a long time, by the Mini Cooper car chase through its streets, the colonnades perfect for the car stunts. The classic pursuit through the sewers was not actually filmed in Turin but in England. Obviously in the traffic gridlock scenes, the Torinese seemed to be enjoying themselves; but even if you paid me, I would not have been one of that crowd. I totally unspool if caught in traffic jams, let alone that crazy gridlock with a crescendo of car horns as depicted in the film.

The most disappointing aspect of Turin is the acclaimed Shroud. We admittedly arrived late at the Cathedral of St John the Baptist, and there it was, a piece of linen cloth with its head of a bearded bloke, very much the conventional depiction of Christ as an emaciated hollowed soul. We could not really get near it, and the fact that it is behind layers of bullet proof glass does not help either. I consoled myself that at least I had seen it but then what had I seen? The remains of a mediaeval hair shirt cut into the shape of a linen shroud – and why shroud? That is somewhat pejorative to say the least. Could just have been the forerunner of those T-shirts with Che Guevara’s image printed on the front.

Pyne for the Asking

Reading this hard-headed article about the French Defence forces, which appeared in a recent issue of The Economist, inter alia it made me compare the French determination with the apparent waywardness of our defence forces, the procurement of materials seemingly left to an array of consultants linked to US defence contractors, but without any apparent expertise in the field. Being Minister for Defence in Australia seems however to be a prerequisite for growing mushrooms; the experience of being one being invaluable in what will ever be known as your Pynestry. If one thinks about Pyne, that grinning visage profiting from just being an average politician, a guy who had never had a real job before entering Parliament at the age of 25. Now one must not be envious! After all, maybe Maurie Pyne will live long enough to receive his appropriate reward, once the AUKUS shill is properly exposed.

Meanwhile, the French have got on with the job. The lesson being very simple is to have a co-ordinated Defence Force with modern communications, just in time – not at a time decades hence when Planet Earth may be a charred remnant, with the Barrow-on-Furness submarine facility long since decommissioned without building any nuclear submarines for us.

Paradoxically, however, France has scaled back the acquisition of some extra kit. The air force will get 48 fewer new Rafale fighter jets than previously planned, and 15 fewer a400m transport aircraft; the army will get 497 fewer Griffon and Jaguar armoured vehicles. “Because we are trying to do everything at the same time, we are sprinkling rather than defining priorities,” said Hélène Conway-Mouret, a Socialist senator on the armed-forces committee.

The new budget, retorts the general, “takes us in the right direction”, even if its full effects will not be felt until 2030. He argues that critics of the plan have failed to understand the importance of capable forces rather than sizeable ones. The number of tanks, ships and planes is not growing as fast as it might, he insists, precisely because of the priority given to “coherence”. “It’s important that if you buy a tank, you have men trained on it, who have ammunition to train and spare parts to go in the field with it.” There is no point, General Burkhard says, in having “an army that is ready to parade on Bastille Day, but is not ready to go to war.”

Vancouver

I note that Vancouver is listed as the sixth most liveable city and, given the subjective nature of such assessments, where both Sydney and Melbourne are listed above in The Economist tabulation, I nevertheless would not argue. In fact one afternoon in Vancouver I defined my experience as the closest I had ever had for ultimate “bliss” – sitting outside in the summer sun consuming a meal of Coho salmon.

Vancouver has Stanley Park, the large parkland which abuts the harbour, and from where it is a jogger’s delight, running long the seawall, past a collection of the long totem poles characteristic of the Indian tribes of the Pacific North-west. One sight which remains is that of being there in April, when the cherry blossoms were in full flower, their generous pink blooms adding to the beauty that was then Canada.

There are always small moments that stick in one’s memory. I stopped after a wind sprint just outside a bower, where a young woman was sitting. I had turned away, when she asked me to take her photograph. As I turned around she had stood up and was offering me her camera. I thought what a strange request to ask a total stranger to take a photograph – just of herself. I complied; she thanked me and went back to her seat; I ran off and never saw her again. Given that the iPhone has made the “selfie” an integral part of normal social interchange, with the capacity to store any scrap of life seemingly almost unlimited, it is one of the examples of social mores trailing the technology. So different from when I had taken that photo perhaps forty years ago.

Now the picture of Canada (see below) is that of forest fires, of drought, waterways and dams dried up. Over the years, I have been to all the border provinces of Canada, except Saskatchewan. I once spent twelve hours at Calgary airport, waiting for a delayed plane and thus left to have a lot of time to become acquainted with the collection of artifacts hung on its walls at that time.

That was the time I took the train from Vancouver to Banff, thence to Calgary where I was to visit the Foothills Medical Centre. This was at a time when I was supposed to be an expert in quality assurance and had just started the first journal, The Australian Clinical Review, which gave me a brief period of international acknowledgement, including for the then CEO of this large hospital.

Of course, I stayed at the Railway Hotel in Banff, one of the faux-chateaux mixed with a touch of the Balmoral, which were built along the Canadian Pacific Railway, looking impressive against the background of snow covered mountains. Staying in hotels like this is very dependent on the room you can afford, but when young and the hotel is relatively affordable, one chases the experience. And I must say I have always gone for the experience – and North America has many of these Grand Hotels, some of which have been renovated or, as was the case when I was in Banff, in the process of renovation.

Now who was Vancouver, his name given to this sixth most liveable World city, and to the nearby Island where the Provincial capital, Victoria is located.

George Vancouver is associated with exploration of the Pacific Nor-West. He was born nearly thirty years after Cook and served as midshipman and junior officer on some of Cook’s voyages. Vancouver was later asked to chart that coast and also drive the Spanish potential conquistadors from the area. He was successful enough to earn the acclaim and hence much being named after him. Ironically the sister city of Portland across the Columbia River in Washington state is named after him, but he failed to detect either the Columbia or Frasier River, something I doubt the meticulous Cook would have missed. As a piece of trivia, there is a freshwater lake near Albany in Western Australia named for him. In 1791, Captain George Vancouver, on his way to America, came to the southern shore of Western Australia, named King George Sound ensuring that all the Australian continent remained British. Where he landed, he saw nothing he thought of any consequence, and after a short stay sailed eastward intending to hug the coastline, but was foiled by the wind shifts. He would not be the last sea salt to believe there was nothing here in Australia.

Cactus on Uluru?

As an Arrernte woman who watched the Labor party apologise for the policies which led to the stolen generations only to deny compensation, or who saw them continue the Northern Territory intervention under another name and demonise entire communities with their “rivers of grog” claims, my trust is gone. – Celeste Liddle in The Guardian

It is not often I change my mind in mid-blog to delay one of my blogs, but Monday this week provided a couple of blows to the campaign to achieve a “yes” vote. I would not say it was exactly cactus, but it certainly needs to be changed radically.

The first salvo came from George Brandis. Now George is one of those conservative Queensland lawyers, once perhaps a form of social liberal but who long since has blotted his copybook with the smudges of entitlement, such is his love of huge bookcases funded by the taxpayer and a comfortable residence in the middle of London, again at our expense. I was surprised to find myself mostly agreeing with his opinion piece in the SMH, setting out seven reasons that the referendum will fail. Apart from insulting the people telling them that they dumb red-necks if as individuals they do not vote yes, with the attendant “moral bullying”, the proponents of the “yes” vote as Brandis wrote: … need to remember it’s not about personalities … The public will see right through cute attempts to make this a popularity contest … They know it is a serious proposal for important constitutional change and expect it to be treated accordingly – not as a political Punch and Judy show.

Here I do question Brandis. Advocacy depends on personalities, but if you choose the wrong advocates then you will surely lose. As testimony to that, Megan Davis is wheeled out in Australian Story as one of the front line academics to prosecute the “Yes” case. Her mother is white; her father who has long since decamped, was an Aboriginal fettler. He is notably absent and it is clear that Megan grew up in a whitefella world, where her mother, a high school teacher, was her guiding spirit.

In her 2010 bio, Megan Davis spends time identifying her Aboriginal blood lines while admitting to South Sea Islander heritage. In the recognition of Aboriginality, it is ironic the heritage of the group descendent from the kanakas “press-ganged” predominantly from the then New Hebrides to work the Queensland sugar cane fields is largely ignored by the other indigenous groups. The biggest population live around Mackay and have their own identity including a flag.

But what is revealing is that despite her heritage, how little time she has spent as an Aboriginal woman. She has grown up as a white woman, who has used her Aboriginality as a means of developing her career, not as one who knows anything about the diversity which is both the strength and the curse of the Aboriginal race. In the Australian Story panegyric, her only link seems to be Uluru through the declaratory Statement, and the fiction that Uluru is the natural heart of the Nation. Why Uluru? Why not Mount Augustus or Mount Wudina or Carnarvon Gorge or the Mitchell Plateau?

After all, Uluru is not her Land. It is Anangu, but conveniently a tourist resort able to be isolated in beautiful photographic layouts. It is also where the Southern skies can be visualised with minimal light pollution.

In Australian Story, it was revealed that she since the age of 12 has walked around carrying a copy of The Australian Constitution. If she was not an Aboriginal person of importance, I would have thought how weird.

Then I read that early CV (sic) in her own write: We grew up mostly in Hervey Bay … I went to school at Star of the Sea, Hervey Bay and St Josephs Tobruk Memorial school in Beenleigh for primary school and then Trinity College, Beenleigh for secondary school. I studied a Bachelor of Arts and Law at the University of Queensland, where I majored in Australian History. For those three years, I lived on campus at Duchesne College, which was the women’s Catholic residential college in St Lucia. During my penultimate year of Law, I started research for the Principal Legal Officer at the Foundation for Aboriginal Islander Research Action (‘FAIRA’) in Brisbane. It was there that I started doing research into the international legal regime, looking specifically at the intellectual property rights of Indigenous peoples. Immediately after law school I was accepted into the United Nations Fellowship in Geneva. In fact, I sat my tax and evidence law exams in Geneva not long after I arrived.

As I watched her parading through Australian Story, this woman since 2010 the recipient of more academic kudos, it is clear that the strategy is to promote women with Aboriginal Heritage, women who have been loaded with academic gowning, part of an urban elite with a theoretical grasp of Aboriginal affairs. In the half an hour Australian Story journey with this strangely passive woman who loves an accusatory oratory platform, I thought why is she being given this platform. Why promote her? She does not seem to connect with the wider Aboriginal diaspora. As Brandis has noted, the whole debate has lost transparency.

Thus, Uluru which seems to be the only Indigenous handle that Davis plus her apparently tight relationship with the genuine Aboriginal activist, Pat Anderson, makes me wonder who is driving the “Yes” case. I wish the motives of those are understandable – or as Brandis has called it a need for “transparency”.

Mouse Whisper

Overheard outside the Mouse residence. Our mouse had one of his friends over for cheese and crackers.

Resident mouse: In English it is a bat, pure and simple, but for the Germanic and Nordic languages, the bat is translated as variations of “flying mouse”. In the Romantic languages, only the French choose to insult us further by calling a bat – “a bald mouse”. Really, even the Romanians, the natural home of the bat the Romanian word for bat is liliac which gave rise to that famous Dracula Song – “I’ll gather liliacs”.

Joking aside, it was the Romans who had the best word for “bat” – “vespertilio”, they having observed that bats come out in the evening, but we mice do not fly, I bet you have never heard of a saying – “like a mouse flying out of hell” or “having flying mice in the belfry”.

Visiting Mouse: Sorry, mate, I know you are very clever, a polymouse indeed! Yet, there is another word in English for bat. It Is uncommon, but it is there – flittermouse. You can put it into your Whisper, my flying mouse mate. But you can’t silence it.

Modest Expectations – Ernst not Sebastian

But if you want my quick take on it, it’s this: Whether Trump is wolfing down Big Macs on the Mar-a-Lago golf course or bargaining for bootlegged tanning lotion in prison, he will be the GOP nominee. Don’t give into magical thinking and never stop the fight to beat him at the ballot box. First, the trial itself. It’s happening in Miami. A hotbed of Trump voters, MAGA radicals, skells (tramps), boat-paraders, and people terrified of dead communists and imaginary communism. (By the way, I love Miami, I really do. But I’ve got to call this place how I see it.) Rick Wilson June 2023.

Mar-a-Lago – bought by Trump in 1985 at more than 62,000 square feet, with 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms, 12 fireplaces, three bomb shelters, and a 29-foot-long marble top dining table, the house is extravagant to say the least. It is the 22nd largest house in the US – the White House comes in 33rd place. – Not Alternative Fact

In response to Rick Wilson’s “By the way”, I thought I would write about my time in Miami at a time when Trump was still a two-bit grifter. Nor when Miami was the warlock’s crucible.

I have passed through Miami more than once – even taken a Concorde flight out of there to New York on my way to London. However, this occasion was the one time we had time to do some sightseeing. We had just come back from Cuba in an unmarked Delta airline plane – nevertheless a commercial fight. As the flight attendant said to us at the time, Delta flew to Havana every day. On arrival in Miami, having been duly warned that if we had any Cuban rum or cigars in our luggage, it would most likely be confiscated, we found that there was no-one from customs on the gate barring our way into Miami. In any event, we don’t smoke, and we had enough mojitos in Cuba to last a lifetime.

This time we had decided to go on to New York by train, stopping off in Savannah. In the meantime, we went for a stroll along 17^th Street downtown, the weather being perfect, to see some of Miami. We had lunch at one of those places where the food is barbecued rib, the drink is beer or bourbon, and the music is loud and country. More Texas than Miami, but Miami is cosmopolitan, a shelter against the winter for the aged, a playground for the rich and a refuge for the colourful.

As we walked down towards Miami Beach, we stopped by the Cadet Hotel emblazoned with Clark Gable memorabilia, remembering the time he was there as an instructor of the recent inductees in the air force. The year was 1942, and he was still mourning the loss of his wife, Carole Lombard, who had been killed the year before in a plane crash.

Gable went on to serve for most of WWII, seeing action in Europe. As we looked in on the reception area of the Hotel, there is no doubt that Gable had a charisma, which belied the fact that he had had all his teeth extracted and his leading ladies had to be inoculated against a cloud of halitosis. Still, I remember that film “It Happened One Night” which starred Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert and that it was the first of only three films which have won the five Oscars – best film, best director, best actor, best actress, best screenplay.

Clark Gable has always had a place in the lexicon of my memories because I saw the film “Soldier of Fortune” when I was in Hong Kong in 1956, the film itself being an adventure story of Gable playing the title role opposite Susan Hayward in a story where Gable rescues her screen husband, Gene Barry from the clutches of the Chinese Communists. I most remember the scene at the top of the Peak in Hong Kong where Gable is expressing ruggedly his love for Hayward. Imagine my chagrin to find out that Hayward remained in Hollywood the whole time the picture was filmed, and Gable was romanticising a Hayward double – her screen sosia.

Looking at the photograph of Gable, his distinctive expression walks the line between sagacity and salacity, but I was not the first to gaze. Judy Garland sang to his photograph in Broadway Melody – “You made me Love You”. Well, not that I sang, I might add; and my wife has never liked him. This is a slightly troublesome matter since Judy was only 15 when she recorded the song. But the teenage crush has history, and I would have preferred Grace Kelly, the first choice for the “Soldier of Fortune” heroine, but which she declined. Then I had only just turned 17 and Grace Kelly was 25 years old.

But let’s continue walking.

We stopped off on the lawns outside the Frank Gehry designed New World Centre where we listened to the New World Symphony rehearsing and the music being piped outside to those of us who stopped to listen. We did not expect to be listening to a piece of old world music in a beach resort not famed for its cultural attainment.

Well, back to reality. By that I mean Miami Beach – a wide strip of sand lined by fenced-off villas where the rich, the famous, the colourful and the pyrites reside. There is something foreboding about high walls, with palm trees and the white stuccoed storied homes poking their heads above the parapets. In the distance is the sea, a pale blue ribbon cast against an equally azure sky, with a wisp of cloud interrupting the blue.

Beguiling. Well, yes, but really depends on when one visits.

Here in Miami the 1926 Great Hurricane left its calling card, precipitating the end of the Florida land boom and the start of The Great Depression three years early. Miami was wiped out and it is salutary to think that a comparable hurricane today would leave little change out of US$250 billion. Despite Miami being recognised as one of the most vulnerable cities in the United States to experience hurricanes, the only other one which has been classified as severe and centred on Miami was Cyclone King in October 1950, which caused severe damage but not comparable with that of 1926.

In recognition, the University of Miami has adopted Hurricanes as its nickname for all its sporting teams, but the touch I like the most is that the mascot is an ibis named Sebastian, since the ibis is the first bird to leave when a hurricane is imminent and the first to return after the hurricane has passed.

I wonder what the status of the ibis population is at Mar-a-Lago these days.

Antwerp

I have been to Antwerp twice, once in the early seventies when we were travelling through Europe and the United States, the first time, my then wife had been back to Europe from which she had come – from a British displaced persons camp in Carinthian Austria. Arriving in Australia she was unable to speak English but, as I found fluent in Slovenian and German with an Austrian accent. A medical graduate and PhD in pharmacology, she had her research papers accepted for several conference presentations, whereas I scored zero. No matter; it just meant I could track along without having to give a paper to a half empty theatre or back room. I remember that we went to Antwerp that trip, and it was somewhat comical walking through the Munich airport, past all the big planes, down the stairs, across the tarmac to the DC-3 – our air chariot dwarfed on all sides by its younger siblings.

My strange memory of that visit was having walked around a sculpture garden with all the shapes and forms representative of the interpretative impenetrability of some of this modern sculpture, I escaped from the park by climbing through a fence onto a major thoroughfare. Having been sensitised to the bizarreness of the display, the utilitarian throughway structures were replaced by my surreal vision of them. The street with all its tubular forms, interlacing overhead wires, lights changing like giant eyes – all the street architecture which we normally ignore or accept had, to me, become the workshop of the absurd. I hasten to add I don’t do drugs, nor had I been drinking.

I had spent several hours accustoming myself to these sculptural forms, and when I emerged onto the streets, it seemed to me just an extension of what I had been looking at. It was a sensation that I’ve never had since. I do not have the imagination to concoct the vision of the great architects, but I understand the meaning of “surreal”. After all, we may be induced to say something is “surreal” when it is just something that one has never experienced; whereas surreal is a departure in a different sensory experience. I remember looking at the overhead tram wires and the stanchions and thought what if these had been placed in the garden, dimensions changed or left as stark forms amid the wooded lawns where the rail lines would lead nowhere – a phantom silvery transport system hidden under a cascade of blue leaves. Then I shook my head and followed the tram line back to our hotel to find out how my wife had gone with her presentation.

The second time, my second wife and I ended up in Antwerp, because we were travelling to Cambridge. Qatar Airways had a “special return flight” from Sydney to Brussels. Having a few days to spare, we went to Antwerp by train. We stayed across the railway square in the Blu Astrid Hotel. What made this foray worthwhile was that the Antwerp Zoo was close to the railway station. The Antwerp Zoo has probably the largest number of okapi in captivity as part of a breeding program. The okapi is the only known relative of the giraffe and its natural habitat is the Congo jungle. Given that the Congo was colonised by the Belgians, it is not surprising that the first okapis were brought to Belgium. There were five or six okapis in what I thought was a generous enclosure. The total area of the Zoo is 10 hectares. However, zoos will always be imperfect, as animals are for all intents incarcerated so that we humans can stare at them.

The okapi, much smaller than its relative giraffe, was first discovered in 1901. It has a striking appearance, being almost burgundy in colour with striped legs. It’s also worthy of study, because its long term future may depend on its ability to breed in captivity. The female okapi is said to be choosey in her choice of mate, and there is not much choice in a zoo.

My wife does not much like zoos and having watched the okapi pacing around in a stressed manner, that was enough for her. She had spent a decade photographing wildlife in Africa, and hardly needed to visit an urban zoo. Okapi were an exception; she was not likely to see one in the wild unless she wandered through the Ituri Rain Forest in the Congo.

However, she does like flamingos, which we had seen in the wild, both in the south of France and in the salt pans of the Atacama Desert in Chile. Caribbean flamingos near the entrance of the zoo, attracted attention because of the noise and their vivid vermillion in colour – they seemed chatty enough.

Of other places in Antwerp, The Plantin-Moretus is a unique museum that celebrates the history of European printing through the 16^th century workshop and home of the city’s most celebrated printer, Christophe Plantin, which he bequeathed to his son-in-law, Jan Moretus. They printed books and maps – the cartography section being very impressive. There is a copy of the Gutenberg Bible lodged here, together with a collection of material tracing the evolution of printing up to the 19^th century when innovations were introduced as a by-product of the Industrial Revolution which rendered the printing work obsolete. Looking at ancient printing presses and some of their products is to marvel at how such a collection has survived in area where bombardment, siege, and troop movements would all seem to mitigate against the existence of such an exquisite place.

I suppose we could have sought out the Diamond district where it has been near the main square since the Middle Ages. Antwerp, through its Jewish population, developed some innovative ways in cutting and polishing of all grades of diamonds. It survived two World Wars. In WWI the Germans captured Antwerp early and held the city for the duration. While there was some hesitation in deporting Jews in WWII to preserve the expertise in diamond cutting, eventually a substantial number of the Jewish population were killed in the various concentration camps, and thus compromising Antwerp’s future.

The Sinjoren, as those who live in Antwerp are nicknamed, are certainly resilient.

I found it amazing that Antwerp was able to hold the Olympic Games less than two years after the Armistice, but given the survival instincts of the population, why should anybody be surprised. Australia was represented at the Games. The flagbearer, George Parker, born in Leichhardt, died in Five Dock, seems to have spent his life walking. At the Antwerp games, he finished second in the 3,000 m walk, beaten by an Italian. The only other Australian medals were awarded in swimming – a silver and a bronze.

And my lasting impression? Workers eating this green food with chips and mayonnaise. This is palint ‘n groen – eels served with a green sauce made with fresh river herbs and wild leaf vegetables, chervil, sorrel, spinach, watercress and wild garlic leaves. Tasted it – not too bad.

Pride comes before a Fall saith Solomon

When I was undertaking the National Rural Stocktake in 1999, I found it frustrating to arrive at a desert destination to find no-one there. I had to accept that the Aboriginal people spend a substantial amount of their time on “Sorry Business”, which took them away and thus they would be unavailable because one of their number had died. Travelling around Aboriginal communities, I often found a great amount of argument, dispute, aggression – and when I was confronted with stories about harassment and violence, I had to make a decision. Namely, I was not there to deal with the problems of the individual Aboriginal person, unfortunate as that may have been. That deserved a review of its own, and although I made incidental comments, my prime aim was to prosecute the case for developing clinical and public health education facilities in the bush, which occurred with funding allocated in the 2000 Federal Budget.

I was brought up in a whitefella world where Aboriginal people were labelled as “stone age” and hence patronised as if they should be kept in an ethnological zoo. It is not surprising therefore that the bulk of whitefellas just did not know how to communicate with Aboriginal people. At the outset I had not appreciated that being taciturn with whitefellas belied a highly complex system of communication, where verbal was only one of the means. Being able to communicate, whitefella to blackfella is a privilege, as I found out.

As background, I had become aware of the level of discrimination from a young age. It had been coated by kind paternalism. For example, when I was a child in the time of the “picaninny”, I received the Church Missionary Society news from the Roper River Mission in then far off Arnhem Land. The growth of missions, both secular and religious only served to emphasise the separation of the Aboriginals from their Land, which did not become recognised until Aboriginal artistic skill with all its complexity became recognised by whitefellas. When I had gone to Alice Springs in 1951, I came back with a large shield, which languished in the storeroom, because every time I picked it up, my hands were covered with red ochre. Over the years as I collected more Aboriginal artifacts, I began to celebrate the diversity, but not without making errors in walking the line of what was taboo and what not.

Afro-American emancipation grew out the 1960s’ cry for emancipation led by Martin Luther King and Malcom X and then the black Panthers, injecting an edgy defiance challenging the comfortable world of middle-class America. At the same time, until he was assassinated, King tried to persuade. His was an evolutionary approach, to which he harnessed public opinion for recognition.

Aboriginal advocacy grew alongside. Recognition of Aboriginal identity grew, dispatching the equivalent of “Uncle Tom” as contempt of the so-called the Aboriginal “coconut” – brown on the outside, white on the inside. Aggression has been the watchword, mixed with a litany of Aboriginal grievances such as the stolen generation and life expectancy being continually drilled into us whitefellas, some of whom have succumbed to guilt, preferring to give in; other whitefellas in power have just employed passive resistance. Rather than mollifying the aggressors, the level of J’accuse by the voluble few has increased with bombastic Noel Pearson as one of the leading Accusers.

From Whitlam onwards, governments sought to increase funding and opportunities for Aboriginal people, despite the opposition of some of the parliamentarians. As I have said, symbolism and metaphor are simple; real action is not. I was around at the time of the first aboriginal medical graduates. I saw many of the Aboriginal medical services (AMS) which arose from the Congress model in Alice Springs, and I looked for change. Many of the AMS were clearly dysfunctional, mainly because there was no continuity in the treatment objectives. Congress has been operating since 1975 and it has had a substantial amount of funding. It has had its vociferous defenders, given it has been the oldest Aboriginal Health Service. However, stripping away the “blah-blah” apologia, what has it actually accomplished?

It is a serious question when there is this push for an ephemeral Voice, as though there is a pot of gold at the end of the Indigenous Larynx. I see the ability of the Aboriginal people to contribute and shape our destiny, but I’m afraid I’ll not accept the pompous sullen uninformed Voice of a few Aboriginal people. Some people who should know better are attempting to gain cheap political acclaim, without thinking through what outcome is expected and what it means for the many Aboriginal people who won’t be part of the Voice. The Voice does not have a powerful Champion who can coherently unite an increasingly divided nation. Linda Burney is not that champion; unfortunately, she lacks the intellectual firepower, and those who spring to her defence further weaken her, only serving to exaggerate her deficiencies.

I would prefer Narelda Jacobs and Pat Anderson; but the male Aboriginal able to communicate with those tending to Vote “No” – the critical cohort I believe – should be a Rugby player in Queensland and an Australian Rules player in the West. But perhaps if the women’s football team is triumphant, Sam Kerr will trump every male.

When I undertook the Rural Stocktake, I tried to identify examples of what worked in relation to Aboriginal health, but such success could never be long term because of the harsh reality of the eventual failure to provide a plan for succession. It is not unexpected because so much of Aboriginal success depends on charismatic leadership, which does not necessarily translate to a long term success and is eventually swept under the sands of failure.

I well remember the activities of Geoff Clark and the fate of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, which he chaired. This fiasco has not come into the conversation about the Voice, even though Geoff Clark was never short of a word. In the end at a time in Australia when funding is short, homelessness is on the rise and where poverty has increased, to see affluent, mostly university-affiliated sections of the Aboriginal community continually meeting in a non-wintry part of the country and complaining about their lot, begins to grate. The Mayor of Broken Hill may not be the most subtle of individuals but in explaining why the Council would not in future pay for “welcome to country” or smoking ceremonies by Aboriginal elders made it clear when questioned responded: “Why should he pay for welcoming people to his Land.”

Grievances are met with counter grievance. As someone said, looking at the Aboriginal flag and the Australian flag flying alongside each other on the Harbour Bridge, why? The same person sees the Aboriginal flag as a sign of division and the Australian flag as an embarrassing relic – both to be replaced by a single flag for everyone in the country. Personally, I believe the Aboriginal flag should be the Australian flag rather than the colonial relic. But to me whose ancestors have occupied the country as part of the Celtic diaspora, the Eureka flag flown first by the Ballarat miners during their 1854 insurrection also epitomises that Australia is my Land – and let nobody forget that. I too have a Voice. That is precious privilege of Democracy.

Brisbane – The Novel

Having won the Solzhenitsyn Prize, the Big Book prize, and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award, as well as having been short-listed for the National Bestseller Prize and the Russian Booker Prize, Eugene Vodolazkin has emerged in the eyes of many as the most important living Russian writer.

I was thumbing through a recent issue of the NYRB and came across a review by the above author. The book was entitled Brisbane. Given that Brisbane and Russian literature are not ready companions, I read the review. On reading this, it seemed to be just an extension of my perspective of Russian literature, telling the Russian story where Death is an ever-present metronome of the various degrees of misery and cruelty which pockmark the whole literary Russian Treasury of the mysteries of life. These mysteries have always been palpable in the Russian Orthodox liturgy, and in its extraordinary church music, where it soars from the depths to the heights. Terra ad caelium.

Why is this novel called Brisbane? It is about Gleb Vanovsky, a celebrated Russian guitarist who, at the age of fifty, is diagnosed with Parkinsonism which not only inhibits his ability to play the guitar but also ultimately will kill him. He has a biographer named Sergei Nesterov who, offering to write his biography, sets about establishing this dual perception of Vanovsky’s early life from each of Vanovsky’s and Nesterov’s perceptions. The second part of the novel details what has happened since his diagnosis. It seems from reading that it is a novel about various interpretations of the meaning of life.

And what of the Brisbane allusion? Apparently Vanoksky’s mother was enamoured by the image of Brisbane as a subtropical Utopia and had an Australian male correspondent, who said she should come. Unfortunately, she was killed on the way to the airport by some thugs. So Russian!

Ah, the Russian tome called Brisbane. The author was born in Kyiv but has spent most of his life in Russia.

Premier Palaszczuk with her Polish heritage should be indeed interested in such a view of Brisbane as Utopia. But watch out going to a Russian airport.

Mouse Whisper

My mäusemaister has this obsession whence Melania Trump has gone. She seems to have vanished to Europe – no longer the lady hand in hand with the Trump. The prominent Irish author Fintan O’Toole, in a recent response to criticism of an article of his appearing in NYRB, has suggested that Cohen, the lawyer and once Trump confidant but who has now decamped from his side to be a pigeon with a stool, is one reason for the disappearance. He was told by Trump to pay Stormy Daniels and tell Melania that the payment was made to avert Daniels’ “fake story” about Trump himself.

As Trump was reported to have said, paying Daniels off was far cheaper than a divorce settlement, as Trump wanted his wife to be mollified. O’Toole opens up another front on the besieged Trump – the circus of a potential divorce. He is probably only saved by Melania not wanting her laundry aired, well at least not before it is appropriately washed.

Modest Expectations – Oh Tannenbaum! Wow!

Pablo Picasso died in 1973. Françoise Gilot was probably the most well known of his wives and lovers. She was 40 years younger than Picasso. She has just died. In her obituary, which variously appeared in the New York Times and Boston Globe, it was noted she was a very good painter in her own right. Given the excoriating reviews of the Hannah Gadsby curated Pablo-matic, currently at the Brooklyn Museum, there seems to be an increasing concentration on Picasso the Misogynist rather than Picasso the Painter. Picasso was famously quoted as saying that there were two kinds of women: goddesses or doormats. He was appalling to women – to those with whom he slept, or those with whom he tried to sleep. Given the times, Gadsby has her following, even if the art critics seem to be universally panning the exhibition which runs until October.

My view? When Gadsby does something comparable to the painting of Guernica, then I may take her seriously.

Meanwhile, an excerpt from the obituary of Françoise Gilot:

Françoise Gilot, an accomplished painter whose art was eclipsed by her long and stormy romantic relationship with a much older Pablo Picasso, and who alone among his many mistresses walked out on him, died Tuesday at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 101.

“You imagine people will be interested in you?” Ms. Gilot quoted a surprised Picasso as saying after she told him that she was leaving him. “They won’t ever, really, just for yourself. Even if you think people like you, it will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life touched mine so intimately.”

But unlike his two wives and other mistresses, Ms. Gilot rebuilt her life after she ended the relationship, in 1953, almost a decade after it had begun despite an age difference of 40 years. She continued painting and exhibiting her work and wrote books.

In 1970, she married Jonas Salk, the American medical researcher who developed the first safe polio vaccine. Still, it was for her romance with Picasso that the public knew her best, particularly after her memoir, “Life with Picasso,” written with Carlton Lake, was published in 1964. It became an international bestseller and so infuriated Picasso that he broke off all contact with Ms. Gilot and their two children, Claude and Paloma Picasso.

Ms. Gilot’s frank and often sympathetic account of their relationship — she dedicated the book “to Pablo” — provided much of the material for the 1996 Merchant-Ivory movie, “Surviving Picasso,” in which she was played by Natascha McElhone, with Anthony Hopkins as Picasso.

If Ms. Gilot’s book sold well, so has her art. With her work in more than a dozen museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, her paintings fetched increasingly higher prices well into her later years.

Gilot showed herself to be an artist who did not need to live within the penumbra of Picasso. Her painting of her daughter, Paloma (Paloma à la Guitare) fetched US$1.3M in 2021.

How does that affect one’s appreciation of each of their extraordinary artistic talent? Or “should”? Picasso’s portrait of Françoise Gilot was anticipated to reach US$12.8m.

Caravaggio was a murderer. His paintings hang in cathedrals.

Closer to home, I have a couple of Dennis Nona works.

Do we need to grade the size of the stone we throw at the past – and the present?

Guernica

When I researched the bombing, I read stories of a number of Guernica victims who appeared at hospitals with strange symptoms: Their hands were mutilated. The injuries weren’t from bombing of burning, but from their insistence on digging barehanded through jagged rubble — until the flesh tore from their bones — in the single-minded attempt to save their loved ones. Dave Boling

Dave Boling is an American sports journalist, not a person noted for historical novels. His motivation for writing the book was rooted in his marriage to a woman of Basque heritage, her grandparents having come from Biscay, (the Basque province now known in official documents as Bizkaia) to herd sheep in the mountains of Wyoming, Nevada, Idaho and California. He has said that his in-laws introduced him to the pleasures of spicy Basque food and red wine and tried to teach him their folk dances. They also indoctrinated him about their strong familial allegiances and their long history of oppression. It is hard to not to have sympathy for the Basques but that has been tempered by the assassination and bombings perpetuated by ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) between 1959 and 2018. Its goal was gaining independence for the Spanish Basques by any means.

The actual destruction of the Basque village of Guernica is the central point of a novel which essentially follows the fortunes of a Basque family which settled in Guernica. I agree with the review in the Independent:

The intended heartiness of the rustic idyll generates a sense of ominous calm. It explodes halfway through this saga, in the Luftwaffe’s experiment, at Franco’s invitation, of carpet-bombing the town and strafing survivors with machine guns. Children fused together, mothers crushed under rubble, old men incinerated – the horror is amplified by the hideous cynicism of attacking a civilian population.

Still, I found it hard to read, probably because I thought that it would concentrate on the destruction of Guernica, but this was a novel of inevitability, thus replacing any sense of premonition of what is to befall the family.

I have been to Bilbao, the capital of the Biscay province, several times and always visited that spectacular Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim Museum. The 3.4 metre floral “Westie”, called Puppy, was installed in 1997 and stands as sentinel to the building. I had thought Guernica would end up here, but I have seen it in three locations. During the Franco period, it was in New York. I remember seeing this painting there for the first time. However, I am confused because if you had asked me where I saw it in New York, I would have sworn it was the Guggenheim Museum, but in fact it was in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Later I saw the painting again in the Prado and then in its final placement in the Sofia Reina, where it lives in solitary splendour.

Picasso’s epic painting, where his intertwined black and white images define the chaotic cruelty of war, is one of the few paintings that I can sit and look at it for more than any other image, with the exception perhaps of the whole mosaic tableau which lines the walls of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. There is so much to see in Picasso’s Guernica, which embraces premeditated carnage, the futility of which is the natural corollary of cruelty. Some may say that the Nazis, the Falangists, the Italian Fascists were just a clinical experiment in war, but the end product was so appalling in its results – a danse chaotique. Guernica died; but the Basques live on.

Barcelona

Rambla comes from the Arabic word ramla or رمل which means sand and refers to the sandy deposit which would gather in the bed of the stream where the street now exists.

Barcelona, located in Catalonia, is one of the edgiest cities in the world that I have visited, both well before the 1992 Olympic Games and after. Catalonia always wants to free itself from Castilian Spain, its citizens having a separate language and flag. It was in this city where Picasso found his artistic limbs. He had been born in Malaga and his family moved to Barcelona in 1895. In Barcelona, Picasso moved among a circle of Catalan artists and writers who met at the café Els Quatre Gats (“The Four Cats,”) styled after the Chat Noir [“Black Cat”] in Paris. Picasso had his first Barcelona exhibition of more than 50 portraits here in February 1900.

It was strange to think that the building of La Sagrada Familia had already been in construction for 17 years at that time.

When I first went to Barcelona in the late 1980’s, preparation for the Olympic Games was well underway. By contrast there seemed to be no sign of activity on the Sagrada site. Rubble was strewn around the base of the unfinished cathedral and high chain wire fence prevented access. Yet I marvelled both at the extent of this unfinished building and how much there was still to do, given it had been over a century since work started. I had seen the plan with that giant spire, which I understood at the time they did not know how to build. Still, this first visit to Barcelona was the first of several during which time the whole process accelerated. At the same time Gaudi became increasingly well known and La Sagrada Familia became a magnet for tourists. Since then, there have emerged entry fees and the camera and iPhone toting queues.

I’ve not been there for years but the last time I was there, the interiors were almost complete, and it was estimated that La Sagrada would be finished in 2028, although there were still a number of spires to be constructed. The reds, blues, yellows and greens of the glass defined the mood of the interior and the early morning was a good time to feel the clarity of the filtered morning sun rays, a burst of golden colour, in the vast nave and chancel.

I am not much of a fan of the Gaudi Park Güell, commissioned by a wealthy textile manufacturer, which demonstrates many of Gaudi’s signature architectural devices, including catenary arches and tessellated finishes. Gaudi’s land of strange shapes and figurines jar, despite the fact that it is very cleverly constructed on the side of a hill, where the terraced pathways invite you to walk and look.

Nevertheless, there is one special Gaudi building – the Casa Batiló – in the centre of Barcelona. To me, like the best of Gaudi, it seems to have been lifted from another world and plonked into a conventional streetscape, such that the other buildings fade, and all you see is the Gaudi building. All the shapes have fancy architectural names, but from the outside, the Casa Batiló is a mottled tapestry with a variety of openings indicating a door or window. Inside, the rooms need to accommodate those adventurous shapes, and the blue theme is evident in the Noble room. Gaudi is confronting and to me, a building like the cathedral or indeed Casa Batiló, is to be fascinated by the mind that could design such an edifice. I wonder whether it may have provided some inspiration for Picasso. It is extremely problematical whether Gaudi ever met Picasso. They moved in very different circles.

I have been attracted to Barcelona because of George Orwell’s book written about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. This is one of the most evocative pieces about a War when democracy died along with the Republic. Catalonia was not only Republican but where the black flag of the Anarchists also flew aloft. Like Guernica, Barcelona was bombed in 1936 by the Italians, with considerable loss of life. I found it ironic that the Barcelona Olympic Games, some 60 years later, was stage managed by Juan Antonio Samaranch who, although a Catalan, was an avowed Fascist functionary during the Franco regime, as well as being a supernumerary in Opus Dei.

The first time I stayed in Barcelona was in an old hotel on Las Ramblas, the central thoroughfare of Barcelona where the city action takes place. I had been warned that I had to watch out for pickpockets. My first encounter of Las Ramblas, as I turned the corner, was of a young man running straight at me being pursued by a couple of policemen. He swerved away and then disappeared up an alleyway being closely pursued.

Then there was a young woman walking by, talking intently into her mobile phone, except that the mobile phone would not be invented for another 20 years. However, her hand imitated the future so well, even contributing to the mime with one finger acting as the antenna.

The old wharf area still existed beyond the statue of Christopher Columbus and there was a clutter of unpretentious places to eat – hardly classifiable as restaurants. Here I was introduced to suquet de peix. This is a Catalan fish stew with fish – probably monkfish – squid, prawns and mussels. Since I don’t much like monkfish, I have never placed it on my memorable fish list. All this disappeared with the Olympic Games, with the creation of a marina and modern waterside restaurants connected by a footbridge to Las Ramblas and where, at night, there was now a spectacular run of fish restaurants.

Las Ramblas, with its market and its liveliness, has a strong connection to Miro. There is a museum dedicated to Miro, but the most striking link to him is the mosaic on Las Ramblas. You really only get a good view of it when there are few people around, and we used to go down the thoroughfare in the early morning and stop for a cup of coffee and a view of Miro on the way back.

If there was anything of importance happening in Barcelona, well wait long enough on Las Ramblas and something memorable will happen. We happened to be in Barcelona on one sunny day in 2009, when a double decker bus with an open deck rolled by, crammed with exultant footballers covered in the blue and garnet colours of the Barcelona Football Club. I remember recognising a young Lionel Messi, and the street crowd going wild. I had never been in person to witness a latter-day Triumph.

Since our last visit the Catalan push for independence has been a political thorn for Madrid, deeply embedded despite extravagant attempts to remove it. Las Ramblas has seen plenty of action by a protesting population in these last years.

As for Picasso, there is a museum where some of his vast output of paintings and drawings hang. In addition, as with any person who spent significant time in the place where ideas and skills were formed, there is a trail that one can follow. I have done such a trail in Paris, following the footsteps of Hemingway, but not here in Barcelona (until I started writing this blog my central interest in Picasso was Guernica). Let this interest rest with something Picasso said about Barcelona in 1936. “Barcelona the beautiful and wise, where I left so many things hanging on the altar of happiness…”, but not Guernica!

Not Pablo

I hesitated to add this scatological piece, but it does have a certain relevance to all that has gone before in this thematic blog. Boys’ schools have always been places where teachers, especially those who have been part of the furniture for many years, earn nicknames. One of the most well-known was the teacher who always seem to cock his head, perhaps he had a wry neck. Boys never worried in the past about such minor matters as disability. He was known as Isaiah, because “one eye was higher than the other”.

Dogger Banks, now surrounded by wind farms

We had a teacher called Grenness, and naturally earned the epithet of “mossy”. Then there were names that fitted together, such as Banks called “dogger” or Giles called “spudda”, which may now seem to be somewhat arcane. Then there were names based on appearance – monkey, bullfrog, mousey, bulldog contracted to bully; predilection – pansy; idiosyncratic – toss, johnny, sponge, shovel; or just behavioural – witness the English teacher with the moniker “Picasso”. Enough said.

I, Consultant

Just after I started as a medical administrator at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in 1971, I was introduced to Peter Davenport, a former RN lieutenant commander, who had become a consultant for PA Management. This firm had been employed to improve the efficiency of the way the hospital should function. PA Management had attracted attention by the way it had reformed the Sydney Hospital, at a time when there were questions being raised about the future of that hospital, given there was a surfeit of inner city hospitals. The oldest, the Sydney Hospital, was located close to Parliament House, but otherwise it had a fading catchment area.

I came to the Hospital just after Davenport had started this consultancy, using participative management techniques. Unlike the consultants who come in and charge an exorbitant fee to observe, Davenport actually immersed himself in the job. The first area that he addressed was the operating theatre complex. The key to participative management is to get the leaders, at that time inevitably the medical specialists, and induce them to surrender some of their individuality to work in a participative model, rather than just issuing orders. It was a change, and I came into this world where there was emphasis on doing better.

Participative management, to work, needs to have the support of the most influential – in this case Sir Benjamin Rank and Dr Jock Frew, a formidable duo, who had served during World War II and knew all about hierarchal management. This was much loved by all uniform services, and that included the medical staff of teaching hospitals. The then Medical Superintendent, John Yeatman, assigned me to work with the consultant. Davenport and I were then in our early 30s and hit it off very early. The upshot was that we were perceived as achieving the objectives, which were agreed across the various departments, in addition to the operating theatres.

Therefore, I had a positive view of consultants, and a decade later when I had completed five years as Deputy Secretary-General of the Australian Medical Association (AMA), I set up a consultancy firm, Diagnosis, with a transport economist I had known for years, Dr Robert Wilson. He was also a particularly good cost accountant as well as having one of the most rounded and perspicacious brains I’ve ever encountered. When I was with the AMA we had worked together on its submission to a Federally-funded review of the health care system in 1980.

Initially it was hard going attracting work, especially as I was debarred from getting any work from my previous employer. It took some time for us to be recognised as the form of consultancy whereby we were flogging our knowledge and skills in navigating a system, where I have always said that, to be truly useful, one must be fluent in the language of health. Beginning in the late 80s public servants, already pensioned off well remunerated, were recruited by the big accounting firms ignorant in health but able to manipulate numbers. These public servants often had an incomplete knowledge of health but one that was serviceable for about two years. The sophistication of the recruitment process was ramped up, together with the fees charged to government. As my ancestor would say, tell me pray where any of these consultancies yielded anything of value when addressing the structure of the health system, whereas I can point to areas where Diagnosis did influence the outcomes in a positive manner.

Elton Mayo at the Harvard Business School

On occasions I did use the skills engendered working with Peter Davenport and elements of neurolinguistics I’d gleaned without any formal training. I remembered one of the famous conclusions of the Australian sociologist, Elton Mayo, who made his mark in the 1920s with his work in the Hawthorne Chicago plant of the Western Electric Company. He noted that output of work is a function of work satisfaction, “which turns upon the informal pattern of the work group”.

However, it seems that today being a consultant with the highest remuneration package relies on who you know rather than what you may provide for change and, laughably, the cost efficiency of the project. The basic work is done by the graduate serfs, who know how to write basic English and regurgitate the ruminants which are increasingly available on artificial intelligence without having any real effect on the outcome. The ultimate greater sin is to recommend at great cost what has not worked in the past.

Meanwhile, the consultancy firms pillage the gravy train as it proceeds along with its impedimenta of ex-politicians and ex-public servants, who have spun through the revolving door into this Wonderland where the gravy is golden.

Q.E.D. as Euclid would say.

Mouse Whisper

For me to quote a Cat is Something!

Larry the Cat, Guardian and Chief Mouser (ugh), No 10 Downing Street:

“I’m pleased that Boris Johnson’s resignation will give him time to see more of his children, possibly even all of them.”

Modest Expectations – Oxen Rest

I thought I would relate a story from India when we were about to board the train from New Delhi to Himachal Pradesh. It was a cold winter’s night, and my wife pointed out a puppy shivering on the platform. It had been a difficult night for her, because we had been assigned what was called “first class” but in fact the compartment involved palliasses and drunken fellow travellers. My wife in all innocence had boarded the train, and suddenly found that this was far removed from our interpretation of “first class”. She was lucky to escape, and by a mixture of aggression and cajolery, I was able to change our tickets to sleeper class. This was the actual first class, and one of the advantages was that this carriage had a carriage attendant. Because of the need for the change in our ticketing, we were among the last to board the train.

My wife mentioned to the carriage attendant that there had been a “poor little dog freezing on the platform” (it was, after all, midwinter and 3.00 am), and I had gone into the normal over-reaction of a doctor, “don’t touch the dog, rabies … blah, blah, blah”. Oblivious to my warning, she pointed it out to the carriage attendant. We then went to our compartment. The train was pulling out from the station, and my wife scanned the platform. The puppy was not there; she hoped it had scampered off to find a warmer place.

The journey was well underway when the carriage attendant appeared and beckoned us to come to his den at the end of the carriage. There, nestling on a blanket in a box, was the little dog. The carriage attendant had heeded my wife’s implicit wish and rescued the little dog.

The “Kalka Mail” from Howrah to Kalka, via Delhi

But that was not all, some days later, when we were returning from Himachal Pradesh, we boarded the train for New Delhi. Same carriage. Same smiling carriage attendant. Same little dog, still in his comfortable box. He was one of the most well travelled dogs – having been to Kolkata and back. He still seemed very happy. He did not have rabies. On reflection, I was the one who had been frothing at the mouth. My wife had authored an example of the goodness of some our fellow humans. It is a nice story to start off this blog.

Blind in One Eye, Horatio. You are Kidding Me!

“China is the largest trade partner of a long and growing list of countries. Very few have the wealth and natural resources that protected Australia, the “lucky” country. Even so, many are studying the lessons of Australia’s escape from China’s grip”. The Economist 27 May

It may be strange heading for this observation, which takes its inspiration from Donald Horne’s inspired observation about Australia as “the lucky country”. This succinct note at the end of an article entitled “Lucky for Some” conceals a resource rich Australia, which is rotting under a mixture of hedonism, hypocrisy, and just plain greed.

This long, drawn-out, high risk defamation case brought by Roberts-Smith strikes at the cabal which has been allowed to get away with massive expenditure on a War Memorial. Against this the Brereton Report has found evidence of 39 murders of civilians and prisoners by (or at the instruction of) members of the Australian special forces. The full Report findings have yet to be to be released.

Coupled with unnecessarily expensive alteration to an already ugly building, the Canberra War Memorial should instead be modest in keeping with remembering the dead but not glorifying war – and certainly not turning it into a defence force theme park funded by us mug taxpayers. Given the extravagant eulogising of Roberts-Smith in the War Memorial display, the protected defence force officer species has now given the Parliament a headache.

Anybody lost in war games is an unnecessary life lost. Australia, like most countries, rationalises loss of life and the attendant destruction in a quasi-religious model where remembrance and grief are locked together with a sprinkle of selflessness, heroism and a fizz of “mateship”. It is a curious brew which has also underpinned this relentless pursuit of the original Olympic ideal in warpaint – higher, faster, stronger – essentially an expression of the male hormone overlay of civilisation; without the recently added Olympic ideal of “together”, a concession to the need to contain an aggressive interpretation of the three exhortations.

The Chair of the Council of the War Memorial is Kim Beasley. I generally agree with Paul Keating’s assessment of people, but I have always wondered why he had a high regard for the current Chair, while others considered him as a militaristic boofhead nicknamed “Bomber Beazley” when he was Minister of Defence.

The problem is that the ill-considered action of the ageing Kerry Stokes in bankrolling Roberts-Smith’s defamation action has exposed the underbelly of warfare. Over the years, politicians on both sides of politics become enthralled with the toys of war, egged on by senior officers who have learned the art of “obsequious control” over their political masters, whatever their persuasion. Greeting visiting overseas dignitaries with rows of soldiers or archaically-dressed soldiers on horses; gun carriages for the dead monarch – what is it all about? A population being groomed for war?

It is interesting how many of the senior officers have done a stint in the United States, where inevitably they would have been flattered, if not groomed into the world of expensive weapons labelled “born in the USA”.

I remember as a young boy when I was present at some of the family afternoon “soirees”, being brought along by my father as an appendage. Here were the blokes who had been to the war and may have been wrestling with their demons – and now were drinking too much Scotch and regaling one another with wartime anecdotes. They would mention unpopular officers allegedly where the troops shot them in the back when out on the patrol; but they generally reserved their disdain for coloured people in all their derogatory verbiage. I remember one anecdote which was of no consequence except it happened while this particular bloke was serving on New Ireland and could not contain his hilarity when he told the gathering about this native who happened to be sitting under a coconut tree when a coconut had fallen on his head, splitting it open. He could not stop laughing, until the next dark anecdote.

I was socialised with a diet of Boy’s Own heroics. Yet as a small boy I witnessed that many who served and witnessed war at close quarters never talked about it. I had never experienced the horrors of a war where the civilian population was the target, where the most vulnerable were targeted – genocide was a term yet to be firmly established in the vocabulary. I then had never heard of Guernica, where Germany and her allies wiped out the civilian population, a technique they were busily perfecting in preparation for World subjugation, that in fact had been first trialled in German South-West Africa (now Namibia) between 1904 and 1908. We were socialised in believing that war was a test of manhood, almost a jolly affair offering the then rare opportunity for an overseas trip and where atrocities are airbrushed away.

I have lived with a succession of wars, some having more or less effect on my way of life – but the older I have got the more I have marvelled at the underlying bullying aspect of war. Murder the defenceless to win the war. I am not a pacifist, but once my country has gone to war, it always seemed at the sound of a distant drum, the more the casualties mount up, ultimately for nothing.

There is no Memorial to the Unknown Child or Mother … only to the Unknown Soldier – in brackets, male. The toys and their sophistication and cost increases. The industry attracts a species of vermin who call themselves “consultant” – only because they have been previously participants – officers, bureaucrats, politicians, once on the inside but with their heads now in the money trough, occasionally raising their heads to vomit the privileged information gleaned over the years. Years of “schmoozing”, networking, social engagements, bribery have oiled the world of the “defence consultant”. Contracts are handed out, contracts are padded, and up to this point it has been a cosy atmosphere.

But now the Roberts-Smith ill-fated defamation case has blown a hole in this closed world of privilege. The politicians on each side do not know what to do. So many of them, still unashamed, raise their heads out of the trough. Their mates still in positions of influence, those with perspicacity do not want the whole closely-knit world to unravel, yet they know that they cannot initiate many more cover-ups. Not that they will not try.

The litany of misdemeanours of the ruling elite, both Labor and Coalition, as epitomised by the mutual giggling display of Marles and Pyne, illustrates a festering political garbage dump, the stench of which will not be quenched by any diversionary nosegay. What this country needs is a cathartic dose of the Cromwells.

Montana Skies

In 1999 I went to the University of Washington. Although based in Seattle at the time, it also provided medical teaching to undergraduates based, in addition to Washington State, in Alaska, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, hence the name WWAMI. As I intended visiting Montana in the late Spring of 2005, I asked Dawn De Witt, who had been recruited as the Dean of the Rural Clinical School and Professor and Foundation Chair of Rural Medical Education based in Shepparton (to give her full title) for advice as to where I should go. I had first met Dawn when she was an academic specialist physician at the University of Washington in Seattle. She had a deep interest in education and she was approached by the then Dean of Medicine, Richard Larkins, at the University of Melbourne to take the post. She also had a special attachment to Montana as she had honeymooned there in the Glacier National Park in the far North of the State and spreading across the border into British Columbia.

When I undertook my exploration of the feasibility of rural clinical schools in Australia in 1999, following Seattle I had visited the campuses in Spokane and in Pullman, just across the border from the Idaho campus in Moscow (pronounced mos-COW). Idaho is a State in two parts. There is a well-forested area north of the divide where the coastal rain falls, while the southern part of Idaho is a dry altiplano where Boise, the capital, is located. Idaho was far less wealthy than Washington, and this difference was reflected in the two campuses.

I had wanted then to go to Montana, but ran out of time. Alaska was a long way away and Montana and Wyoming could wait. Montana was visited six years later. By that time the rural clinical program in Australia was in full swing.

On Dawn’s recommendation, one of the local doctors, Ted Scofield, invited us to stay in the small town of Livingston, close to Yosemite and to its massive backdrop of the Rockies. After all, Montana is the land where the wide glacier-cut valleys do in fact reach for for the sky. I realise that beauty can indeed be muted, in shadows cast, grasslands understated – mostly a wide emptiness.

On arrival we were whisked away to watch his daughter play softball against a team in the neighbouring township of Tall Timbers. Tall Timbers, we were informed, had a champion softball team, as they proved that afternoon. Tall Timbers had achieved its brief period of fame when Robert Redford played the lead role in the film Horse Whisperer, which was filmed there.

Livingston remains a series of images of what I had imagined would be a grasslands town, windswept as one would expect of town lying at 1,400 metres above sea level. The buildings dating back to the late nineteenth century were close to the Yellowstone River, which actually ran through the Scofield property where we stayed. At one stage, we tried to have a picnic on the Yellowstone River, but we were defeated by the mosquitos, which were both very large and very assiduous, if that is a euphemism for bloodthirsty.

The property overlooked the dramatic Crazies, the Crazy Mountains. Spanning a distance of 32 kms from the Yellowstone River to the pinnacle of Crazy Peak, the terrain rises more than 2,100 metres. The reason for the name of the mountains is obscure; it may be their position. They seemed not to be where the mountains should be, as they lie separate from the Rockies themselves. Nevertheless, the scenery waking up in the morning was in a word – “different”. OK – breathtaking!

Ted was one of the WWAMI teachers, but at that time there were no students in the practice. Nevertheless, we undertook a number of ward rounds at the hospital. He had completed his undergraduate degree at Kalamazoo College, Michigan, then went on to graduate from medical school at Saint Louis in 1979. Given that the population is around 8,000 Livingston seemed to have very adequate medical facilities, but as I have since found out, the area is very popular with many prominent actors and moneyed people who had properties around the town. There is a word to describe those rural areas that do not have a problem recruiting doctors –“resources rich”. Useful to be near ski resorts and in the case of Ted Scofield, hunting. Ted was a keen hunter and his house was festooned with trophies, and on our last morning, we had homemade elk sausages for breakfast.

The Scofields and their children and mother were “Wee Frees”. This segment of the Presbyterian Church traces its roots to 1843 and the struggle of the Scottish church to remain “free” from State interference. In fact they live at the extreme end of the evangelical Protestants, and predictably are against the cultural reforms of same-sex marriage and access to abortion, believing the literal interpretation of the Bible. As we were guests, we steered clear of any discussion, but took part in their mealtime, where everybody held hands while Ted said grace before each meal. Not quite Little House on the Prairie, but where piety is mixed with blood sports. It was a time when Bush was President and the Iraqi war was in full swing, but again not a topic for discussion given that we soon realised that our beliefs were very far apart

They were very hospitable. For instance, they were teetotal, but stocked low alcohol beer which they offered us. We gave a presentation on Australia to the health centre and hospital staff – a slide show centred on a recitation of Dorothea McKellar’s poem “My Country”. It seemed to be well received; they had little knowledge of Australia and our own open spaces.

We did not talk much about teaching because on the ward rounds he was very much the conventional doctor, where teaching was not an easy fit. The traditional country rural medical practitioner is a solitary person, used to treating patients without question. In one instance, I did question the treatment, and he took it in good grace, demonstrating to me more flexibility than I had observed up to that time.

In the end, I do not know what I thought. As I write this reflection, I realise that I learnt more than if I had been involved in conflict. Far apart we may have been in belief, I learnt more than I thought in my sojourn in Livingston without only saying “Dr Scofield, I presume.”

Laura Vall

When I was learning Brazilian Portuguese, one of the more relaxing and attractive ways learning this form of Portuguese was to watch a bossa nova video performed by NOVA, whose lead singer was Laura Vall.

NOVA’s tagline is Born in Brazil, Made in LA. Laura Vall is from Barcelona but moved to LA. Here she had set up this Group with Mike Papagni, a bossa nova and jazz quartet, back in 2011. The quartet with her as the vocalist are David Irelan (guitar), Thomas Hjorth (bass), and Mike Papagni (drums). Since then, they’ve been performing around Los Angeles and I found them and her on YouTube. The signature bossa nova song is The Girl from Ipanema, written in 1962 by Antonio Carlos Jobim with lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes. The singer generally associated with the song was Astrud Gilberto. The Sinatra interpretation is well-known, admittedly at odds with the original lyrics it nevertheless has a certain charm, given he was singing alongside Jobim, the latter accompanying him in Brazilian Portuguese.

In the Portuguese version, the lyrics employ two words for girl, while the title uses “garota” a third word for girl but not used in the song itself. The girl from Ipanema is variously “menina” or “moça”. When I watch her singing the song she was the epitome of all of these plus an element of the vagabond in English – in Portuguese it has a more direct meaning shorn of the street-wise imputation that it has in English.

Whether singing with microphone as her only prop or when shaking a ganza, Vall’s movements are minimal yet sensuous, her voice clarion clear, her voice with a touch of defiance, if not ferocity. Her Brazilian Portuguese is impeccable. To me she is also a beautiful woman. Her accompanying musicians are understated but a perfect backdrop, yet all playing against unspectacular background room – no flashy cut aways to Ipanema beach or elsewhere. Just a beautiful singer in a Los Angeles studio with a great backing trio. The ongoing encouragement to continue learning Portuguese – admittedly now with little practical reason, except to keep the brain active – and listening to Laura Vall.

She is a worthy successor to Astrud Gilberto, who died this week.

The Withered Spring

All over Eastern Massachusetts it’s the same story, with azaleas, forsythia, rhododendrons, and their colleagues underperforming. Where there should be flowers and joy, we have mere leaves, bare stems — and self-doubt.

The disappointing spring bloom is all the more painful because it comes against a backdrop of climate change — not the fault of any one gardener, but rather the collective action of the human species.

Last summer’s drought, the historic arctic blast in early February, the wild swings in temperature — they’re all contributing to the lacklustre Spring.

An eloquent observation in The Boston Globe, which imparts the same message that Rachel Carson made almost two generations ago when she wrote of a countryside before the chemical onslaught, including the now banned DDT.

Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them.

Rachel Carson wrote these words in 1962. How goes the ingenuity of us humans to escape the disasters we create?

Mouse Whisper

Ever thought about the three blind mice? The “three blind mice” were the Oxford Martyrs, all Bishops and supporters of the short-lived Queen, Lady Jane Grey. (The Liz Truss nine-day monarch equivalent). Their names were Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer, accused of plotting against the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII. They were tried for heresy in 1555.

Before they were burned at the stake, Latimer was heard to say: Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Strange how “play the man” now has such a different connotation.