Modest Expectations – Tura Beach V 

Queen Elizabeth II

Her everlasting legacy. She did not linger. She died with dignity. She would have ensured that.

Celebrate her life; not mourn. She would not have wanted the clocks to stop.

Reflection

I reluctantly must accept that I have a form of long COVID-19. It is September; I reverted from a positive to negative RAT in second week in July. My condition is characterised by persistent productive cough, lack of sleep, a veil of depression. Some days are better; some I relapse.

In any event:

The window exists 

at the end of the room

A discoloured pane frames the tree 

Sallow maple leaves cling

Potted cymbidiums hang

From trunks

That gently swing

defiantly green

Striving to touch the cycadic spikes

Along the unseen cobblestone path 

The gate aubergine 

and fire-bricked wall

Brown-wooded letter box 

All separates me from the World

Nothing else? 

That’s right

Nothing else

Why bother?

I do not go out

Just lean back in my chair 

And realise that Winter has come.

I wrote the above which I called “Reflection”. It is this view which I see every day from my table, where I sit behind my computer. To my right is the television screen – images bouncing around as the sound is turned off. I love flowers and now on the table to the right of my direct gaze is a bunch of garnet-coloured dianthus (Sweet William) in a muted patterned rosé vase. It is framed by an arced spike of cymbidium flowers – carmine stigma and delicate red russet petals – cut from our garden – stuck in a Tall Poppy Vase, that someone gave me some years ago.

Yes, this past week was my Australia Day – September One – the start of seasonal regeneration and when the wattles are at their zenith. I will get out of my chair and go out. Maybe I shall improve, but it is draining me.

 Fishing traps 

Rain is a myth haunting the arid places
And clouds are the dry eyelashes of the sun and moon. . ..
Its only protest is dust and the rivers drying
And the horrid gaping sores of a dying race –
Maria Reay, Poem from Brewarrina (1946).

I was reminded of one of my visits to Brewarrina by my son meeting “Dean from Brewarrina”, in the Tasmanian Highlands for God’s sake. We are a literary family, but predominantly in the lifestyle area of writing. Maybe I stray when I comment about the fish traps on the Barwon River at Brewarrina, a very old manifestation of Australian Aboriginal identity and industry.

Brewarrina fish traps

The poet, Mary Gilmore, grew up in the Riverina and moved around NSW as a child.  Her father if not a sundowner, was certainly a wanderer. Mary Gilmore herself moved around and was one of a group which followed William Lane to Paraguay in 1893 to found the settlement of New Australia to pursue a socialist ideal. Hers was a short lived emigration; nevertheless, she lived her life back in Australia with her exquisite literary ability used to promote her socialist ideals.

In 1933, when she was 56, she wrote about the fishing traps in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, the following of which is an extract:

That the aborigines made fish-traps and fish-balks (as we used to call them when we came across them) is a fact. That they used natural barriers as Mr David G Stead writes is also a fact. Sixty years ago there were many of the smaller balks in existence, and white people knew them and made use of them for other purposes than those intended by the aborigines. The larger fish-traps were made for the great gatherings, and were invariably based on a running reef or natural outcrop of rock. There were a number of these places of gathering known to my people, and I often heard them spoken of. One of these was on the Clarence, one at Brewarrina, one on the Upper Murray, and one down near Hay or Narrandera – it was near the swamps between these two places, the swamps being sanctuaries.

When you view the fishing traps on the Barwon River at Brewarrina, there is a necklace of rocks meandering down the river, and when Gilmore was writing her articles, she was responding to opinion which tended to dismiss these traps as manmade.  Gilmore concedes in this paragraph that the local indigenous people used natural rock formations upon which to fashion their fish traps. The reason that few have survived is attributed to whitefella dismantling the structures; but another reason is that all the structures as described, particularly those made of wood and reeds, would have been susceptible to the periodic flooding of the Murray-Darling Basin.

The reason for the survival of the Brewarrina fish traps was the fact that Brewarrina was beyond the navigability of the river paddle steamers. However, the structures are simple and could have been easily reconstructed by tribal groups after every river catastrophe, because the river is susceptible to spreading across the floodplains. Brewarrina may have these rapids, where rocks are suitable for re-arrangement, but it emphasised the importance of Brewarrina as a gathering place for Aboriginal tribes. These corroborees required some preparation to ensure sufficient food was available. Hence the importance of ensuring the fish traps were in good condition; but the converse may be true. For a hunter gatherer society where the corroboree was a regular convocation of the local tribes, it was essential to hold them in a place where food was plentiful.

One of the observations about the necklace of rocks defining the fish traps was that each fish trap is said to have one family responsible for its trap.  Given the nature of Aboriginal society, I find it unusual that, in this instance, each of the fish traps was singled out as a single family’s responsibility, implying that the fish traps conferred de facto property rights.

Depiction of fish traps, in ochre on sandstone

Brewarrina has an Aboriginal Cultural Museum recessed into a hill, and one day when driving between Bourke and Walgett, we dropped by. I remember this day well. I had no intention of purchasing anything – after all it was a museum. Nevertheless, there was one item for sale and that was a slab of sandstone upon which a depiction of the Brewarrina fishing traps was painted in ochre. The cost was $250. We bought it.

It was a very heavy piece. We transported it back to Sydney, where it sits on its mulga wood stand.  We also picked up a large rock, which sat at the intersection of two sandy tracks just outside the Tilpa pub. The rock squats incongruously in the front garden, a desert souvenir in a sub-tropical mess of bromeliads. Both remain as treasured memorabilia from the Outback.

The fish trap painting was something special – whether the fish traps were nature’s work, manmade or shared between both, it does not matter. What is not debated is that Brewarrina has been a place of significance to the Aboriginal people, even now the site of the annual Baiame’s Ngunnhu Festival, belying the misery implicit in the words of dispossession written by Maria Rey nearly 80 years ago.

Utopia

Now

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country – Uluru Statement 2017

Then

The objectives of ATSIC are:

  • to ensure maximum participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in government policy formulation and implementation
  • to promote indigenous self-management and self-sufficiency
  • to further indigenous economic, social and cultural development, and
  • to ensure co-ordination of Commonwealth, state, territory and local government policy affecting indigenous people. – Section 3 of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Act 1989. 

By way of 

“Where a clan or group has continued to acknowledge the laws and (so far as practicable) to observe the customs based on the traditions of that clan or group, whereby their traditional connection with the land has been substantially maintained, the traditional community title of that clan or group can be said to remain in existence.” – Attachment by certain High Court Judges to the Mabo decision

Once I was invited to address a bunch of Aboriginal elders at Utopia. This settlement is home to both the Alyerrerre and Anmatyerre people. It lies 350 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs on the Sandover Highway, an unmade road which runs across the Northern Territory spinifex and black soil plains until it eventually joins the Camooweal-Urandangi Road just over the Queensland border.

Utopia had even earned a reputation as a centre for Aboriginal art, being where Emily Kame Kngwarreye lived and painted. When we visited, she had passed away three years before.  She was one of a number of Utopia artists, notably Minnie Pwerle, Barbara Weir and Gloria Petyarre.

The distinctive style of Utopia painter Minnie Pwerle

As I was undertaking work for the Commonwealth Government, the Aboriginal elders, an all-male group, invited me to tell them why I was there. They had moved to a roofed, open concrete area, and then they squatted in a semi-circular area. A whitefella, to whom I had not been introduced hung onto a pole on the fringe.

Even though the Aboriginal elders had seemingly sat in a non-hierarchial arc it was not difficult to work out who was the boss. As I started to talk, I started to experience this extraordinary energy of the gathering.  I had never felt this level of non- verbal communication, despite their expressions being impassive, as I glanced down and around the group.

In retrospect, I likened it to the same pressure I had felt at school, when you had to speak for two minutes, without saying “um” or “ah” – or repeat yourself. The pressure was constant during the 15 minutes I spoke. When I finished, the man whom I had already identified as the leading elder stood up and said, half to the meeting in general and half to me. “Very good meeting. Let’s go have a cup of tea.” That was that.

I had felt the communication during my time talking; it had been intense, continuous but not hostile. Over the mug of tea, the discussion was general. One indication of whether you, the whitefella, was acceptable was the ability to chat. Aboriginal people can be silent; and if they believe it to be irrelevant, they simply don’t turn up for a meeting. I have been snubbed several times; “sorry business” takes precedence.

This time the two women in the party then joined us for tea. The centre of attention was the young kid with a charred kangaroo head which he gnawed at distractedly. It is amazing how small instances stick in one’s memory when other parts of that weekend passed in a blur.

The women went off with the women elders for “women’s business”. I have no idea what went on, even though one of the women was my wife. So, I can say no more; but if you are a woman reader, then you can find out if you wanted to do so.

But what is then the “Voice” in Canberra whitefella terms?

This was just one of my experiences with Aboriginal people. These were essentially desert people, and a significant group. It emphasised to me something that I had come to realise – the level of non-verbal communication among Aboriginal people. There was no indication of how well the two tribes intersected. In modern settlements where tribes have been forced together, such as Doomadgee in the Gulf Country. This product of the mission supervision and education led to displacement from traditional lands. Doomadgee is now a cauldron of various tribal groups forced together. Unsurprisingly, they are often in physical conflict.

Therefore, the concept of Voice has different connotations.

William Buckley escaped from a failed white settlement in Victoria in 1802 and lived for over 30 years with the Aboriginals who inhabited the land around Port Phillip Bay and thence into the hinterland where Colac and the shallow Western district lakes are located. When he emerged from the bush at the time Batman came from Tasmania to settle Melbourne, he had lost the ability to speak English.

Nevertheless, he had a unique perspective on what constituted communication. “Voice” in terms of a continuous Aboriginal traditional means of communication has always had a huge component of the non-verbal but also the song lines.

Buckley quickly regained his use of the English language, and in his memoirs, he describes his original exposure to a corrobborree (sic). These seemed to be where tribes could meet in harmony or for a celebratory purpose. When he was picked up by the Wathaurong tribe, as white was associated with death, he was thought of being a re-incarnated relative.  So his “initiation” into the tribe was the reason for a corrobborree (sic) where there were hours of dancing and singing and beating of sticks and improvised drumming by the women on their skin rugs which they had removed and tightened between their knees to resemble a primitive tympanum. This gave meaning to the Voice?

Then one Aboriginal fellow, whose family were from Queensland, demonstrated that in his tribe there were clicks in his language. At least there is one Aboriginal voice, known as Lardil, where the clicks express a certain meaning. He demonstrated the clicks.

I had experienced a click language before, in Namibia among those from the Kalahari Desert people. In fact, where we were once in Namibia I asked one of the women serving us to read out the menu in her language. A wondrous experience – words mingled with clicks. I regret that I did not record her recitation.

Above I mentioned songlines. I remember the small group of Aboriginals, whom we once encountered on the banks of the Murray River near Mildura. They had come from the Pitjantjatjara Lands to get away from the “troubles” as they said. These people live in the northern part of South Australia, but they have a number of what I thought were songlines which they can follow across “country”. After all, I had also met a group of Pitjantjatjara men in Ceduna on the Southern Australian Coast, an eight day walk across the desert from Amata, one of the Pitjantjatjara settlements. It was suggested that this small group on the Murray River may have followed other songlines, as one Aboriginal man later suggested. Unlikely, but then these people do travel – and it is their land as they would have it.

Pitjantjatjara land

Songlines are events where fact merges with myth interpreted through storytelling, rock art, songs and dance. As one Aboriginal elder has said: “Aboriginal people use songlines as a means of navigation, following all the landmarks they sing about. You may not have been there, but the songs give you enough information to find your way. Our people learn hundreds of songs.”

Thus, there are many interpretations of “Voice”; the Aboriginal people have so many languages and so many different totems and taboos to augment the various voices.

Given that, I have no idea what the Voice means. Is it just a forum for the articulate Aboriginal, given that there have been a number of these manifestations?

The sorry history of the Aboriginal and Torres Islander organisation (ATSIC) failed the Voice test. ATSIC was defunded nearly 20 years ago; and the former Chair is still facing 380 fraud charges. This miserable outcome of ATSIC is being used by opponents of enshrining a Voice. What has changed?

My vote in any referendum is contingent that its interpretation does not enshrine an Indigenous elite. Not the shrill Voice of self-importance. Secondly, nor should the Voice be a nod to tokenism.

The dulled Voice of dispossession continued.

Jobs and Skills Summit

We hardly need to labour the importance of the AMA’s core purpose—fighting for doctors’ interests—amid the chaos COVID continues to inflict on a health system that was stretched and inefficient to begin with. It is true that doctors’ interests have rarely, if ever, perfectly aligned with the public interest. Nonetheless, the debate over the future of healthcare in Australia stands to benefit from coherent and unified advocacy on behalf of the medical profession. The AMA still has political clout, but it needs a renewed clarity of purpose to more convincingly argue that doctor knows best

Thus concluded an editorial that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald in July bemoaning the lack of engagement and the fall in the influence of a once powerful Australian Medical Association. In 1983 I attended the Hawke summit as part of the invited Association delegation, where the AMA President spoke.

It is important to reflect on how important the Hawke Government Summit was. It was summarised thus:

The Hawke Labor Government has not been conspicuous for its reforming pro-labour initiatives. With the exception of Medicare (itself quite a limited initiative) little has been done to improve the position of the least well off members of the population. This is not to say that the Labor Government has done nothing and is not interested in reform. It is just a question of the reforms they have introduced: assets tests, the deregulation of banking, entry of foreign banks, abolition of exchange controls and the floating of the Australian dollar.

The “relevance symbolism” of AMA involvement was not lost on some of the more assertive members of the AMA, but the following years were full of fighting for doctors’ interests. Whether the SMH editorial writer above was referring to the rise of Bruce Shepherd and his protégé, Brendan Nelson in the late 1980s I’m not sure. Certainly, the last bilateral Inquiry into Fees for Medicare Benefit occurred in 1984. Thereafter relations between government and the AMA dissolved into conflict.

Influence has faded once the strategists, who facilitated the AMA presence at that 1983 Summit, moved on and it lost its strategic direction under the populist Shepherd and his acolytes. Shepherd may have won a few battles, but an association where office holders are ephemeral loses continuity, (especially when they pursue personal agendas rather than those of the Association) – and may I say clout.

The AMA was not invited by Albanese’s crew to the recent summit. In fact, there appear to be only three invitees associated with health – Annie Butler; Federal secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwife Association; Carmel Monaghan, CEO Ramsay Health; and Christine Nixon, Chair of the Australian College of General Practitioners.

Annie Butler

One was a health professional, Annie Butler, heading 290,000 nurses – an experienced nurse; one businesswoman heading a successful private health group and an ex-copper who has had her fair share of controversy. Given the politics of general practice, as distinct from the practice of general practice, who knows what her grasp of the health sector is apart from the petty intrigue which has dogged the RACGP for years.

The effect of the pandemic on employment seems to be ignored in the lack of AMA representation at the Summit last week.  Although the AMA had made plenty of comment, it failed to have a leading role. In fact, it was one of the failures of organised medicine that it assumed a passive role and at no stage attempted to co-ordinate resources and advice outside government during 2020-2022.

Such intervention would have shown relevance and helped quell extreme opinions. A very small but vocal minority in the community seized the agenda; and the politicians had no defence except enforced social isolation.  This was an important incentive for vaccination when it had become available, but once the lock downs were revoked, there was no other incentive to maintain the level of vaccination, which had been further complicated by the different times of the approval for administration to the various age groups. Their public health experts were silenced.

Medical associations now have lay administrators. Their loyalty is to their career.  They have no ongoing professional stake in maintaining the professional relevance with government.

As one who has led a number of campaigns, notably the campaign against the French nuclear tests in the South Pacific in the 1990s, I eschewed the self-aggrandisement for action. We had a plan. Irrespective of its effect, France has long since stopped the nuclear tests. The lesson was that when the interests of the medical profession coincide with those of the public as it did then, it is a powerful combination.

An AMA which exists with its office-bearers counting the number of the media releases and their appearance on Tik Tok or whatever – but in effect doing nothing or as one person said using the phrase “looking good in their suits” to define inactivity. That unfortunately is the AMA, a sound bite expressing concern or saying why doesn’t the government do something is in itself a recipe for irrelevance.

It is not surprising that Annie Butler has the ear of Government. She is an experienced nurse. She does not have to look good in a suit.

Mouse Whisper

Overheard in a lunch bar

Sandwich maker:  What would you like in your salad roll?”

She: Everything except onion, please.

He, in American accent (next in line):  That is a very Australian way of ordering.

She: Is it? Never really thought about it. Still, better than saying tomato… and a slice of beetroot … carrot … lettuce yes… jalapeño… perhaps jack cheese… at least with using “except” I’ve avoided the list sliding into infinity!

He: I get your meaning. So different from us Americans.

Whisper: The efficient quiet Australian!

Modest Expectations – Marcus Aurelius

How depressing to see the Prime Minster spending “quality time” with Lachlan Murdoch, at a time when Murdoch is trying to bully the newsletter publisher, Crikey into submission. The description of Crikey as a minnow is to underestimate its clout and the intention of Eric Beecher to confront what he perceives as the malign influence of the Murdochs.

Eric Beecher

It is important to place Beecher in context, and while his own bio is scant, this quote from the Public Interest Journalism Initiative provides a summary of his early achievements. Beecher started in newspapers as a journalist on The Age in Melbourne and later worked at The Sunday Times and The Observer in London and The Washington Post in the US. In 1984, at age 33, he became the youngest-ever editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and in 1987 was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Herald and Weekly Times newspaper group.

He has spent a large part of his later life as the pamphleteer, railing against the privileged plutocracy, which has grown under cover of globalisation and the so-called information revolution. He has explored alliances with other writers with a like attitude.

Lachlan Murdoch is targeting him in the defamation jurisdiction on Earth most sympathetic to the complainant – namely NSW.  Nevertheless, Beecher has taken the decision after initially retracting the offending comment to challenge the Murdoch Empire of “alternative facts”. As Beecher has commented, any morality in journalism has been sacrificed in the pursuit of financial profit, and Murdoch, once the supporter of Whitlam and the Republic, has given over to a son without any connection to Australia, apart from a father who has long deserted his citizenship, again in the pursuit of profit.

Thus, it is tedious to see the Prime Minister giving the Murdochs the normal vassal symbolism of going cap in hand to them. When will they learn? Remember, Rudd was entrapped by a Murdoch operative in a New York strip club. Prime Minister, have you forgotten the disgusting behaviour of Murdoch in Great Britain, where yon Rupert almost apologised by closing down the “News of the World”? But then it was the other son James in the firing line, rather than Lachlan.

I’m not surprised that Marles joined in the pilgrimage to Compostela de St Rupert, given his common Geelong Grammar School heritage with Rupert. Marles, as with Murdoch, had an elderly father, and both his parents were high achievers.  So, both “slumming” in a working class electorate and rubbing shoulder with the establishment is a recurrent behavioural pattern among some of the Victorian Labor party private school elite.

But really, Penny Wong!  Or were you just practising dealing with some of the unsavoury types lurking around the world in some of the foreign affairs portfolios?

Presumably to demonstrate neutrality in the ongoing stoush, the Prime Minister should visit Crikey and break bread with Eric Beecher and his crew in a less plush setting but in keeping with his electorate’s wish.

Finally, yes, we have contributed to Crikey’s defence.

St Kilda

I have been reading about St Kilda.

Not the beach suburb of Melbourne, although I must admit that I was surprised of an association; I’ll come back to this later.

St Kilda was a few rocks stranded in the Northern Atlantic Ocean about 60 km from the Outer Hebrides and where, for centuries, a small group of hardy settlers subsisted. Until the nineteenth century, they lived a very isolated existence with the occasional ship calling carrying salt, iron and timber for which they traded cows, sheep, feathers and grain.

It was a hard life, living in such a state without money, where the whole population gathered as their local council, with strict observance of the Sabbath with Christianity interwoven with pagan practices, where the infant death rate was greater than 50 per cent because of neonatal tetanus, which is terrifyingly described.

The islanders raised sheep and cattle and grew some crops, barley and potatoes. They did not fish, but rather raided the bird nests which were clustered in the steep cliffs which ringed the islands.

Abandoned houses, Hirta

The largest and inhabited island was Hirta and thus the inhabitants were more commonly called Hirtans rather than Kildans. The link with Melbourne is that some of the islanders apparently found their way to Melbourne.  St Kilda beach in Melbourne may have sea birds on its sands, but that was the only similarity. The immigrants would have missed their roasted puffin, but surely cooking a puffin reminds one of the old recipes about cooking a galah with a stone.

Collecting eggs and birds from the cliff face was a Hirtan skill, which even to today’s rock climbers would have presented a challenge, as the ropes they used were very rudimentary, with much jollification while this hazardous operation was happening.

In the nineteenth century, St Kilda became a tourist spot, even though landing on the island presented problems, especially when the weather was bad. There was a post office where postcards could be stamped. Photographs of the islanders became popular. Paradoxically, the standard of living rose, as shown in contemporary photographs of the improvement in the housing, but the attrition of a population, now exposed to the mainland “delights” increasingly losing their previous self-sufficiency, accelerated.

The final paragraph of the description of the Hirtans in Shadowlands is evocative. By 1930, the population was reduced to 36.

…in the dying days of August 1930, the final postcard was sent. Its message, from a tourist called Freda, said, just “Last Greetings from St Kilda.” Then the post office was shut forever. The final service was held in the church and bowed by sorrow, the islanders rounded up their dogs, those indomitable hunters and guardians, tied weights around their necks, placed them in sacks, and dropped them from the pier, looking sorrowfully on as the yelping bundles sank beneath the waves. They returned to their houses and waited for HMS Harebell.

And up on the stacks of Boreray, from their nests in the cliffs, the birds rejoiced.” 

It is an example of the problem of civilisation intruding on a community which has achieved a fragile ecological balance and then, over time, from being endangered they are rendered extinct. Our forefathers characterised the Australian Aboriginal people as remnants of the Stone Age whereas they had developed a very complex hunter/gatherer society, but unlike the Hirtans they had a far bigger canvas upon which to work. Nevertheless, what have we learnt from the Hirtans, especially as with the Australian Aboriginals, there was no written language – not even an ogham?

Same Old Rubbish?

I have been a supporter of the Essendon Football Club for most of my life. It was because of the Doust family, who lived on the corner; and then after WWII they went back to Britain, leaving me with a black and red scarf. We lived nowhere near Essendon, and so it was quite a trip across the city to watch them play. The Victorian Football League (VFL) then was essentially composed of inner suburbs extending west and north. The only team in the eastern suburbs was Hawthorn, and when I was small, its team was a “basket case”.

Essendon did not conform to the original teams when in 1897 the VFL was formed. Essendon was not an inner working class suburb.  Yet Australian Rules was essentially a working person’s game, despite having a posh beginning as a game between an Anglican and a Presbyterian private school.

Many of the clubs were both Irish and Roman Catholic, none more so than Collingwood in the era when John Wren virtually owned the club. Essendon was not Roman Catholic – far from it.  But the nuances of this history were lost on one small boy, even the fact that Essendon once played their games in East Melbourne where the railway yards now stand and they were nicknamed “the Same Old”.

By the time I became a supporter, the team was located at Windy Hill, high on the hill in Essendon where the gales blew. In winter it was a place for the frozen spectator, even rugged up and with the obligatory Thermos in hand; and because the suburb Essendon had become the location of Melbourne’s airport, the football club adopted the nickname of the “Bombers” in 1940.

It was a different time with the VFL progenitor, Victorian Football Association (VFA), having many of its teams in the eastern, south-eastern and southern Clubs still active. Oakleigh, nicknamed the Devils even though they wore gold and purple colours, just down the road was my club, but I was never as addicted to Oakleigh in the same way as I was to Essendon.

This long introduction is to say that most of my life has been consumed in my support of Essendon, even at one time being a paid-up Essendonian. However, that changed when the game became an exercise in keepings-off and Essendon relinquished its Windy Hill home.

Windy Hill, 1980s

Sport at the top level is now a moneyed game driven by TV rights. There is also a stadium fetish, to ensure that the pampered few are spared the rigours of winter with access to glass boxes awash with alcohol. The players from teenage years are moved around as well-paid commodities without, in most cases, any deep-seated loyalties. After all, being doled out in a draft means that these players are separated from their hearth and home. And that gnaws away at the special nature of the Game loyalties.

Curiously, the game is reverting to the original game where there seemed to be limitless players, running on and off in a blur, to maintain the momentum of the game, keepings off, scragging; little men in yellow running around making arbitrary decisions so they can keep up with a game, which is driven by the manic desire of those who run the game to make it faster and faster. The only difference between the original game in 1958, which perhaps should be introduced, is running among the gum trees in Yarra Park and the length of the playing arena when rules as today were arbitrary or non-existent – and of course the little yellow officials.

However, there is a veneer of corporate civilisation. As somebody wrote about the Essendon worship of bright and shiny baubles “Walking up the concrete steps, Essendon’s headquarters feels like a corporation. The generic nature of the massive building continues inside where it becomes immediately clear the home of this historically great football club – which has not been anywhere near great since it moved to Tullamarine – has no heart.

That is my problem – once a fanatical supporter who imparted the same spirit to my sons and then they to most of the grandchildren. But then only one of these six was alive – just – when Essendon won its last premiership in 2000. My heart has gone – I no longer care.

Maybe a flicker of nostalgia when I read about Michael Hurley’s complete loyalty to the club. (pictured)

A picture of loyalty

The AFL has a heritage round, but what is meant by heritage? True heritage would be playing twenty a side – eighteen on the field with two emergencies, which came on as replacements and were not interchangeable. Yet that rule only operated from 1946 until 1978 when the interchange rule was introduced. The longest time the rules of the game have not been changed was nine years between 1877 and 1886. Now, there is more year-to-year fiddling with the rules than in a Bullamakanka bush band.

Then see how the spectators would enjoy it. The grounds are more uniform than in the past. When playing at Hawthorn, you were on a compressed ground wedged against the railway lines – and with the right conditions the full back kicking out, if accurate enough, could kick a goal at the other. I repeat “if the conditions were right”. Oh, for the suburban grounds that had character.

Now, what an exercise in sterility, but the AFL is now politically correct. Gillon McLachlan, scion of the South Australian Establishment, you have left your legacy – you have pasteurised the game behind pay walls. Well done.

What the Butler saw

The Strengthening Medicare Taskforce is bringing together Australia’s health policy leaders. The diverse membership has been drawn from across the health professions, and includes consumer, rural and regional and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representatives.

The Taskforce will work to deliver concrete results through its recommendations, including:

  • Improved patient access to general practice, including after-hours.
  • Improved patient access to GP-led multidisciplinary team care, including nursing and allied health.
  • Greater patient affordability.
  • Better management of ongoing health conditions including chronic conditions.
  • Decreased pressure on hospitals.

Here we go again. The Same Old!

The Hon. Mark Butler MP

Mark Butler, a lawyer and union official prior to being elected to Parliament, under Rudd had an exposure to matters relating to Health, in various parliamentary secretary and ministerial positions between 2009 and 2013. He had been Shadow Minister for Health since January 2021

Unlike another South Australian, Neil Blewett, who maintained continuity in the portfolio whether in Opposition or Government to became one of the best Ministers of Health, when the Labor Party went into Opposition, Butler was handed the shadow environmental portfolio by the then Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten. The Health shadow portfolio was passed to Catherine King. After the 2019 election, the shadow Health Ministry was held by Chris Bowen, until it was passed back to Mark Butler. The Health portfolio seems to have been in the “pass the parcel” category among the Labor gentry.

The Hon. Neal Blewett

One of the prerequisites for the Health portfolio incumbent is that unless one learns the language of Health, it condemns you to being at the whim of translators. Blewett as a linguist was fluent in Health, and he also had a bunch of public servants who had served in health matters for a considerable period, and while they were not necessarily health professionals, they were more or less fluent in Health. Guys like Alan Bansemer and Bernie MacKay.

A 17 member committee is doomed to failure as anything but a megaphone, given that allows every member an average of 3.5 minutes an hour to speak. Also the bigger the Committee the more unwieldly, although technology allows for everybody not to be in same room for a meeting; however, that introduces the trickiness of the membership being in isolated cells, without any meaningful interaction. But maybe that is a deliberate ploy. I have faced public service running interference and have dealt with it mostly – without winning any popularity polls.

Scanning the list of Butler’s Committee, the only one with any decent corporate memory is Stephen Duckett; like all of us who have been in the health sector for as long or, in my case, longer than him we have our own set of biases. Duckett sure has his, and his bias against private practice is well-known. He is sure to raise salaried practice and capitation as alternatives; but Medicare has served Australia well, even under conservative governments where it is always allowed to decay. Added to this the central agencies hate uncapped programs as Medicare has been.

My problem with the medical representation is that each is there because they have been elected as distinguished members of one of the many tribes of medical graduates, not as experts in health economics and policy. To them, reforming the health system is not a full time pursuit, but a task force gives them all the opportunity to whinge, and in a couple of years these office holders are gone.

The only medical graduate on the committee, a former President of the AMA with some experience of the vicissitudes of Medicare, is Hambleton. He does not fill me with any confidence because once when I asked why the AMA had ceased being deeply involved in establishing doctor’s incomes, he seemed confused about the value of the bilateral Medicare Enquiries between the AMA and the Federal Government last held in 1984.

Looking down the list it seems that the aim is to include every player in the provision of primary care and a wish list of aims without any means of achieving it. Thus presumably, the Department will prepare a series of working papers – a variation on the Jenny Macklin National Health Strategy Initiative where she was asked to review Australia’s existing system, which produced a series of discussion papers of varying quality. That task force was disbanded in 1993, without any discernible effect on the health system. My involvement goes back to listening to Gough Whitlam expounding on health reform in 1969 at the time of the Nimmo inquiry, when the genius of John Deeble and, to a lesser extent, Dick Scotton provided the intellectual capital for both Medibank and Medicare.

The crux of the primary care problem is that despite all the talk about professions working together, it just does not happen spontaneously. I am a patient in a very good general practice, with very competent medical and nursing staff.  They have their tasks and they don’t spend their time in formal training in how to get along. As a patient, I want to be able to converse with my general practitioner and yet realise I have a limited time to do so.  Yet despite its caring profile, this long term traditional suburban general practice has been absorbed into the corporate world, and if it were not profitable, you could bet your bottom dollar that this world would not be there.  This presents a bit of a paradox. Substantial investment on the one hand; crying poor on the other.

The other variable is general practices now closing off appointments for new patients, which effectively caps throughput. Given that Medicare is uncapped – and the rule of thumb is to maximum daily limits for doctor – namely seeing 80 patients a day for 20 days a year or 30 telehealth consultations for the same period a year, otherwise any more will attract a reference to the Professional Services Review Committee. That is the only comment on optimal throughput – two extreme positions.  The Committee should address optimal throughput.

Given that the public has been used to bulk billing in general practice, I can now ask a question: “What is general practice?” and then ask, “what is the most cost-effective way to deliver general practice?”

My premise is that general practice is heterogeneous. Yet it conforms to certain rules. For instance, at least three doctors are required if the practice provides a 24-hour service. Yet how many practices exist as standalone services providing such a service? In rural areas in the small towns such a service is problematic, but general practitioners there do have a local hospital to back them up. I have no idea what the “urgent centre” proposed by NSW and Victoria is; and where does the staff come from – Mongolia?

In any question of general practice, one must ask the question of what level of coverage by general practice yields the most effective return. The fact that the so-called 24 hours clinic or general practice attached to urban hospitals has not become standard suggests this is a work pattern unacceptable to the majority of the general practice workforce, notwithstanding that its income is underwritten by government.

From a question of what is general practice, and the most cost effective organisation of same, then it becomes a cost accounting exercise. The best cost accounting depends on ensuring that all the assumptions underpinning the process are clear. There are times when approximations will be made; and it is the test of any good cost accountant to know when to approximate. After all, if one waits for a complete census of any population when 90 per cent will provide a useful approximation and if the information can be obtained in a reasonable time, then delays are avoided that otherwise can render the data of limited use.

The problem is that the advice provided by cost accounting is ignored by government, because it is often inconvenient. We once showed that the most effective radiation oncology practice was one based on three linear accelerators at any one site. What happened was the States bent to political pressure and scattered one machine facilities across its jurisdiction; as well as being uneconomic, these facilities had difficulty maintaining staff.

In the end, once the true costs are known, then it can be discussed what should be the professional cost of the practice, the expected income of the general practitioner, which is subsidised through fee for Medicare benefit and what can be gained by additional charges that the patient has to find. This  figure is complicated by the corporatisation of general practice. After all, general practitioners can charge what they believe is fair and reasonable. What does their corporate boss want to charge?

The Federal government provides a patient benefit not a doctor’s fee. The patient benefit is constitutionally valid; but setting fees is not. The Australian voters in the 1973 referendum rejected Federal control on prices and income.

And there you are. Answers are gained, and the 17 member committee can deal in facts adorned by assumption rather than opinion warped by bias and, I hesitate to say, “enlightened self interest”.

Where fantasy meets reality 

In the Boston Globe, Stephanie Ebert runs a regular opinion piece chronicling what is happening due to the Supreme Court ruling, overturning Roe v Wade. This is her latest update I’ve edited hopefully without affecting the original content.

The consequences of withholding reproductive choice were expressed in stark and varied terms, by a Republican state legislator in South Carolina, by voters in New York, by political pundits balling up their midterm predictions, and by HBO viewers shocked by the premiere of the “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon.”

But before we get to Westeros, let’s stop in the Palmetto State (South Carolina), where a Republican state lawmaker’s abortion regret clearly struck a chord.

Rep. Neal Collins 

Rep. Neal Collins told an emotional story about the real-life fallout of the “Foetal Heartbeat Bill” he had supported, which prevented a 19-year-old whose water broke at 15 weeks from terminating a pregnancy that was not viable. She was sent home from the hospital with a greater than 50 percent chance of losing her uterus, he said, and a 10 percent chance of developing sepsis and dying.

“That weighs on me. I voted for that bill,” Collins said in a video clip that circulated on social media. “These are affecting people.”

The clip was picked up by CNN Politics, where commentator and former Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin said that in some states, the GOP was going too far with abortion restrictions.

“This very extreme position will backfire on Republicans — not having exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother — and I absolutely think we need to course-correct,” she said.

That’s the view of many political observers who are rewriting their predicted narratives for the midterm elections since voters began having their say at actual ballot boxes. A special election victory by Congressional candidate Pat Ryan — a New York Democrat who campaigned on abortion rights after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade — is a sign that Democrats are now more competitive in the midterms than anticipated.

Anger over the abortion ruling is translating into new voter registration and could fuel a pushback at the ballot box, several new analyses suggested.

Tom Bonier, CEO of the political data firm TargetSmart, dug deep into Ohio voter registration and reported that women out-registered men by an 11 percentage-point margin since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on June 24 — a huge change from the 2018 midterms.

Bonier documented the surge of women who registered to vote in Kansas after the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft ruling in early May before Kansans voted overwhelmingly to preserve abortion rights in the state’s first-in-the-nation referendum on the issue.

Not to be outdone, the New York Times’ The Upshot examined new voter registration in 10 states and found the number of women registering to vote rose by about 35 percent after the decision was leaked, while men had an uptick of 9 percent.

Meanwhile, abortion bans have taken effect in 12 states. But in one of those, Idaho, the Justice Department prevailed in a legal challenge that partially blocked criminal prosecution of doctors who perform abortions. A federal judge agreed with the Justice Department that Idaho’s abortion ban conflicts with the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires hospitals that receive federal funding to provide treatment in medical emergencies.

In Texas, the decision was the exact opposite. A federal judge agreed with Attorney General Ken Paxton that the state can’t be compelled by the federal government to save a pregnant woman’s life with an abortion.

In other news

Once vulnerable, N.H. Senator Maggie Hassan is suddenly benefiting from abortion ruling, other Democratic breaks – The Boston Globe.

Google, criticized for steering those search for abortion to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centres, takes steps toward clarity – Bloomberg

The aforementioned HBO series “House of the Dragon,” which requires both trigger and spoiler alerts for a brutal childbirth scene that was upsetting to many women.

Still, one of the showrunners told the L.A. Times that the women consulted during production offered positive feedback.  “Some felt it wasn’t violent enough,” he said.

Was it gratuitous – as was often said about its patriarchal forebear “Game of Thrones?” Was it transparent in its intentions, like a latter-season “Handmaid’s Tale”? I was surprised to discover it was written and filmed well before the Supreme Court ruling.

Mouse whisper

Appalling taste. According to The Economist, there are those Brits who are promoting Larry the Cat as the next British Prime Minister. Extraordinary how the Brits have embraced this serial murine killer. But then Larry has had to deal with Boris Knotgudonov, who has tried to portray himself as a cool cat, but turned out to be an appalling mouser.

Meanwhile, back in Hammersmith …

 

 

 

Modest Expectations – Sciacca

What a crazy world we live in. The former Prime Minister, for no valid reason whatsoever, sequestered all the major portfolios to himself except, it seems, Defence. He presented himself as the Dad of Australia, or thought he did, to propel him to an unlikely win in the 2019 elections over one of the most unelectable men the Labor Party had ever produced. And boy, have the Labor Party produced a number to be bestowed with such a title.

The problem with the Pentecostals is that their religion casts them into an alternative world, and while they may project a façade of easy charm, underneath is their use of the Bible as a weapon – to be accepted literally, or else.

When the dust of the miracle election settled, then the rapture settled in – Morrison, the Instrument of God emerged. Having mingled in my youth with some of these characters, I know their affable countenance quickly changes when you question the validity of their beliefs. My mother was a creationist, and I found out that it was unwise to broach this subject with an otherwise gentle and caring mother.

Hence, I stop pondering on the Morrison condition, because I believe pursuit of its roots will lead me into some dark recesses of the human condition, where to go is only to entangle oneself in a pointless dialectic.

What is clear is that Morrison should leave Parliament as soon as possible. The Elder Howard worries that it will damage the Liberal Party. I would suggest that it is already damaged by the number of fellow religious travellers linked into the party branches and by keeping Morrison there, he will still be able to try and assert influence, the evangelical knee-jerk. Already these antics in social media just emphasise the powerlessness of the Liberal Party leadership and/or its total enmeshment in a form of theological fascism more associated with the European Roman Catholic Church previously.

Morrison in many ways could become the Liberal Party equivalent of the Vicar of Stiffkey (pronounced Stewkey) whose bizarre behaviour, quite different may I add from that of Morrison, ended his life as a fairground exhibit who met his Maker while being mauled by a circus tiger. An unfortunate exit for a figure of fun.

While he is in Parliament, the Labor Party would be loath to go after the current Governor-General, whose behaviour in apparently using his position to solicit funding, presumably by Prime Ministerial fiat, would appear completely beyond acceptable. Those who say that the Governor-General should by necessity be a judge or senior lawyer have short memories. Remember that inglorious tosspot, John Kerr.

While Ninian Stephen and William Deane, both eminent jurists, on the other hand were two superb Governors-General, one should not forget one of the most effective was Bill Hayden, once a Queensland copper and no dullard.

No trunk Route to the top of Mount Elephant

There is one advertisement shown on television which intrigues me.  A young girl is seen driving a motorised billy cart up a grassy track towards a hill with a conical crown.  To me it looks very much like Mount Elephant, which guards the small township of Derrinallum.

Caprine power

The vehicle stalls and there are two other images which remind me very much of the township, which I passed through countless times when we owned a property at Port Fairy in the Western District. The familiar image of the gravel road leading around the conical summit, which hides the old scoria quarry from the highway with the “mother” gesticulating to her “daughter” who by then has teamed up with another billy carter with a more technically advanced cart. The road looks suspiciously like one near Derrinallum, where the highway both runs uphill in a westerly direction and through the township divided by a treed median strip.

It is characteristic that around all these extinct volcanoes in the Victorian Western District there is always a settlement at the base. Some of these volcanos have been disfigured by quarrying for red scoria. Some, like Mount Shadwell which overlooks Mortlake, has yielded semi-precious green stone called olivine which, together with very good meat pies, was always on sale at Mortlake.

The Hamilton Highway is mostly very straight and lined by small townships and hamlets.  It has always been a speedway, because police patrols were rare when I would drive the highway sometimes several times weekly. A former Premier of Victoria, Jeffrey Kennett, was pinged for speeding at a petrol pump called Berribank, so small is this hamlet. Then there was the horrendous crash when “the footie legend” Ron Barassi drove his Mercedes into a tree on the Western outskirts of another township, Lismore. His passenger was another famous Australian Rules footballer who was seriously injured. That accident occurred in the 1970s and the damaged tree stood for years as a survivor of excessive speed and the fact that trees don’t move out of the way.

But this is only background to what is the most significant reminder that Victoria has a convict heritage in that these stone walls at Derrinallum, made from volcanic basalt, were the product of convict labour. They are very observable being along the highway, half hidden in the grass, although there are places where the casual observer may stop and walk unimpeded to see and touch them. Apart from these honeycomb basalt walls just out of Derrinallum, there are 3,000 kilometres of these walls in the Western District, because the ancient lava flows left otherwise arable and grazing land strewn with rocks.

Mount Elephant

Making a drystone wall was a convenient way of using the stone when labour was cheap. The walls incidentally proved a barrier to the rabbits which one of the colonial squires, Tom Austin, helpfully introduced when releasing 13 wild rabbits onto his estate in 1859. Oh, what a legacy these stalwarts of Victorian Victoria unleashed upon our Land. Rabbits reminded him of the Old Country and he introduced foxes also, so he could have a bit of redcoat and jolly tally-ho-ing – the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable, as Oscar Wilde termed fox hunting.

Convict transportation to Victoria ended in 1848 before the Gold Rush, and therefore convicts were not the only source of labour.  The unsuccessful. prospector was another. Given that the Western District abutted the Goldfield area, it is not unsurprising that skilled Celtic wallers who moved South built more of the walls and also taught the landowners how to make them.

Australia’s stone walls are taller, thicker and deeper than elsewhere in the world. Local bluestone and scoria in addition to the honeycomb basalt were used and the walls reflect the desires of the owner, the purpose (varying sizes depending on whether controlling sheep or cattle with not unsurprisingly the tallest for personal glorification), the preferences of the wallers and the availability of rocks littering the paddocks.

Dry stone walls rely on selection and placement of stones, together with a combination of gravity and friction. “There is a place for every stone” – stones are not broken or chipped, although each is tapped with a hammer to make it “settle”.

Walls are best constructed with two men working on opposite sides. Typical freestanding drystone walls are built with “throughstones” crowned with copestones, the centre being filled with smaller stones and rubble, so-called “hearting”.

Much of the walls visible along the Hamilton Highway have fallen, a result of pulling out stones on the chase after rabbits, rubbing by cattle, or pressure from trees. But enough remain for the girls in their “turbo-charged billycart” to drive along – perhaps.

Memories of a Pastoralist

Thomas Alexander Browne (Rolf Boldrewood) on the front steps of ‘Raby’ in Olive St, his Albury home.

One of the most intriguing books I have ever read is “Old Melbourne Memories” written in 1884 by Rolf Boldrewood, the pseudonym of Thomas Alexander Browne, whose initial venture as a pastoralist is described in this book. This was in The Western District in what is now Victoria near Portland. It should be appreciated that although he started from Melbourne, the Portland area whither he was going had already been settled by Edward Henty a year earlier than that of the establishment Melbourne on Port Philip Bay.

Browne settled on Squattlesea Mere, as he described it “about 50,000 acres of ‘wood and wold,’ mere and marshland, hill and dale. It was all my own – after a fashion – that is, I had but to receive my squatting license, under the hand of the Governor of the Australias, for which I paid ten pounds, and no white man could in any way disturb, harass, or dispossess me.

Westward were marshes; northward were what we know as “stony rises” where the cooled remains of lava flow “now matted with sward of kangaroo grass”, but the piles of scoria and rocks were too sharp to ride horses over them. South were green “luxuriant” plains able to sustain two or three thousand head of cattle. Against this mixed picture, he reported on the disputes between whitefella and blackfella. Most of this centred on the indigenous propensity for rustling, both cattle and sheep. After all, the blackfella had no concept of titles. It was not property in the English sense but their ancestral land, and any thing on blackfella land should be shared – simple communism.

This led to what Browne describes as the Eumeralla War, which was essentially a sporadic battle between spear and carbine.  Browne initially built with his “men” a sod hut, and then a three-room split slab hut, probably plastered with mortar into which chopped grass or horse hair was packed. The roof was of stringy bark. A rude chimney enabled a fire to be set in the general living room which also served as the sleeping quarters for his stockmen.

A stockyard was built, enclosed by seven foot high walls, so tightly constructed that “a rat could not get through” – and robust enough that “a stampede of elephants” would be needed to level it.  Browne mentions a number of  property owners, without specific indication that they had built anything resembling his palisade.

As Browne wrote: “among the Rocks there were innumerable caves, depressions, and hiding-places of all kinds, in which the natives had been used to find secure retreat and safe hiding in days gone by. Whether they could not bear to surrender to the white man these cherished solitudes, or whether it was the shortsighted, childish anxiety to possess our goods and chattels, can hardly ever be told. Whatever the motive, it was sufficient, as on all sides at once came tales of wrong-doing and violence, of maimed and slaughtered stock, of homicide or murder.”

Thus, there was mayhem, with nightly incursions of the blackfellas in hit and run, taking stock if they could. The walled stockyards attested to defence in such a hostile environment.

One solution for the white settlers to quell the indigenous people was to use native mounted troopers armed with carbines; they proved a major determinant in the defeat and subjugation of the local blackfellas.

I was reminded of this by a recent episode of ABC’s Backroads, where they wheeled out in Tumut what seems to be the essence of modern Aboriginal elder, with a homely elderly face encircled by grey hair and beard which seamlessly seem to intersect. This vision of the peaceful Aboriginal jars against history which tells that the above troopers were recruited from the NSW border area in the early part of the 19th century, far away from the Aboriginals of the Western district.

So zealous were these troopers that they effectively subjugated the locals. Browne recalls being shown a bullet scar in the chest of an Aboriginal man who asserted that: “Police-blackfella ‘plenty kill him’” during that period, and on recovery immediately offered himself as a shepherd to one of the white landowners. “… being convinced that lawless proceedings were likely to bring him to a bad end.”

The concept of employing native troopers originated in Victoria but was quickly adopted in both NSW and  Queensland; in Queensland in particular it seems an Aboriginal legacy about which there is selective amnesia. It is pity because much Aboriginal heritage implies a warrior class; and it seems that Aboriginals without cultural links to the locals were used as effective enforcement for subjugation of their fellow blackfellas.

I would like to know where this fits in the modern narrative, but are Aboriginal people prepared to discuss this part of blackfella history?

As a footnote, Browne wrote:

“The Aboriginal blacks on and near the western coast of Victoria – near Belfast, Warrnambool and Portland – had always been noted as a breed of savages by no means to be despised. They had been for untold generations accustomed to a dietary scale of exceptional liberality. The climate was temperate; the forest abounded in game; wild fowl at certain seasons were plentiful; while the sea supplied them with fish of all sorts and sizes, from a whale (stranded) to whitebait. No wonder that they were a fine race, physically and otherwise – the men tall and muscular, the women well-shaped and fairly good-looking.”

He respected the local Aboriginals as he went on to write – “grandly-formed specimens of humanity, dignified in manner, and possessing an intelligence by no means to be despised, comprehending a quick sense of humour, as well as a keenness of perception”.

But not a mention of cropping or organised horticulture. Browne was a perspicacious man. I’m sure he would have mentioned them if there had been any.

I believe that if there is an Aboriginal Voice, it should recognise its history, and not place it in some monochromatic rose-tinted light, selectively ignoring that Aboriginals may have been the first inhabitants, but one with many cultural differences, which led to some good and some bad consequences, Otherwise the Voice becomes one of Delusion.

Pooch, Have I got some Chocolate Fudge for You!

In the USA, National Dog Day is coming up Aug. 26, and The Boston Globe has identified some places for cool, sweet treats in Boston for both you, the dog owner(s) and your dog(s) to celebrate.

If you are into dark chocolate studded with macadamia nuts, you may initially allay the sweet tooth of the dog, but you have fed the dog a double whammy in terms of a death warrant. Muscle weakness in the hind legs is a sure sign of the pooch has been nibbling macadamia nuts. But chocolate, particularly cooking and dark chocolate, contains theobromine, which unlike us humans, dogs cannot metabolise and hence it builds to toxic levels.

Read further at your own risk! (Blog master)

“While it may be hard to resist your pet’s sweet, pleading face when he or she stares at your cone”, it is best to avoid lactose. However, here are the further American recommendations your dog (I refuse to use the words “four-legged friend”) can enjoy a cold treat, including specially made doggie ice creams.

That said, we found a few tail-waggers (God, more abhorrence!).

I am indebted to the Boston Globe for this further insight.

  1. THE BEN & JERRY’S TRUCK

Ben & Jerry’s Doggie Dessert Pop Culture Tour winding its way up the East Coast, hitting Gloucester Aug. 20-21. Find the treat truck at the dog-friendly Gloucester Waterfront Festival on Aug. 20 and 21.

  1. SCOOP SHOPS

You can also snag a scoop of Ben & Jerry’s at some of their brick-and-mortar area shops (Newbury Street, for example, has Doggie Desserts listed on their online menu) or pet stores for home freezing. Doggie Desserts come in two flavours: Rosie’s Batch made with pumpkin and mini cookies and Pontch’s Mix made with peanut butter and pretzel swirls.

  1. JB’S DOGGIE DELIGHTS (No, not me subtly advertising)
No need to walk the dog …

There’s also a local doggie ice cream truck: JB’s Doggie Delights serves Boston area pups. The hand-made treats are made with minimal ingredients, such as peanut butter and honey, and are safe for dogs’ sensitive stomachs. Track truck stops on Facebook or Instagram (sic).

  1. JP LICKS

A favourite Boston ice cream shop for humans also offers dairy-free pup-friendly treats. Next time you hit up one of JP Licks’ area locations for a cone of your own, order your dog a dairy-free Cow Paw, “a lightly flavoured peanut butter sorbet with a touch of honey served with a kosher dog bone.”

It sounds like a kids’ book, but The Bear & The Rat is actually a dog ice cream, made from frozen yogurt with prebiotics and digestive enzymes for doggy tummies. Your pet can enjoy flavours like bacon and peanut butter; banana and peanut butter, or pumpkin and cinnamon. In Boston, according to their site, you’ll find them at various Polkadog shops and Whole Foods among other spots.

  1. PUPPY SCOOPS & HOGGIN’ DOGS

Lactose-free Puppy Scoops, formulated for doggy digestion, comes in flavours like vanilla, peanut butter, and maple bacon. It’s in powdered form, so you can order online. Just add water, freeze, and let the tail-wagging begin. Ditto with Hoggin’ Dogs in flavours like cheese and banana. Both are made by Puppy Cake, as are Smart Scoops, “created for dogs that have sensitive tummies.” You might pair a scoop with cake to celebrate very good boys and girls on Aug. 26.

Can you imagine such treats being sold at The Annual Kelpie Muster at Casterton. Oh, I forgot, the Muster is in June – weather is a bit cold for JP Licks.

Therefore, one recommendation could be to move the Kelpie Muster to later in the year, so the burghers of The Western District can invest in Puppy Scoops or JP licks. After all, Australia did embrace KFC and McDonald’s, those toxic American invaders. So why deprive the dogs of American delights?

Yet you cry; “Surely Casterton, that centre of the Australian tradition would be immune from McDonald’s or KFC.”

Wrong – on both accounts! “Puppy Scoops” await.

You must have heard this from Prince Rupert

Golf has a predilection if you better par by one is to call it a birdie, two under par eagle, three under par albatross and four under par a condor. That is holing out in one on a par five hole, I understand has only been recorded five times.

Four under par …

However, as the golf courses are stretching to par seven, a new bird as been introduced, an ostrich equivalent to five under par. Nobody has been recorded yet in achieving this unlikely target.

The longest drive? In 1974, 64 year old Mike Austin drove a 515 yard on a 450 yard par-4 using a steel-shafted, 43.5-inch persimmon driver and balata ball while competing in the U.S. National Seniors Open Championship at the Desert Rose Resort, Las Vegas. Both club and ball have been replaced by more technologically advanced equipment, but that day there was a hot following wind of 27 mph, and the golf course was at an altitude of 2,000 feet, which all helps.

But wait, there is more.

Carl Cooper had a disastrous start to the third hole of the 1992 Texas Open when he earned the unofficial longest drive ever. His blast towards the green bounced past the green, beyond the sixth tee, and eventually came to a stop behind the twelfth green. After the ball finally came to a halt, it had travelled 787 yards, but not on the one hole.

So given the right conditions anything can happen in golf – even an ostrich from the sand.

Mouse Whisper

Australia’s official war historian, C.E.W. Bean, who wrote of Monash as a “pushy Jew”, and Rupert Murdoch’s father, Keith Murdoch, conspired during the war to try to prevent Monash winning the active command of Australian forces on the Western Front. Murdoch later opposed Monash’s efforts to build the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne – Tony Wright.

Over to you yon Keith Murdoch hagiographer Eric Beecher!  Oh, from the mouse that whispered.

John Monash and Shrine of Remembrance

Modest Expectations – Brentwood

I am bemused to see Peter Dutton setting a confrontational course against China. He is charting a no-win situation. Whether the Chinese mainland invades Taiwan or not is an exercise in the pointless for our foreign policy. If we were to send any troops, which seems to be our knee-jerk reflex whenever the Americans call their allies to arms, you would just wonder why.

One of the many Chinese artefacts in Taiwan

Are the Chinese prepared to destroy a sophisticated industrial machine and repository of a large part of Chinese heritage in order to prove a point? Maybe they will, because if you take the long view, the Chinese may believe it to be a cleansing tonic. I always wondered whether they would be prepared to destroy all the priceless artefacts that were taken from China after the defeat of the Nationalists in 1949. My Chinese expert shrugged – he said he doubted whether they would care. The main game is to suppress a democratic Taiwan.

Chinese expansionism not for first time was into Tibet. Its system of repressive feudal theocracy which the Chinese overwhelmed has been sugar-coated by the long-lived effervescent Dalai Lama, who however has moved down from a Nobel prize winner eminence to a lamasery relic that nobody influential cares about. The price of living too long – “if you aspire to holiness, die young” is an aphorism which the Nazarene Christ showed.

It was easy for the Chinese to supplant Portuguese rule in Macau, which was coming to an end in the Far East as Macau had become a decadent gambling joint, sheltering criminals. Then there has been Hong Kong. I suspect the Chinese had never forgotten their humiliation by the British and the French in sacking the Imperial Palace.

The Chinese are there for the long haul. They have long memories. So they abided all the British pageantry, and then when they were ready, they tossed the 50 year agreement into the diplomatic rubbish bin, and took over Hong Kong lock, stock and barrel with the customary charmless brutality.

But I remember the fuss in the 1950s over Quemoy (or more commonly called Kinman now) and the Matsu Islands, which are within spitting distance of the Chinese mainland. Now 70 years later they still remain in the hands of Taiwan, despite in the intervening period the Chinese having taken over a number of disputed islands in the South China Sea and extended its commonweal to include both the Paracel and the Spratley islands between China and the Philippines. Having said this, after the  savage confrontation in the 1950s, the intervening cordial relations between these islands and the Mainland have soured with the advent of Xi Jinping. For instance, the ferry service between Quemoy and the mainland no longer runs.

The Chinese have constructed missile arsenals, aircraft hangars, radar systems and other military facilities in the Spratley Islands on Mischief Reef, Subi Reef and Fiery Cross. It remains to be seen if China will pursue the construction of military infrastructure on other coral atolls in the South China Sea.

America has no claims itself but has deployed navy ships and aircraft for decades to patrol and promote free navigation in international waterway and airspace. Other countries – the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei – claim all or part of the sea, through which approximately $5 trillion worth of goods are shipped every year.

China routinely objects.

Hainan is almost the same size as Taiwan, but is a specific Chinese Economic Zone famed for its coconuts and tourism. It lies about 1,000 kilometres to the south of Taiwan, hugging the coast. There is no question of it not being part of China.

But this irritant Taiwan! Thousands of years before ethnic Chinese settled on Taiwan, aboriginal tribes were hunting and farming the land. They probably came from the Philippines and today constitute two per cent of the population. China held the Island until the Japanese acquired it as a result of the First Sino-Japanese War.  From 1895 it was a very model of a community where the native Chinese and Japanese lived and worked together harmoniously.

Then, after the fall of Japan in 1945, the status of Taiwan became ambiguous, paralleling the ambiguity of the continued recognition of Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (R.O.C.) as the True China, despite the fact that he had been roundly defeated in 1948/49. He and the remnants of his army, together with a considerable amount of looted treasure, fled to Taiwan. In fact, he was just leading yet another invading force of Taiwan. He then set up a virtual dictatorship which, at the time being the Cold War, the Americans supported. Called the White Terror period, even though Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975, the military rule extended to 1987.

I peripherally experienced this conflict in 1956 when I was on the crew manifest of the S.S. Taiping; well, for a time I occupied the assistant wireless officer’s cabin at least. I remember it well, the ship being “buzzed” by American Starfighters on the South China Sea, with the Matsu islands providing a background on the horizon. Let me say, they came in twice at funnel height – quite a performance.

Over the years, Mainland China took the permanent seat on the United Nations and reduced the number of countries maintaining diplomatic relations to 14 plus the Vatican State. Most of countries are in Central and South America plus the Caribbean; also a few of the Pacific microstates and in Africa, Eswatini.

Now all that remains is the independence of Taiwan – an enclave within the Chinese diaspora. If Taiwan had been maintained strictly as a Fortress for the R.O.C, with its own Potala Palace to remind the world of its oligarchic past – in one case theocracy, in the other a military junta – then Taiwan would be solely dependent on being propped up by the Americans as an anachronism.  Taiwan is far from that – being a modern democratic industrialised country – anathema to China and yet lodged in an artificial enclave constructed by China.

The Chinese nightmare is for Taiwan to declare independence, and call the Chinese bluff. That is an important card in its hand. The only matter of importance is that war does not extend to Australia, with the Chinese community taking up cudgels for one or other of the sides.

The mountains of Taiwan

The Chinese must look at the terrain of Taiwan and shudder, but as the Chinese Ambassador to Australia, in his speech implied, they have 1.4 billion people to lose (assuming that his assumption is that all 1.4 billion Chinese think as he does about Master Xi Jinping and his infallibility) and the Taiwanese only 22 million in any conflict, which could yet just go on year after year; and in the meantime the planet burns. Nature does not take sides. We all die.

John Knight

I started off with a mention of Dutton, elected as Leader of the Opposition, who has continued to behave as if he was still a Queensland copper. Yet he had been elected unopposed as Leader of the Liberal Party.

Whereas when Billy Snedden was elected by a margin of one vote to the position of the Leader of the Opposition after five ballots in 1972, it indicated that there was a solid group who voted against him. Among them, it was generally believed that he was a nice enough fellow but a policy boofhead.

After all he had been the Treasurer in the failed McMahon government, and McMahon had become an embarrassment propped up by the NSW Division of the Liberal Party. A familiar theme?

However, if you looked overall at the standard of Snedden’s office, the concept of “boofhead” did not quite gel, as he was considered to have recruited some smart individuals. At one time just after his first group of advisers had assembled, an office straw poll was held of those who voted for the McMahon Government in 1972 election, and the answer was no-one.

One of those recruited was John Knight, who was working in the Department of Foreign Affairs before Snedden appointed him as his senior Private Secretary. When John Knight had been originally recruited to the Department of Foreign Affairs there had been 400 applicants for 15 jobs. From the start he was potentially a high calibre diplomat and already had had one posting as a third secretary in the High Commission in New Delhi.

John Knight

As he showed many times, his certain adroitness, his ability to grasp and magnify the positive elements of the conversation showed he had learnt well. Snedden asked him to see if he could organise a trip to China for Snedden.  Since Whitlam was going later that year, it provided the opportunity to develop a bipartisan approach to China.

The initial spokesman for Foreign Affairs was Nigel Bowen, whose head was now in another space after his defeat as Leader given the exhausting exhaustive ballot. In 1973, Bowen retired from politics and was appointed as Chief Judge in Equity in the Supreme Court of New South Wales. He was appointed first Chief Judge (later Chief Justice) of the Federal Court of Australia in 1976 and held this until his retirement in 1990.

This in effect meant John Knight had very much free rein, which he exerted with discretion, but secured an invitation for Snedden to visit Beijing. John got on very well with Andrew Peacock, their progressive views matched. By the time Snedden went to China, Peacock had replaced the outgoing Bowen as Foreign Affairs spokesman.

There have been mixed reports about his visit, because it was not the play sheet that Whitlam wanted, given that he had already appointed his former adviser, Stephen Fitzgerald as the Australian Ambassador to China. Snedden visited, and while he did not meet Mao Tse-Tung, whom Whitlam did, his approach was in marked contrast from the previous Coalition government. When we were there, Fitzgerald could not have been more helpful, and in fact let us in on some interesting snippets he overheard pass between our Chinese hosts. After all, it was not the most stable time in China with the Gang of Four rampant.

However, a report of the visit is another story. As I wrote earlier, Snedden was convinced that the Liberal Party should recognise the P.R.C.  governing China rather than the R.O.C. holed up in Taiwan, as Whitlam had formally done on behalf of Australia at the end of 1972 with ambassadors being exchanged between Australia and China in 1973.

John Knight provided the advice in relation to China. Watching Dutton stridently asserting an aggressive policy makes one wonder where he is getting his advice. Despite being still under thirty, John Knight provided shrewd progressive advice, as he did in facilitating Snedden’s visit to China. I still have a diary of that visit.

By August 1973, Snedden had been to China, met senior government figures and returned. It is agreeable to have a friendly ally, as I found out when the Taiwan Government sponsored my visit some years ago when I was involved with an international society concerned with the quality of health care. But in the end, the Taiwan trip was a junket. But does Dutton only want to be left with a bowl of whey as his China policy as I write this blog in August 2022?

Visiting China made me feel that I was a participant in a major change and, as a result of Snedden’s visit, the Opposition reversed its position and reconciled itself to a new order – a new order which had been precipitated in 1971 by the Government of China assuming its rightful place in the United Nations.

John Knight Memorial Park

John Knight later went on to become the first Liberal Party Senator for the ACT in 1975; he was re-elected in 1977 but died of a heart attack while water skiing in 1981 at the age of 37. His memorial is a park in Belconnen, a 12 hectare area located on the eastern foreshores of Lake Ginninderra. He died way too young.

Malevich – a Ukrainian pathfinder

The effect of Malevich’s exposure to the new art was electrifying. In the three years between 1909 and1912 he went from being an unremarkable provincial painter to producing some of the major works of art of this century. In that time he assimilated the modern corpus, mastering it entirely, and he began to take his own direction in full consciousness of his powers. – Charlotte Douglas

Last week I related our pilgrimage to the Magritte Centennial Exhibition.

About eight years ago, there was an exhibition of Malevich’s work at the Tate Gallery in London. I well remember the trip down the Thames to the Tate Modern.

I came away with a memento.

I look at this figurine – a wooden model drawn from the quartet of multi-coloured figures in the Malevich painting entitled The Athletes, probably painted in 1931 and hanging in The Russian Museum.

The rendering of the human form as faceless, multi-coloured athletes was supposed to evoke how Russian saints are depicted in iconography. In particular, the shape and placement of the feet along a solid black line imitates the stance in the icons.

Kazimir Malevich was born in 1879 and died at the age of 56 in 1935. He was Ukrainian born in Kiev of ethnic Polish parents. He has become one of the most influential abstract artists whose work confronts the concrete concept of objectivity – the tools of the natural world.

Malevich went through an early phase of experimentation, often using peasants as subject matter, the yeoman stock of his Mother country. Then he entered a phase of cubism painting, before his signature Supremacist phase. Here he reduced his depiction of the human condition to geometric forms, one being a black square on a white background which seems to have mesmerised a whole generation of art critics.  This time coincided with the Russian Revolution.

He is remembered through his painting conceptualising Suprematism “to access the supremacy of pure feeling” as he put it. His Supremacist painting is what makes Malevich standout. Essentially an exercise in decomposition he reduces the natural world into multicoloured images arranged in weightless space. Once you thus attempt to explain Suprematicism, you invoke visions of space where images are precisely organised into geometric forms; in many case it seems more reductionist than entering so supreme form – personally I do not understand why these paintings are associated with the Fourth dimension, which I always think about as the image of a man, holding an image of himself, infinitely repeated (see old Weeties packets).

Suprematist Composition 1916

Yet trying to intellectualise Supremacism does not detract from the brilliance of his painted work, without having to get into his mind and all its entanglements for an explanation.

Following the death of Lenin with the rise of Stalin, Malevich modified his paintings to show identifiable figures, while maintaining his basic supremacist analysis. The Athletes is part of this period. After his death, much of his work was destroyed by Stalin’s regime, but enough has survived, notably in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Perversely much of Malevich works are also held now in Russia; enough said.

Mal-a-Prop

When will it end? Below is an opinion piece by Alyssa Rosenberg in The Washington Post. Alyssa Rosenberg writes about the intersection of culture and politics for The Post’s Opinions section. Rosenberg holds an Arts degree in humanities from Yale University. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times and many other publications.

This is one of an increasing number of articles where Trump is no longer perceived as a politician, but as the leader of a quasi-religious cult. Whether Trump is inciting a Jonestown scenario or not, you can be sure that he would not be present if Trumpland faced a Jonestown type Apocalypse.

Last week, a man whom authorities have identified as Ricky Shiffer was shot and killed in a stand-off with police officers after he allegedly tried to break into a FBI office in Cincinnati. Reports suggest that he may have been motivated by a strong devotion to former president Donald Trump and by anger at the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

On Thursday evening, The Post reported that according to sources, the search at Mar-a-Lago was aimed in part at recovering “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons.” Trump’s response? A post on Truth Social, the platform he founded, declaring, “Nuclear weapons issue is a Hoax,” and a false suggestion that “Barack Hussein Obama” had done something similar.

But whatever we may learn about Shiffer’s motivations and the results of the FBI search, one thing is clear: The number of people who have died seemingly in service of an idol as unworthy as Donald Trump is tragic.

It’s one thing for Trump to relieve his followers of their money for dubious causes. The former president has raked in millions of dollars ostensibly dedicated to political work, when in reality what money has been spent has gone to Trump’s personal expenses.

But it’s different when people start dying.

Four of Trump’s supporters died at the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol: Ashli Babbit, who was shot while trying to climb through a broken window; Kevin Greeson, who suffered a fatal heart attack; Benjamin Philips, who succumbed to a stroke; and Rosanne Boyland, whose official cause of death was “acute amphetamine intoxication,” but who was caught up in a crush of bodies on the Capitol grounds. Christopher Stanton Georgia died by suicide later that month after he was arrested on unlawful entry charges stemming from Jan. 6; he pleaded not guilty before his death.

Now comes the death of Shiffer, who was also apparently at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Some might be tempted to create distance from these tragedies through mockery, or by treating Trump’s devotees as oddities.

That impulse — to disparage or dismiss the weird and extreme — seems to undergird a 2020 New York Times profile of a widowed farmer in India who adopted Trump as a personal deity, then collapsed and died after taking to his room and refusing to eat when Trump tested positive for covid-19. It’s also the sentiment behind so much snide social-media chatter. For instance: “some dude woke up today and decided to commit suicide by cop because the former host of celebrity apprentice wasn’t allowed to keep the top secret documents he stole from the White House.”

It’s easy to scoff. But this sort of commentary ignores the sadness running through so many of these stories.

Ashli Babbitt was looking for meaning because her military career had stalled out, and her pool company was failing. The QAnon conspiracy theory — which presents Trump as a bulwark against a secret cabal of powerful paedophiles — gave Rosanne Boyland purpose and a framework for understanding the world as she struggled with addiction.

The absurdity and maliciousness (sic) of the cause for which these people have died only compounds the horror of their deaths. How is it that no one, no institution, could offer something more substantive than the manifest hollowness of Trump and Trumpism?

An essential part of Trump’s malign magic is its impermeability. Suggest that his followers deserve better — whether that is an actual infrastructure package or a leader who appeals to their best qualities rather than their basest — and you’re accused of exhibiting the very contempt that made Trump attractive in the first place. Suggest Trump is scamming his followers, and you’re a tool of the deep state. According to Trump and his many enablers, there is no evidence that isn’t planted or manufactured, no moral act that is disqualifying, no act for which Trump himself can be held responsible.

Even the people who seek to martyr themselves in Trump’s defence can be redefined and reinterpreted through this corrupt logic: On social media, Trump fans aren’t celebrating Shiffer as a Trumpist patriot. They’re dismissing him as a false flag planted to paint the FBI in a flattering light.

Those of us who live outside the boundaries of this mad realm may be tempted to count ourselves lucky. Still, we should be concerned for the residents of Trumpland for their own safety. And if that’s not enough, we should care because the people who die for Donald Trump may someday take others with them.

Mouse Whisper

As I sat under the breakfast table, I heard him ask, “what had Brendan Murphy as Head of the Department of Health known about the Morrisonian hi-jinks. It would appear inconceivable that he did not know about the arrangements, if his Minister Hunt knew. He should be asked as to what he knew, because this serious breach of conventions at the very least affects ministerial responsibility and that of the Head of Department. I shudder to think what would have happened if Morrison had been re-elected, given his recent statements. Would he have sought the Governor-General to also appoint God to the Ministry?”

He also wondered about the mental acuity of the Governor-General. “This guy after all headed the Australian Defence Forces. Did he show the same level of judgement when he was boss there as he showed with this secret collaboration?”

Well, I think that is what he said, reporting from my mouse pad.

The Health Minister with the Minister for Health

Modest Expectation – Irma is Not My sister

There has been flooding of the Murrumbidgee River this week, and Wagga Wagga has been one city where there has been some flooding. I know the city well, and where the flood seems to have its greatest impact, as reported, seems to be in North Wagga Wagga and particularly the caravan area adjoining the Wagga Beach. It has always been somewhat anomalous to see a sign to the Wagga Beach, which is inland and not on the coast. However, the major rivers – both the Murray and the Murrumbidgee – have areas of sea-mimicking beaches in spots along their respective river courses. One of these is in Wagga Wagga, and after a major flood there is always the chance that one will find pieces of jasper on the beach, as I did once.

My find was a substantial piece about the size of a hand. Jasper is a microcrystalline form of quartz, usually a deep red due to the iron impurities. Further up the River is the village of Wee Jasper, close to the Brindabella ranges south of Canberra and near where the Burrinjuck Dam is located. Wee Jasper was named unsurprisingly by an old Scot who found small pieces of jasper at the site. So, Jasper and Murrumbidgee are linked … as is flooding.

The flooding is not catastrophic, as we crossed the river further north of Wagga Wagga at Gundagai, where the river splits the town of 2,000 people into North and South Gundagai.  Here there is a large flood plain. There was evidence of flooding, in fact massive flooding in parts, whereas in other parts there were cattle and sheep grazing on soggy ground. I did not see any houses underwater but then we were on the highway, where the bridgework is high above any flood line. I well remember the old wooden bridge and the old railway bridge – all were constructed high above the Murrumbidgee River and its adjoining flood plain.

Gundagai learnt its lesson early, as in 1852, the whole township was swept away by floods, with a loss of 89 lives, then a third of the population. The death toll, the highest ever in an Australian flood, would have been even more if some of the local Aboriginals had not paddled their canoes out and saved upwards of 40 people. There was a re-allocation of lands so that residences were built above the flood line, but not before the settlement was hit with another flood in the following year.

Yarri and Jacky Jacky – flood rescuers

I have travelled the Hume Highway, the major four lane artery between Melbourne and Sydney, countless times but rarely if ever have I crossed such a flooded Murrumbidgee River. The road builders have got it right.

As the Daily Advertiser reported: Gundagai escaped significant damage over the weekend despite major flooding along the Murrumbidgee River, which peaked at just over 9.02 metres on Saturday afternoon.

Moderate flooding conditions continued on Sunday and State Emergency Service Gundagai unit commander Ross Tout said volunteer crews had responded to one car crash and two livestock rescues.

“We have pretty much finished here as the river is dropping down. We have done a lot of running around with the council to organise the clearing of bridges,” he said. “The river is going to stay reasonably high for a while as they’re going to keep on getting water out of Burrinjuck Dam.

“We were pretty safe here in Gundagai, there were no evacuations, no houses in the water … Gundagai is designed well for floods.”

Run, Oliver Hoare, Run

To my chagrin, I had never heard of Oliver Hoare before this week. This is because if you are a gun track and field athlete, there is no point hanging around Australia. Hoare won the Commonwealth Games 1500 metres against a world class field, in record time. There have been a number of pretenders to the class of 50’s, culminating in that extraordinary win by Herb Elliott in the 1500 metres at the 1960 Rome Olympic games, when nobody came near him. After all, he had heralded this success at the 1958 Cardiff Commonwealth games, when Australia filled all three places in the mile – Merv Lincoln and Albie Thomas finishing behind Elliot.

Elliot inherited the mantle from John Landy, who always seemed to be beaten, because he  was the one who ran from the front and therefore he was the sitting target as he was in the Vancouver Games when he looked back over the wrong shoulder and the Englishman Roger Bannister burst through on the outside to beat him; and uncharacteristically in the Olympics Games 1500 metres final in Melbourne in 1956, Landy got caught in the ruck but still finished a valiant third.

I had no idea about Hoare, as I watched him line up for the final of the Birmingham Commonwealth Games 1500 metres. I saw him get passed in the last lap and thought, here was another creditable fourth or fifth coming up. I remembered the career of Craig Mottram, who promised and promised…

Not to be this time. I witnessed one of the great athletic feats by an Australian track athlete, rivalling Ralph Doubell’s win in the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games 800 metres, when he overpowered the Kenyan, Wilson Kiprugut, in the last 100 metres, as Hoare did this week to his fellow competitors, including two Kenyans.

Landy, Elliot and Doubell all trained in Australia in an era when athletics was a prelude to a professional career elsewhere, and before the Iron Curtain countries, America and certain of the European countries instigated virtual professionalism and moreover systematic cheating through the various cocktails of drugs, including “blood doping”.

Yet here was Oliver Hoare who, early in the year, had won the Wanamaker Mile at the Armory in New York, where it has been held since 2012.  The Prize money for winning is modest: $3,000, then 2nd place $1,500; 3rd place $1,000; 4th place $759; 5th place $500; 6th place $300. Still the event attracts the best middle distance runners in the world.

The indoors Armory track is rubber and the mile requires eight laps of the surface. It makes for a fast race with the speed on from the start by having one of the runners being the designated pacemaker, running the first four circuits before dropping out.

Given that Channel 7 had overlooked him in their pre-game publicity, it was difficult to watch as the following day, the Channel tried to retrieve the fact that their know-all commentator, Bruce McAvaney, had missed this guy. Moreover, they had the cheek to try and push McAvaney to front and centre with Hoare rolled out as an appendage to try and retrieve the Omission by the Oracle. But to be fair, most of us did also.

The Salon of 1846

Baudelaire

I have just finished picking my way through The Salon of 1846 by Charles Baudelaire, who is remembered as the poet author of Fleurs de Mal. Baudelaire led a dissolute life, but when he wrote his review of the pictures in the exhibition, he was still only 25 years old. As has been written, it was not a particularly good exhibition. There were several major painters of the period who had bypassed the salon.

It was an unstable time in Paris (and France as a whole), as the government of Louis Phillipe was under fire because of the very limited voting franchise – France was shuttling between Empire and Republic, but the great mass of the French people was shut out of government – after all élite is not an English word.

In fact, Baudelaire is writing his review of painting two years before 1848, when Europe was eventually convulsed by revolution provoked initially in France; and against a backdrop of famine across Europe and consequently migration of the oppressed to a “Newer World”, where they might savour freedom.

Michael Fried is the name of a prominent art critic rather than the title of a Salvador Dali picture, and in a foreword to the most recent publication of these Baudelaire’s essays he writes: “Structurally, the Salon of 1846 comprises a dedication (“To the Bourgeois”) followed by eighteen short sections, each bearing a title. Not all the sections are equally crucial to his overall argument, but taken together they are remarkably consistent; the task of someone like myself who seeks to introduce this deceptively simple-seeming text is to do justice to that consistency as well as to the particular vision of painting and criticism it attempts to convey.”

Baudelaire has mastered the skill of every chapter being an island but fitting into a coherent archipelago. Therefore, I find that I can read one chapter, and it makes sense without it being in some continuity. Yet it is not a book of aphorisms – sprinkled with self-conscious wisdom.

It is difficult to excerpt the text itself because much of the criticisms relate to painters who have been long forgotten. Baudelaire admired Delacroix and his interpretation of “la héroïsme de la vie moderne” Baudelaire methodically takes us through not only Delacroix but also another painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, illuminating his belief that “the pursuit of the ideal must be paramount in artistic expression”. With Baudelaire, there is mixture of admiration and disdain, given that the salon audience was predominantly the bourgeoisie, itself in a state of flux as France lurched from monarchy to republic.

I must say that I found the selection of subject matter and paintings hung at that 1846 Salon as all very much painted in shades of umber and russet with splashes of more optimistic colours. They are an incredibly gloomy set that made me feel you are wandering around a poorly lit cathedral. There is a Corot, and I have always liked these almost silhouette countryside paintings. Here exhibited it was Vue prise dans le Forêt de Fontainebleu, which conformed very much to the Corot formula.

But perhaps the pictures of the Red Indians would not be found next to the Biblical Mary or Rebecca. The more you look at the array of neoclassical paintings the more I understood the mood of Baudelaire – the rebel in the style of Stendhal and Balzac; but I am sure Baudelaire had a tricky mind.

Magritte

Among the satirical questions, one is asked, is “Name five famous Belgians?”

Well, Rene Magritte was one.

I had always admired Magritte’s paintings. I had a print of Dominion of Light (L’empire des Lumières) in my Melbourne office in 4 Treasury place, then the Old Customs Office. I do not remember which one it was of the 17 versions that Magritte painted, but I loved the juxtaposition of the darkened buildings against the backdrop of blue sky dotted with white cumulus. Surreal; paradox … to me it represented the confusion of life dependent on senses.

To me, surrealism is irony in painting.

L’empire des lumieres, 1961

I am not on my own in admiration of this work. A 1961 version of Dominion of Light, one of the largest from these paintings of the same name, was offered at Sotheby’s earlier this year. It came from the collection of Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet, the daughter of Magritte’s patron Pierre Crowet. The painting had remained unsold with the Crowet family and was on long-term loan to the Musée Magritte in Brussels from 2009 to 2020.

The price paid was almost £59.4m.

In 1998, a major exhibition to celebrate Magritte’s birth in 1898 was held in Brussels at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts. It was scheduled to run between 6 March and 28 June, and we belatedly decided in June to go. The problem was we grossly underestimated the availability of tickets and didn’t book ahead. Thus, this intrepid pair set off to Brussels with the belief that tickets would easier to procure on site; only to be proved wrong, so wrong.

We thought Martin Walker, then the European correspondent of The Guardian, whom I had invited to Australia to give the Cowper Oration might be able to help. Despite the fact that he and his wife, Julia Watson, a noted food writer, over dinner at their home in Brussels agreed to help, they also both drew blanks when they tried to get tickets.

As a last resort we went to the Exhibition, hoping that there may have been tickets returned. Again, shaking of heads. Then the clouds opened. A woman who had been listening to our pleas…. that we had come all the way from Australia… that we so loved Magritte… and so on, motioned to us. She was apparently a supervisor and it turned out she had the discretionary power to admit people, if they fitted within certain categories. Thus, we became representatives of an Australian Art Gallery of our name. She whispered you better agree on the name if you are challenged.

Then the deal was done. Courteously escorted through the barriers without ticket, without payment. We had made it. Magritte in all his magnificence lay before us. The exhibition did not disappoint. We were not challenged.

Ceci n’est pas une pipe!  It certainly was – in fact “deux pipes”.

Archie Roach – The Balladeer

Recognition of Archie in the American media, The Washington Post is reprinted below.

On 31 July, the day after Archie died, another magnificent singer, Judith Durham also died. The Washington Post too has acknowledged her contribution in her obituary.

Whose contribution to Australia culture was the more important.

Daniel Andrews, the Premier of Victoria, offered a State Funeral to the Durham family. He obviously thought her contribution should be recognised. Was Archie Roach’s family afforded the same recognition?

This American recognition of the life of Archie was republished in The Boston Globe.

When Archie Roach was 3 or 4, welfare officers came to take him away from his family in southeastern Australia. His aunt tried to scare them off with a gun, and his cousins tried to hide him under a pile of leaves. His mother wept; his father came running in from the fields. His memories of that moment were scattered, he said, but eventually he was carried away on a police officer’s shoulder, told that he was leaving for a picnic.

Mr. Roach was part of the “Stolen Generations,” the tens of thousands of Indigenous Australian children who were forcibly removed from their homes under government assimilation policies that lasted into the 1970s. As an adult, he struggled with alcoholism and homelessness, sleeping on the streets of Sydney and Melbourne while trying to reconnect with members of his family. He spent time in prison and in hospitals, suffering seizures that doctors linked to his alcohol abuse, and he attempted suicide while trying to dry out.

Music helped ease his pain. “It gave me something to fill the gap left by drinking,” he told People magazine. With his husky baritone, gentle guitar playing, and poignant lyrics about family, love and politics, he became one of Australia’s most renowned singer-songwriters, raising awareness of the Stolen Generations through his debut single, the 1990 ballad “Took the Children Away.”

“This story’s right, this story’s true; I would not tell lies to you,” he sang. “Like the promises they did not keep, and how they fenced us in like sheep. They said to us, ‘Come take our hand,’ set us up on mission land. They taught us to read, to write and pray.

“Then they took the children away.”

Mr. Roach was 66 when he died July 30 at a hospital in Warrnambool, Victoria, on Australia’s southeastern coast. His death was announced in a statement by his sons, Amos and Eban, who gave permission to use his name and image. (For cultural reasons, many Australian Indigenous people do not use a person’s name and image after death.) They said Roach had a “long illness” – he acknowledged struggling with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – but did not cite a specific cause.

A senior elder of the Gunditjmara and Bundjalung people, Mr. Roach was a leading advocate for Aboriginal communities, working with Indigenous children in juvenile detention centers and developing educational resources to help students learn about the Stolen Generations. The mistreatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was “as much a part of Australia’s history as Captain Cook and Burke and Wills,” he told the Guardian in 2020, referring to British explorers who helped map the continent.

“We still need to own the whole history of this country and be honest and courageous,” he said. “It’s the only way we’re going to move on.”

Mr. Roach drew on American country, soul, and gospel in his music, releasing 10 studio albums and opening for artists including Billy Bragg, Tracy Chapman, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Paul Simon. But he remained best-known for “Took the Children Away,” which he wrote in the late 1980s, a few years after historian Peter Read started using the term “Stolen Generations” to describe the forced removal of Indigenous children from their homes.

“It is a landmark,” the Melbourne Age wrote in 1990, shortly before the release of Mr. Roach’s debut album, “Charcoal Lane.” “Quite apart from its place in Aboriginal history, it is a great Australian folk song, perhaps the greatest since ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda.’ “

When Mr. Roach first started playing the song, audiences were dumbfounded. “I had goose bumps and the hairs went up on the back of my neck as he sang it, to dead silence from the audience,” singer-songwriter Paul Kelly told the Guardian, recalling a 1989 performance by Mr. Roach in Melbourne. “He finished the song and there was still dead silence. He just stood there for a minute, and there was still silence.

“Archie thought he’d bombed, that everybody hated it, so he just turned and started to walk offstage. And as he walked off, this applause started to build and build and build. … I’d never seen it before – people were so stunned at the end of the song that it took them a while just to gather themselves to applaud.”

Five years after Mr. Roach recorded the song, the Australian government launched a national inquiry into the Stolen Generations. It found that from 1910 to 1970, as many as one in three Indigenous children – many of mixed white and Aboriginal descent – were removed from their communities and taken to churches and foster homes, under the premise that a Western upbringing was more humane. Many of the children faced physical and sexual abuse, according to the inquiry, which likened the forced-removal policies to genocide.

After more than a decade of campaigning by Mr. Roach and other activists, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued an official government apology in 2008, acknowledging what he described as “a great stain on the nation’s soul.” Last year, Australia’s government agreed to pay about $280 million in reparations to survivors taken from their families.

“For years I’d walked around with this burden, not just of being removed, but of who I was removed from: my mother and father,” Mr. Roach told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. in 2018. “It was like I was carrying them around with me for years, on my back. When the apology came it was like the weight shifted and I felt light. To me it was like they were set free – Dad to return as a red-bellied black snake, and Mum to fly away as the wedge-tailed eagle,” a central figure in Aboriginal mythology.

Archibald William Roach was born in the rural town of Mooroopna, Victoria, on Jan. 8, 1956. One of seven children, he was living in Framlingham, not far from where he died, when he and some of his siblings were taken to a foster home. Officials tried to westernize him, including by attempting to comb his hair flat, and falsely told him his parents had died in a house fire.

Mr. Roach was adopted by Scottish immigrants in Melbourne, whom he described as kind and loving. But “there was always a restlessness in me, like a fault line waiting to rupture,” he recalled. Around age 14, he got a letter from a little-known sister, Myrtle, telling him their mother had died the previous week. He left home and spent the next 14 years searching for information about his past, eventually reuniting with two sisters and other relatives.

As a homeless teenager in Sydney, he met Ruby Hunter, a fellow Aboriginal musician who had also been taken from her family. They became musical partners, got married and referred to each other as “Dad” and “Mum,” terms of affection that they used in the absence of their birthparents.

By the late 1980s they had formed a band, the Altogethers, and moved to Melbourne, where Mr. Roach’s performance on a local television show attracted the attention of guitarist Steve Connolly, who played with Kelly’s band the Messengers. Together, Kelly and Connolly produced Mr. Roach’s debut album, which won two ARIA Awards, the equivalent of an Australian Grammy.

Mr. Roach said he was initially uncomfortable with the spotlight, and for a time he considered quitting music. He continued after receiving encouragement from Hunter, who told him, “It’s not all about you, Archie Roach. How many Blackfellas you reckon get to record an album?”

His later records included “Jamu Dreaming” (1993), “Looking for Butter Boy” (1997), and “Tell Me Why” (2019), which accompanied his memoir of the same name. When the coronavirus pandemic forced him to cancel what was supposed to be his last concert tour, he sat down at his kitchen table and rerecorded the songs from his first album, releasing the new version as “The Songs of Charcoal Lane” (2020).

Information on survivors was not immediately available. Hunter died of a heart attack in 2010 at age 54, and Mr. Roach was still grieving her loss when he suffered a stroke that left him temporarily paralyzed on his right side. The next year, he was diagnosed with cancer, which caused him to lose half a lung. Still, he continued to perform, aided by supplemental oxygen.

He often said that each time he played “Took the Children Away,” he let go of a little pain. “I still feel the pain, every day,” he told Time magazine. “Sometimes it threatens to engulf me. But I’m not going to let it destroy me.”

Eventually, he said, that pain would be gone for good.

To complete the week of black crepe, now there is also Olivia Newton-John dead on 8 August. All in a week gone! The offer of a State Service was dwarfed by the public grieving in America fuelled by the various media reminiscences and her protean interests beyond the entertainment world. The memories and obituaries for her easily surpassed the other two. Yet each of them represented a facet of a Victorian childhood, albeit briefly, and as such in the death a reminder for me of the ballad rendering of:

When I’m feeling sad
I simply remember my favourite things
And then I don’t feel so bad.”

I know this Twitter did not emanate from Prince Rupert

Republicans now want to abolish the FBI, CIA, IRS, Dept of Ed, impeach the President, VP, DHS Sect and AG, put the NIH Director in prison, and it’s only Tuesday.

Mouse Whisper

Reflecting on The Salon of 1846, I mentioned that I wanted to see France before I die. My friend, Rosemary, looked at me sagely and said I must have thyme on my paws. Next morning, pinned to my mousehole door, was the following:

“Brown rats and roof rats were eaten openly on a large scale in Paris when the city was under siege during the Franco-Prussian War. Observers likened their taste to both partridges and pork.

According to the “Larousse Gastronomique”, rats still are eaten in some parts of France. This recipe appears in that famous tome. “Alcoholic rats inhabiting wine cellars are skinned and eviscerated, brushed with a thick sauce of olive oil and crushed shallots, and grilled over a fire of broken wine barrels.”

Fortunately, I am very abstemious when I go to France.

Modest Expectations – Building a B-B-Q

I am somewhat bemused that John Howard keeps being rolled out by the Liberal Party. I suspect that knowing Johnnie, he would be quietly – with that telltale lip quiver– badgering his colleagues to remain in the limelight. After all, he did not have the elixir of political life, being the second Prime Minister to be ejected by the voters from his electorate. Hardly, what you would call success.

John Howard 2000

Sure, Howard won a landslide election in 1996 from a smart guy who was too smart for his own good. Then he survived – just, against Beazley, one of the most over-rated political party leaders ever; and then won against the authoritarian Latham. The authoritarian personality is that dangerous individual who is happy to be on the political extremes, as far away from democracy as you can find. The syndrome is often combined with extensive gazing at one’s reflection in the pool among the other Narcissi. But Latham was just plain nasty, with a zest for appropriating other people’s ideas.

But come on, ye Howardophiles, he gets rubbed out by another strange character, whose basic insecurities were concealed under a filo of flaky puffery. The puffery was soon dissipated into an unelectable cloud of irritant, but remember Rudd did knock off Howard comprehensively.

The problem with the cohort of those of us who have passed the age of 80, such as Howard, is that those who are used to own the limelight now struggle for relevance. Most of us do not care. Some have hobbies or indulge in what they have aways wanted to do but did not have the time. Some write blogs. They have done what they had to do, and now separate themselves from their previous careers.

From my own perspective one notices subtle changes in personality of one’s peers – the lack of sharpness and increasingly where experience and the biases hang off like fairy lights and overpower  any residual original thought.

Regard for Howard’s legacy will diminish with time, but if I were he, I would not accelerate that process. Him flogging a major resource, our natural gas, to overseas interests for a pittance is one item. One problem with his Party is, I suspect, that there are a number of people of similar age to Howard still wielding undue influence.

John Howard 2022

What do you do with a group of octogenarians and beyond who are unable to give up power. There is only so much biography the world can digest. And there is only so much plastic surgery that can conceal the temporal ravages of the skin, but not that of the brain.

Halibut and Homer

I must say I quite enjoy travelling Alaskan Airlines. They are a friendly mob, unlike the hard faces that welcome you on the average American airline. Still, Alaska is a long way from Los Angeles, and a near six hours in a Boeing 737, even at the front of the plane, tests the friendship.

Anchorage was the destination and we were booked into the Captain Cook Hotel. Captain Cook visited Alaska on his final voyage looking for the North-West passage. On 29th August 1779, Cook reached the Siberian coast, but then abandoned his plan to look further as he deemed it too dangerous. He set sail for the southeast to escape the rapidly approaching ice to Norton sound in Alaska, remembering that at the time Alaska was Russian territory.

It is an odd experience staying in a Captain Cook Hotel so far from home. However, it gave us the opportunity to review our acquaintance with the Alaskan king crab. This crab is harvested from the cold Northern Pacific, particularly Bering Strait. Red king crabs can reach a width of 28 cm, a leg span of two metres and a weight of about 13 kg.

To catch them is apparently one of the most dangerous occupations. Hauling up lobster pots, which may weigh up to a tonne, from a stormy sea results in a high death and injury rate. But the season is short; the returns are attractive; the show must go on.

As far as I know of there are three types of halibut – red, blue and brown. I have only seen them cooked, and to state the obvious, all lobsters are red in the pot. I had eaten them in a seafood restaurant, which once was located across 57th Avenue from where we used to stay in New York. It was a rite of passage after arriving to book into the Buckingham Hotel, with its dark art deco reminder of a New York from the 1920s. Up and across the street was Carnegie Hall; next door was the Steinway Building, with the grand pianos in the window.  A historic block, the seafood restaurant was just so convenient to the tired traveller.

There, I always seem to order oysters, which reflected the diversity of the various beds along the Atlantic Coast mainly and then the spectacular king crab with those gigantic claws. To tell the truth, I always found the crab as a gustatory as distinct from the visual experience to be disappointing. I suppose I expected a distinct taste, such as the one found in our mud crab. Nevertheless, whatever its diet, the crab flesh reflected bland feeding habits – “nice” would be a correct word for the taste. It was no different that day in the restaurant in the Captain Cook Hotel.

Tonight’s dinner

As part of recollections of memorable fish meals this one occurred in Homer. As with much of my travels, there was always a sense of the serendipity hanging around. I had an interest in the Russian settlements of Alaska, and one of these Russian groups were the Old Believers who sought religious asylum in Alaska. There was an Old Believers township of Nikolaesvk on the Kenai Peninsula near Homer, which itself is about 350 kilometres from Anchorage. Their story is a separate one, but along the way has yielded to the discovery of halibut.

Nevertheless, we needed a place to stay and there was no accommodation in the Old Believers’ village. In addition, my wife reminded me that this was an area where we could see bald eagles, which she wanted to photograph – so the trip had many objectives, but a meal of halibut was initially not one of these.

Coming upon a fish meal of halibut was accidental. Halibut is a large fish, which resembles flounder, but can grow to over 200 kg. As I found out later, the name halibut was derived from the Old English for “holy flatfish”, as it was a favourite with the mediaeval clergy for Friday repasts. It must have been the original monkfish.

When we arrived in Homer, we were told at the motel we must have a meal of halibut. For some reason, I had always associated halibut with English fish and chip shops and hence of little consequence. How wrong I was!

Homer is located on Kachemak Bay and has breathtaking views of the volcanic snow-covered Kenai Mountain Range. Homer itself is located on an old moraine jutting out into the Bay. There are still seven glaciers which actively drain into the Bay.

Homer itself was flattened by an earthquake in 1964, an earthquake separated by a large chunk of the Kenai peninsula jutting out into the Northern Pacific Ocean, but since it was 9.2 on the Richter scale, its effect on Homer and the surrounding countryside was that of massive subsidence accompanied by a tsunami – and the gravel spit of land upon which Homer was perched had to be re-constructed.

Now near the end of this spit are located a clutch of restaurants where we went for a meal. I think it was called the Harbour Grill, all brown timber and cosiness. Homer faces Halibut Bay. From a fisher’s point of view this is where the large halibut are abundant. It was a simple meal as I remember, with chips.

Fresh halibut fillet –with its glistening white flesh. That is enough. It was a meal to remember, but unlike wine, there is no surrounding gustatory and olfactory nonsense about a hint of vanilla or a whiff of honeysuckle as one finds with some wine connoisseur musings.

Just luscious but simple – or do I sound too much like Rick Stein?

Homer and Kenai Mountain Range

Add the twilight view across to the mountains with its celestial feeling. Does God eat halibut on Fridays?

Borders are Edgy

Sometimes when you drive the back roads of the nation, you come upon settlements where rural poverty is pronounced; houses at the dilapidated end of town where the casual passersby wonder just where the line of unliveable lies.  Often it is the shops that are closed, with cobwebs coating the edges of a dirty window where the For Sale sign has faded.

It is somewhat surprising when you drive past what appears to be an empty shop next to an unprepossessing house to see it surrounded by a high metal fence and bristling with a substantial array of power lines and CCTV cameras. There are other buildings on the property, including a large shed at the rear, and any windows seem to have the blinds down. There are limbs of animals hanging from trees dotting the property. A warning?

Parked outside this well fortified property were two modern SUVs and two motor scooters. It all seemed strange in such dilapidated surroundings.

Nevertheless, there is a pattern of small hamlets off main roads where there are multiple exit roads, where one can find such  “improvements”. I remember another small town near the South Australian border where there were the same such “improvements”.

Maybe this observation is a one off. However, a Victorian police officer commenting on the activity of bikie gangs, of which there are at least a dozen across Australia, some years ago made this classic understatement: “If there’s not been a presence in a regional town and all of a sudden there are (bikie) clubs expressing an interest, we need to look into why. They’re not setting up babysitting centres.”

The Overlanders

Last week, in the afternoon, I watched a screening of The Overlanders, an Anglo-Australian film released in 1946 which was based on the cattle drive from Wyndham to Brisbane, when 1,000 cattle were moved south to escape any Japanese invasion in 1942.

The film was in black and white, and the camerawork reflected the period, but it was still compelling. Filmed in the Northern Territory, it borrowed from the American Western themes of cattle drives, somewhat drily called a “Meat Pie Western” – that is the Australian version.

The film introduced Chips Rafferty, who received £25 a month for five months, but the film launched his career. You can see in some of Chips’ the facial expressions that Paul Hogan “inherited”.

Helen Grieve

What attracted my attention was the juvenile lead in the film, a fresh-faced teenager called Helen Grieve, who had been born in 1931 in Sydney. She was to appear in one further film, “Bush Christmas”, made in 1947. This was a bush adventure story about nasty men who steal the children’s horses. They are eventually caught; the children win out. I saw it; like many children of my age.  It was a great film. I well remember the Aboriginal boy introducing the white children to the witchetty grub, which he ate with relish, to the horror of the white children.

After “Bush Christmas” Helen Grieve gave acting away to do science. The proposed sequels to that film never eventuated, and film work in Australia had dried up.

My curiosity was tweaked.  There was little further information about her. She had died when she was rather young, at 49 years, in 1981. Then I discovered a note in the society pages of The Bulletin that she had married a David Joseland in 1955 at All Saints Woollahra.

The wedding report disclosed that her father was Herbert Ronald Robinson Grieve. He was a prominent medical practitioner with a general practice in Eastwood (but who lived with his family in Vaucluse). Dr Grieve was an influential meddler in the politics of health care, so much so that he was ultimately knighted, being a mate of Earle Page. Conservative in politics he may have been, but he still had enough energy to marry thrice.

David’s mother was a member of a pioneering pastoralist family near Canberra, and her husband, John Joseland had been absorbed into the Crace family when they married. She died in 1933; he too died in 1937.  David Joseland was thus orphaned and at the age of six he was consigned as a boarder at Cranbrook School.

As his daughter later said: After seeing The Overlanders, Dad’s dream was to meet my mother, work on the land and have that rural life.” And he did all of that.

How they got together is for someone else to fill in. Sydney was far smaller then, and if it is assumed that the two of them were products of the privileged eastern suburbs, it would not have been that hard for young Joseland to fulfill his quest to find his Helen.

He was well connected despite his tragedy. His grandfather was a well-known Sydney architect with incidentally a deep love of fishing. His father had been a pastoralist near Canberra. David spent his vacations at Belltrees, the famous property of the White family in the Hunter Valley, still then a very large fragment of a huge landholding selected by one James White who had come to the colony in 1826, and was given a free hand it seemed to put together a half million acre holding extending from the Hunter Valley to the Manning River, and which was subdivided among his seven sons and daughter when died in 1842.

Helen Grieve was a science student at The University of Sydney while David  had left school to be a jackaroo on the Everard Park Station near the South Australian Pitjantjatjara lands. Theirs were not exactly overlapping careers, and hence ardour of David Joseland must have been the overriding factor.  When you see a photograph of him in his later years, he had the face of a very determined man, not unlike that of Reginald Williams of leather fame.

Their marriage was followed by the couple moving to the Mittiebah Station,  a pastoral lease operating as a cattle station in the Northern Territory of Australia.

To give some perspective, the station occupies an area of about 7,000 square kilometres on the Barkly Tableland, about 320 kilometres east of Tennant Creek and 285 kilometres north west of Camooweal.  The Joselands raised a family there. Helen died prematurely and her grave in Alice Springs is inscribed with a minimalist: “Her life was devoted to the outback and its people.”

Seven years after her death, David relinquished the lease and moved to Tumut in 1988. He died there in 2015.

It was a story worthy of Luhrmann’s “Australia”, rather than his faux-view of the Outback. I doubt if Nicole Kidman would have made a suitable Helen Grieve. But you never know, the name Kidman is also associated with cattle.

An Unexpected Consequence

Helen Grieve’s second film “Bush Christmas” was a resounding success in Great Britain in 1948, when rationing was still very much in force there.

The unexpected consequence of portrayal of the Aboriginal boy, Neza Saunders eating a witchety grub, in front of famished white children seems to have resonated with a hungry British upper class wondering whether grubs and snakes could alleviate food shortage.

Putting the Queue on the Rack

I hate queueing, but then it is an orderly way of accessing scarce resources, whether the scarcity is absolute or relative – or contrived.

Gripped for decades by neoliberalism Australia has developed, for those with the key to the executive toilet, a taste for monopoly and/or cartels. The aim is to eliminate risk in accumulating the dividend. The area of transport has not escaped the wondrous fingering of these people with the key.

Toll roads are one area where the gouge is well and truly cemented as part of the culture. Toll road owners seem immune from political vicissitudes; if the tolls get to “extreme outrageous”, then the politicians ante up with a subsidy for the drivers, while money keeps jingling into the toll road shareholders’ bank accounts.

But we have benefited by the Irish export of the flying leprechaun, Alan Joyce. An aggressive homunculus, his history with budget airlines should have forecast his contribution to Australian aviation. Drive down the costs and maximise the subsidies from government. With the pandemic, Qantas has mopped up a total of $856 million from Jobseeker and Jobkeeper and showing it had also taken substantial sums from other government support programs. Qantas has been supported through seven separate government programs so far, including refunded charges under the Australian Aviation Financial Relief Package, and subsidised flights to repatriate overseas Australians and maintain critical routes.

In future, the airline will benefit from a $200 million international aviation support program, which will outlay wage subsidies for its international crews, as well the Domestic Aviation Network Support (DANS) and Regional Airline Network Support (RANS) programs. And so it goes on…

In return, Joyce pampers those who fly up the front of the plane, with Captain’s Club and all the associated frills. The irony is that most of these beneficiaries are flying on Qantas on our taxes – namely the politicians of all hues.

What has Australia received? An industry dogged by contrived scarcities driven by shareholder greed and Irish blarney and caic tabh.

I hope that Qantas, reputed to be the safest airline in the World, does not have to be shaken from its price cutting frenzy by Australian lives.

And this above provides a foreword to a Washington Post analysis of what is happening in America currently, with a few eucalypt driven asides.

In the past two months, 2.2 percent of flights by U.S. carriers have been canceled and 22 percent — or 260,000 flights — have been delayed. The pattern is by no means limited to the United States: 52.9 per cent of flights departing from Toronto Pearson International Airport were delayed between June 1 and July 12; London’s Heathrow Airport, where 40 percent of flights were delayed, announced it would restrict the number of departing passengers to 100,000 daily.  (Sydney Airport came in at number six in the top 10 worse airports for cancellations, after it clocked a 5.9 per cent cancellation rate over the last two months. Australia’s largest gateway was also named number nine in the list of worst airports for flight delays, with 34.2 per cent of all flights delayed in the last two months)

Much of the problem stems from an industrywide labour shortage. After the aviation industry was decimated in 2020 by covid-19, U.S. airlines received $54 billion in pandemic aid (Qantas received an estimated AU$2bn and Virgin AU$1.2bn). Overestimating how long it would take for travel to scale back up, they offered older employees retirement packages and gave many workers temporary leaves of absence. Now they are struggling to train and certify new pilots quickly enough. Federal data suggest (more than suggests!) (The US Transportation Department data shows air carriers were directly responsible for about 41 percent of delays through May, a figure on par with last year but higher than before the pandemic. Late-arriving aircraft — another problem mostly attributable to airlines — accounted for an additional 37 percent of delays.) that the airlines were the biggest reason for flight delays in the United States from January to May, and are responsible for a significant number of cancellations. 

Most organizations working in air travel had to cut back on staffing or pause hiring in 2020. That has led to shortages in airport staff, baggage handlers, security and more. Employers are trying to rapidly hire and train workers, but many airport positions require security clearances. The air traffic control system has also experienced staffing challenges in certain high-volume areas, caused in part by covid-19 outbreaks and a halt in training before vaccines were available. Because air travel is deeply interconnected, issues in one airport can lead to delays and cancellations downstream, overwhelming the system.

The Transportation Department have been urged to use its powers on consumer protection to crack down on air carriers. In fact, the department has opened 20 investigations into airlines for failing to pay refunds efficiently. Authorities should enforce rules if any have been violated, but investigations take time and might not always produce the desired results. (The Australian Competition & Complaints Commission is not a complaints handling body, but we can choose to take action where there are systemic breaches of the ACL. The warm lettuce leaf response.)

In a June meeting, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg pushed airline executives to ensure summer flight schedules were operable. Airlines, to their credit, have cut their schedules by 16 per cent since the spring, and flight cancellations have decreased since mid-June. Yet that does not address the longer-term questions of capacity. 

Airlines, airports and authorities must work together to fix the structural issues exposed by this summer’s disorder. The pilot shortage was a concern even before the pandemic. Carriers and the federal government should find ways to lower the barriers to entry to training programs and certification, which are time-consuming and costly.

It’s also time to look closely at recruitment and retention in airport and ground services, jobs that are often low-paying and labor-intensive with unattractive schedules. 

The air travel industry, like much of our economy, was unprepared for the disruption from COVID-19. By acting now, it could be more resilient in the face of future crises. (Difficult to know unless it is a direct assault on patient safety, whether the Australian Government has the appetite to challenge the powers of the airlines and airport management.)

Mouse Whisper

I understand that for the Gay Pride round of the National Rugby League next year, Manly will not change the name of its side to Binary.

Ian Roberts

Modest Expectations – Nadia von Leiningen

I have learnt a great deal over the past fortnight about this infernal virus.

This whole incident started after we had driven from Sydney for a dinner in Broken Hill. On our way home we intended to stay with my wife’s mother, who at 96 still lives at home in Albury. As I reported in my blog two weeks ago, we all contracted COVID and we all took anti-viral drugs, despite some difficulty in accessing them. In all cases, the disease was mild, although mine has lingered with a post-viral cough.

On reflection, given how successful the antiviral treatment seemed to be especially with my 96 year old mother-in-law, I wonder why there appear to be limitations on access to these drugs.

For instance, President Biden, who is 79, received the antiviral drug, Paxlovid. In clinical trials, Paxlovid is said to reduce the risk of severe illness by 90 per cent. He has experienced a mild infection that he attributes to vaccination.

By contrast, when Trump contracted COVID in 202I, eight drugs, from aspirin to the antiviral Remdesivir, were given to Trump in what observers at the time called a “kitchen-sink” approach. Most of those drugs were probably ineffective. Trump’s infection was certainly not mild. He was lucky. Biden’s outcome is predictable, uneventful recovery. One problem is that Biden seems to have undervalued the effect of the antivirals.

When the two cases are compared there is no comment about whether there should be any restrictions on access.

Thus, why can’t the whole Australian community have access? Or is it the same case as it was with the vaccine availability, incompetent supply chain decisions covered up by a military uniform?  Not enough being ordered by government is a familiar refrain. Is it another Department of Health stuff-up? Open government, Minister Butler.

We certainly had difficulty in obtaining the drug in Albury, where there were limited supplies. But this appears to be a common problem, even in capital cities. In the discussions, there seems to be a surprising degree of passivity in the community about the restriction in access without any objective clinical explanation, although that may reflect actual knowledge in the community of the existence of antiviral drugs.

Now, seeing both how our whole family benefited and how his doctors did not muck about with President Biden, who was immediately prescribed anti-viral drugs, why the restrictions on usage? On form, incompetence by the bureaucracy would appear to be the number one reason.  But maybe I am too bleak. So please, what the hell is going on?

The second comment was that when the whole family has the virus, and you are away from home, how do you actually get the anti-viral drugs. You need a doctor’s prescription, and because of the current conditions for that prescription, you need to get your own doctor to prescribe. In both our cases, the practice was contacted, the doctor was busy but rang back and sent the prescription immediately by email or text. The difficulty then is getting the prescription not only filled but in our case, to also locate a pharmacy that had the drugs.

Nevertheless, the key response was that of our doctors – suburban Sydney and Albury. They promptly rang back. I have heard of the contrary situation occurring.  In this case, the general practitioner did not return the call, not that day, not the next, when the prescription of an antiviral drug was essential. How often does that occur – a general practitioner forgetting the Hippocratic Oath? And nothing is done about it.  How many people have died because the doctor did not ring back? One is enough!

On the Cheapside

It was a slow Saturday afternoon, and my wife was looking over a series of ship manifests seeking information about some of her relatives’ arrival in South Australia. She came across a series of ship manifests including one from the 621 ton barque Cheapside which left Plymouth Hoe on sixth July 1849 and berthed at Port Adelaide three months later on the tenth October 1849. The Cheapside was the nineteenth emigrant ship from England to arrive in the South Australian colony in 1849; it was reported in the three months voyage six babies were born and ten persons died.

On board was my grandfather John Egan, then aged five years, together with his younger brother Michael, then three and sister Mary aged one.  My great grandparents were Michael and Bridget, specified as such on the manifest.  Michael is described as a labourer originally from Co Clare. Bridget – nothing added – just the spouse of Michael. I knew she had been born Bridget Corcoran in Cappoquin in Co Waterford.

Strangely, I remember once standing on Plymouth Hoe and looking out to sea and trying to feel what it must have been like sailing from these shores, knowing that you would never to see them again. But then again, they had already trekked across Ireland to Plymouth. Their embarkation had been from Plymouth not from Ireland, where Queenstown (now Cobh) in Cork was the common embarkation point for emigrants.  But to America not Australia!

The Egan family was numbered among the 242 emigrants in steerage. To give a flavour to the “passengers” on the other hand there were a Mr. Clisby and his daughter, Mr. Farmer, Mr, Hodgkin, Revd. Mr. Wood, his wife and five children and Mr. J. Ayre, late surgeon-superintendent of the Tasman are described as being “in the cabin”, 12 in all.

As has been described, for the “emigrants”, they were lodged below the main deck in steerage quarters converted from cargo spaces. This area would have been dark, crowded and close to the water line – when seas were rough passengers were often shut in with poor ventilation.

Added to this were probably the captain and 20 crew; so life was crowded.

On disembarkation, the Egans made their way to Kapunda, where the first commercial mine had been opened in 1842. It’s copper ore was some of the highest quality.

The township of Kapunda lies 80 kilometres north-east of Adelaide, just beyond the furthest reaches of the Barossa Valley, where a landscape of grassland and peppermint scrub here is gently undulating. That was the scene that confronted Michael Egan and his family – wife and two children – when they alighted from the bullock dray. It was early summer.

Michael had been attracted to Kapunda because he knew there were Claremen working in this newly-opened open cut mine.

Michael had always been restless. He had worked as a steward on an estate in Clare owned by the Blood family. He was still in his twenties when he left Clare and obtained work near Ross in Co Wexford, but 20 miles from Co Waterford. Here he met Bridget who was the daughter of a local farmer from Cappoquin, who had been forced into service.

They had married in the years before potato blight took hold and devastated the potato harvest across Ireland. Potatoes were an essential nutrient. As a result, the famine devastated Ireland, the first wave commencing in 1845 and by 1849 those who survived were fleeing The Emerald Isle.

And in the South Australian heat, here he was with his wife and children in November 1849.

But this was a mining community, unfamiliar territory where extraction and smelting of the ore was a task Michael had never encountered. He was rubbing shoulders with seasoned Cornish miners.

Kapunda’s copper mine 1850s

Yes, I have been to Kapunda and walked the perimeter of the overgrown mine which has been fenced off. Strewn around the site there remains clear evidence that this was once a copper mine. The tell-tale pale green cupric ore with tawny iron stains abound in the rock fragments. I souvenir a few pieces and turn away and go back to the car. The first chapter of Michael and Bridget Egan’s Adventures had begun.

For Michael was 35 at the time; he was to die 53 years later, a distinguished and wealthy Melburnian. 

Taking a Taxi to Bethlehem

This is a story about my good friend, Chris Brook, who died suddenly in May. Chris was a complex person, where many facets of his personality flashed, often the light from one cancelling the other out. Yet nestling under the carapace of arch comments and disdain was a compassionate person.

He and I had gone to Jerusalem in 1995 to attend a conference where Chris was then the President-elect of the International Society of Quality Assurance (ISQua). The Conference organiser was a courtly Israeli, a long term member of the Society executive going back to when I had been President of the same institution six years before. He said very little, but I found out that he had been a veteran of the 1948 war. The veterans of this War split in two Israeli factions – Likud and Labour.

Yitzhak Rabin had been a brilliant soldier and strategist, and even though he was a hard man, he was a reasonable man. A member of the Labour Party, in 1995 he was in his second term as Prime Minister.  Just over a year before he had negotiated the Oslo accords with Yasser Arafat, which introduced a period of comparative tranquility into the relationship between Israel and Palestine. For this he and Arafat had jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

We were lucky to go to Jerusalem during this period of peace. One morning, Chris and a colleague, Heather Buchan, decided to go with me to Bethlehem. It was a ten minute drive by taxi; negotiating the border was quick, unlike the time it had taken to enter Israel, being quizzed endlessly by unsmiling Junior Mossadista.

Church of the Nativity

Bethlehem by and large is a nondescript town of little shade and rows of ugly yellow stucco buildings. Yet the taxi was weaving its way unerringly to the Church of the Nativity said to have been situated on the site of Christ’s birthplace. There is a photograph of us all in the Manger Square in front of the Church. On the edge of the photograph of us was a smiling lean young Palestinian, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

Like many Palestinians living in Bethlehem he was a Christian, but unbeknown to me at the time Chris struck up a conversation with him. Chris said very little about him, but after we returned home Chris corresponded with him, and whether he sent money or whether he was prepared to help him migrate to Australia I am not sure.  They continued to correspond. Then one day, he mentioned to me he had not heard from this young man. The silence persisted; Chris tried to find out what had happened. As far as he knew the young man had been killed in some street altercation with Israeli troops; but where, when or how, Chris never disclosed that information. Although he must have been affected, Chris never showed grief.

At the Wailing Wall

We had gone to Jerusalem when a calmness prevailed. We were freely able to visit Jewish, Christian and Muslim shrines.  I particularly remember walking along the Wailing Wall amid the black robes and nodding heads. There was a cave at the end of the wall, where many of these Orthodox Jews were clustered. I had entered it, even though I was obviously a tourist. Nobody seemed to mind. One of these Orthodox Jews I clearly remember was one who lifted his beard to reveal a tracheostomy hole. It did not stop him launching into a crazy tirade. I listened to the invective – vicious invective primarily directed at Yitzhak Rabin for what he had done. I excused myself.  When I walked out into the sun I felt I needed a shower.

Four months later, Rabin was assassinated by a right wing extremist, Yigal Amir, on 4 November 1995 in the Kings of Israel Square.

The Accidental Nobel Laureate

Due to their recent discovery and relative inertness, there have not been many clear establishments for the applications of fullerenes. However, there are predicted applications that are presently being tested – May 22, 2022

Dr Robert Curl died last week. Dr Curl shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

As recalled in his obituary in the NYT, in 1985, Dr Curl, a Texan, along with Richard E. Smalley, a Rice colleague, and Harold W. Kroto, a scientist visiting from the University of Sussex in England, showed a new configuration: 60 carbon atoms bonded into a molecule that resembled a soccer ball. They also found a larger version made of 70 carbons.

A buckyball

The finding was serendipitous because the scientists had been looking for something else. The chemists named the molecules buckminsterfullerenes after the architect Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes. The name was later shortened to fullerenes or buckyballs.

What a great name to enliven an esoteric area – the concept of kicking buckyballs around the molecular framework. The problem is that no matter how enticing the name and how cute the carbon atomic configuration; they were unable to find a commercial use.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo in 1996, Dr Curl said inter alia

At the outset, none of us had ever imagined these carbon cage molecules. When we looked at carbon, the single astounding carbon sixty peak in the mass spectrum and the circumstances under which it came to prominence admitted no other explanation than the totally symmetric spherical structure, and suddenly a door opened into a new world.

The fullerenes have caused chemists to realize the amazing variety of structures elemental carbon can form from the well-known three-dimensional network that is diamond and the equally well-known flat sheets of hexagonal rings that are graphite to the newer discoveries of the three-dimensional cages that are fullerenes. We have learned that the cages can be extended into perfect nanoscale tubules which offer the promise of electrically conducting cables many times stronger than steel. Or the cages can nestle one inside the other like Russian dolls. Now that we have become more aware of the marvellous flexibility of carbon as a building block chemists may ultimately learn how to place five- and seven-membered rings precisely into a network of hexagonal rings so as to create nano structures of ordered three-dimensional complexity like the interconnecting girders in a steel-frame building.

The statement at the head of the blog was published in March this year.

Ergo, a Nobel Prize awarded for a discovery they were not looking for with a cute name but still in search of a function in the nanoworld of the molecules, let alone the ongoing search for their commercial application.

No Place for the Shamus?

I receive a great amount of stuff from the Lincoln Project, an extreme group of former republicans dedicated to destroying Trump and his acolytes. I receive regular communication because I purchased a print from them of a portrait of Abraham Lincoln with a tear in his eye. It is a powerful image. Those behind the Project are no saints; they are men who have been at the heart of the US government, insiders well versed in the “dirty trick campaign” and seemingly unafraid of using the same tactics.

The critical decision for the reader to make is to whether, if you read on, are you reading fact or “alternative facts”. It is important to factor in your own bias, if you have no idea of what is actually occurring. Yet the last sentence limply reinforces a paean which unexpectedly appears four paragraphs before about the Secret service being essential and valiant; a tincture of an apologia methinks! Rick Wilson the author of this below is what, in the terms of Cain and Chandler, may have been described as “hard bitten and cynical”. But then that is my bias!

Here’s why it matters that tens of thousands of you raised your hands and demanded answers about those deleted January 6th Secret Service texts:

If reports are to be believed, the Secret Service handed over exactly one – ONE! – message. That’s like writing “FU” on a blank cover sheet, crumpling it up, and throwing it in the general direction of Capitol Hill.

To get this straight: the Secret Service let the dog eat all their text messages during, wait for it, and this coincidence will SHOCK you, the two days surrounding the most calamitous threat to our democracy. Literally every possible agency with investigatory power has a duty to figure out just what the hell happened.

It matters that a Federal agency given sweeping powers of action and discretion has quite clearly engaged in a coverup to protect Trump and his coup plot. Stay with me here, because my mind is wandering…

1) The long-rumoured and discussed cadre of Trump Praetorians in the USSS needs to get aired the hell out. This just reeks.

2) The leadership and every single person on the detail and Uniformed Division that day needs to have their personal and work devices of every kind subpoenaed and examined. They must also be deposed.

3) I hope you’ll let the 1/6 Committee know you’ll tune in for “The Long Hot Summer” series. They absolutely should add this to the docket and make it so hot even the DOJ can’t ignore it. They can skip vacation “juuust” this once and crack some skulls. 

4) I’ve noticed many Republicans get very livid lately when this whole scandal gumbo is compared to Watergate.

The Secret Service is a vital agency. Their unchallenged bravery at being the last line of defense between violence and assassination of U.S. Presidents and protectees is storied and written at times in blood. It is a brave and honorable duty. The core of their reputation wasn’t just a fearsome readiness to defend the President. It was also a cool, detached professionalism that served the office, not simply the political whims of the man who held it. 

For months, Mike Pence’s refusal to enter the VP limo has pinged the edges of my radar. I couldn’t quite sort out his reluctance. He’s not a physically brave man, to my knowledge, so what was it? What else did he know or sense? If you ask me, I think Pence knew parts of the Service were compromised and put Trump’s politics over duty.

To go deeper down the rabbit hole: I’m no Presidential staff historian, but Trump’s elevation of hyper-loyalist Tony Ornato from the Secret Service into a political role at the White House (who later planned the photo op with the Bible, and the tear gas attack on peaceful protestors in Lafayette Square…) might have been a tell. I suspect he’s rather a key element here. We also know that when President Biden took office, he felt compelled to change out pro-Trump detail members. Putting all that together leads us to some unpleasant potential conclusions, to say the least.

This is not a matter where all of us – not the Committee, not the DOJ, not every American who cares about the rule of law and the vital role of the Secret Service – can sit back and be satisfied with one lousy text message. We have to pull at these threads and connect these dots.

The danger the Secret Service faces every day in the line of duty is real. Their sworn duty is an honourable one. But it’s starting to look like the MAGA rot runs deep here. Who knows how big of a role all of this played in the January 6th insurrection?

Yes, who knows. Jason Bourne is across it, and he was supposed to be flight from reality.

Mouse Whisper

If that human crowd have not had enough pandemic, Splendour in the Mud in Byron Bay may just be a catalyst for another, especially as it is not an uncommon event as exemplified in this British report:

Unusual transmissions of gastrointestinal diseases have also occurred during large scale open air festivals. An outbreak of Escherichia coli was reported during the Glastonbury music festival in England and was linked to mud contaminated by infected cattle. Heavy rain had turned the site into a quagmire, and attendees had high levels of contaminated mud on their hands and faces.

Leptospira

Also, those coming back from Splendour in the Mud last weekend should become acquainted with the one word “leptospira”. These nasty bacteria, the bane of sewage workers, are associated with my dirty cousin rats – in their urine which they sprinkle over sugar cane and banana plantations and which is washed away when the rains come and into the mud that forms around these bacteria.

Welcome to the disease world of the unprotected youth, acquiring a disease to remember where splendour is in the eye of the beholder as they cavort to the sounds of those masters of the music world. So, as you raise your glass with the muddy hand, do I hear you cry “Here’s Mud in Your Eye”?

No, that is a toast from another era well before Woodstock, in fact it’s biblical.

Hosting a leptospirosis party?

 

Modest Expectations – Fence to Fence

“Of Australian politicians, Penny Wong is wonderfully deft in a way that is not Ardern, yet from the same school; those who can stand outside themselves and see their image as others do. Her minimalist approach to herself is extremely effective.”  Modest Expectations 11 May 2019

                                                **

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

Working with partners in the region to build our collective security, to diversify our export markets, secure supply chains, provide renewable energy and climate solutions, avert coercion, and respond to natural disasters. By investing financially and intellectually in the security and stability of our region – because defence capability on its own won’t achieve this. We share with ASEAN states an abiding interest in averting hegemony by any single power – so this is where our energy must be applied.”  Modest Expectations 11 March 2022

Just my idle squiggles. Seems as if Albanese maybe came to the same conclusion.

Personal Responsibility – The Big Cop Out

More useful on the face

Jennifer Hewett: “The idea of sitting in an office and wearing a mask, that is not going to work.” How ridiculous it is that we are not being led by important health advice and going instead with what journalists believe will or will not work.

Jennifer Hewett is one of those irritating know-it-alls, who patrols the border between “opinion” and “opinionated”. Watching this confetti of journalists last Sunday on Insiders pontificating on public health matters suggested to me that having this panel was as logical as after the next Federal Budget is released, Insiders having public health physicians as their expert panel. At least this latter group have been trained in scientific method.

That other pillar of self-opinionation, Peter Van Onselen, was free with his logic-free view, that “We don’t wear helmets in cars.” Yes, you do in racing cars… and when riding motorcycles and bicycles, because it is a matter of risk. Nor, do we wear body armour when we go for a drive. When I was young, I heard the same argument about so-called “personal responsibility” in relation to the introduction of seat belts. Now seat belts are accepted as a normal safety procedure. I ought to know – a seatbelt saved my life.

As with the seatbelt that broke my rib in the accident (so severe the impact), I have got the above off my chest. My outburst nevertheless expresses the frustration of a public health physician in relation to the state of commentary at present on the pandemic.

In a way, having a blog weekly during the whole pandemic  attempts to emulate others who have done so during such trying times, such as Samuel Pepys.

The Prime Minister has said no more lockdowns, no more border closures. I wonder whether he really has understood the significance of that statement.

These were two factors which, from early 2020, guided public policy. This was a time when there was no national leadership, despite the incontrovertible fact that this was a pandemic, probably initiated in China.

The politicians were blindsided by the very word “pandemic”,  confronted as they were by tales of the Spanish flu pandemic, which resulted in the deaths of millions of people worldwide in the early part of the last century.

Quarantine under the Australian Constitution is unambiguously a Commonwealth power. The then Prime Minister Morrison shifted, as he often did, responsibility rather than showing leadership by taking responsibility for a national plan. This inaction gave inordinate authority to a number of State chief health officers, rather than giving single point responsibility to Dr Paul Kelly as the Commonwealth Chief Medical Officer after Brendan Murphy was promoted to head the Commonwealth Department of Health.

One example of an out of control State Chief Health Officer was the bizarre behaviour including her litany of comments of Jeanette Young, the Queensland long term occupant of the post. She was just an extreme example as this fragmentation of authority resulted in contradictory babble. Confusion and anxiety were heightened across the community, and quackery substituted science as exemplified by the proposal of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as cures.

In this situation, the easiest response of politicians to show they are doing something is to close borders and within borders to impose restrictions on movement – the lockdown.

Lockdowns work, as testimony of the near elimination of influenza during 2020 and 2021; with the removal of restrictions, flu emerged ferociously this year.

Lockdowns are now considered political poison, but in 2020 it should be remembered that there were no vaccines, no antiviral drugs and even the most basic protective equipment was at a premium. Moreover, people were dying, mostly the elderly in nursing homes but not exclusively.

Nevertheless, there has been one constant with a plus in front of his name – Dr Paul Kelly, the Commonwealth Chief Medical officer.

This is as far I shall write this week. My diaries have a great deal more to say. The COVID Virus still hangs over me, but next week … and I just need more time to arrange the tale. So sorry, to dog it this week!

Nuts to you all!

Balranald on the Murrumbidgee

We stopped in Balranald – always the one place I missed driving around and through the Far West of NSW. It seems Balranald was just not one of my backroads. People are used to talk about the Outback as being “Back of Bourke”, which probably relied on the bush balladeers travelling the country north-west of Bourke, an almost fabled shorthand for the Outback.  Two hundred and twenty kilometres beyond Bourke, straddling the NSW-Queensland border is the tiny settlement of Hungerford. Hungerford has the romantic association of the Outback that Balranald lacks.

Henry Lawson, when he was employed as a journalist for The Bulletin, went to Hungerford. J. E. Archibald, then the Editor of The Bulletin, gave Lawson five pounds and a return train ticket to Bourke to go and write about this adventure. Lawson wrote a short story about Hungerford, to where he walked from Bourke – 220 kms in 1893.

No such legacy for Balranald.

In Balranald we stopped to seek directions. It was a Saturday afternoon, when people are scarce on a country town street. This guy was removing bins from the footpath. The casual “Hey mate” became a conversation, yarning about the town, where he had lived all his life. His forbears, the brothers Giansiracusas, left Sicily in 1932 and settled in Balranald, barely out of their teens. They became market gardeners, and he had grown up in the family business.

As he said, he had lived there all his life, and had watched the town slowly shrivel as a district centre – that is until recently. There were now mineral sand mines opening up, the source of titanium and zirconium, important in steel alloys. Mining of mineral sands had become a conservation problem in the more convenient coastal and riverine areas where they occurred in the past. In some of these areas sand mining was banned. However, being here on the Riverina plain in sparsely populated country, sand mining did not have the same conservation pressures.

When I was a boy, the area on the Murray around the Victorian border town of Robinvale was the centre of the dried fruit industry – the table grapes: muscatels, sultanas, red globes among them which, for a time, were a strong export item, particularly to the United Kingdom. What would Christmas be without table grapes!

Robinvale on the Murray River is about one hour’s drive from Balranald, which lies on one of the major tributaries of the Murray River, the Murrumbidgee. Table grape production as such has declined relatively in the area. Overseas competition and changing food habits have led to the decline in the value of the production.

Almond trees

The “Saviour” has come here in the form of the almond tree. There are hectares and hectares of these trees (over 10 million of them) being grown along the Murray River from the South Australia Riverland to the Sunraysia and then up the Murrumbidgee River, where Balranald has become a district centre for almond growing. Although sealers brought the almond tree to Kangaroo Island as far back as 1836, until the last 30 years growing almonds was a cottage industry in Australia. No more, as the Australian production approaches a billion dollar industry annually. Balranald has become a beneficiary of this planting.

Pistachios

There is also a substantial area close to Balranald being opened up to grow pistachios, a nut which has only recently emerged in the Australian lexicon. A hugely valuable crop to Iran and Turkey, its cultivation is also in America, which is a major producer. By comparison, Australian annual production is currently minuscule.

Walnuts

Around Leeton further up the Murrumbidgee, where once rice was the prime commodity, large broad acres are filled with walnut trees.  The climate is perfect for growing these nuts. Recently, a furore has broken out with the fear that bees essential for pollination of almond blossoms will precipitously decline because of varroa mite infestation in NSW.

More threatening, given Australia is the “dry continent”, these nuts are voracious for water. As one source says “To grow one almond requires four litres of water. The crazy thing about that is that walnuts, hazelnuts, pistachios, and cashews all use roughly the same amount of water to grow as well, but it is the almond which is in such high demand at this time.

Mr Giansirscusa needed to finish his tasks, yet seemed reluctant to stop talking. To me, it is encounters like this which are the stuff of travelling in rural Australia; the exhilaration of just travelling out of major conurbations which I started to do many decades ago, and I have been glad to have done that.

A Hamlet called Hebel

Mention of Hungerford reminds me of another time when I visited a Queensland settlement just over the NSW Border. It was the time I was travelling with Nick Mersiades, as part of the Rural Stocktake I undertook in 1999; we had stayed the night on the NSW side at Goodooga, an Aboriginal township, which had at that time a long-serving Indian-born doctor whom we wanted to meet.

The township is Hebel. It had been a Cobb & Co stopover point, established in 1889 with the name Kelly’s Point. It achieved notoriety then as Dan Kelly and Steve Hart, members of the Kelly gang, lived in the Hebel area under assumed names. The name was changed to Hebel in the early 1890’s, the name of a local German family that settled there.

In this area of NSW, these are black soil plains. There had been a great amount of rain.  When it rains on black soil, the previously near perfect surface upon which to drive, becomes muddy glue. Thus, vehicle travel is banned as the danger of being bogged or carving out deep ruts in the surface of the road is just plainly too great. Anyway we were free to go this morning, and the road to Hebel showed that it was not a well-travelled highway and there was clay in the road surface. Normally, one does not have grass growing in the middle of the road, I observed. Nick turned and said wryly I had not done enough driving on these backroads.

Along the road were dams, huge shallow stretches of water for use by the cotton farmers taken from Culgoa River Flood plain. Nick and I were kitted out in checked Viyella shirts, woollen ties and moleskins, the very fashion plate of government rural bureaucrats as we strode around the edges of some of these dams.

Eventually we reached Hebel. The settlement had achieved some degree of notoriety because a “willie-willie” had destroyed what I thought was the local post office. As we got out of the car, a large guy with a pot belly encased in a torn navy t-shirt, shorts and thongs emerged from the hotel. To complete the picture was a single front tooth. The complete epitome of Saltbush Bill.

He advanced on us, and looking straight at Nick, said: “Hey, mate have you got any of those gay body-building magazines?”   Unexpected, but memorable.

No, Nick did not trump that question by going back to the car and producing a suitable anthology, if that is the suitable collective noun.

Hebel Hotel

Anyway, we went into the pub, but obviously looked too much like “we’re from the government”. Everybody sitting around in the pub shut up; we each ordered a beer, breaking the silence, drank it as casually as we could interspersed with suitable small talk and then high-tailed it off to Dirranbandi.

We did not talk about gay body builders. Not the type of request one would expect in the Outback.

Yet, I have not been to Hebel for years and as I found out in Balranald, regional settlements do change, especially if their community leadership is re-invigorated. After all, the community centre in these tiny hamlets is mostly the pub; and therefore the community activity often rests on the personality of the publican and his or her family.

Monkeypox – “I don’t think we’re prepared for another pandemic of something that’s actually serious.”

Monkeypox has crept into the infectious disease lexicon. Cases have been reported in Australia, and as reported below it is a disease contracted by close personal contact, but as this report says there is no systematic contact tracing.

As Johns Hopkins School of Public Health has succinctly reported, monkeypox is caused by a virus related to smallpox, but monkeypox disease is usually milder than smallpox. It is called monkeypox because it was first isolated in monkeys. The name “monkeypox” is misleading as rodents, not monkeys, are the primary carriers of the virus.

The disease may be more likely to affect people who have never been vaccinated against smallpox. The smallpox vaccination program ended around 1972 (the last documented case of smallpox in Australia was 1938). I well remember as a medical student that you needed to demonstrate proficiency in vaccination; you proved that by vaccinating a fellow student under supervision. Another lost art?

There seem to be two variants of the virus endemic in West Africa and the Congo Basin respectively. This strain is similar to the West African strain.

In people, monkeypox is spread through contact with an infected person’s rash or bodily fluids, including respiratory droplets. Close personal contact, sexual or not, can cause a person to become infected.

As this case report below indicates, the disease is mild in most people, but there are the usual vulnerable groups common with all viral infections.  Other reports describe more debilitating encounters with the virus.

This abridged report comes from the NYT:

In San Francisco, B, a 43-year-old medical writer who asked that his name be withheld for privacy reasons, found himself shivering uncontrollably with a high fever on June 14, eight days after he had multiple sexual encounters at a bathhouse in Chicago. 

When a blister appeared on B’s wrist on Friday afternoon, he suspected monkeypox. But his health care provider said the city’s health department would not be able to pick up his sample till Tuesday, June 21, after the Juneteenth holiday.

No one reached out to him to ask about his contacts, or to offer vaccines to his roommate or partner. It was Friday, a week later, before the sample was picked up, and the following Wednesday — nearly two weeks after he had contacted his health care provider — before he was told he had tested positive for an orthopoxvirus.

By then, his lesions had healed, and he no longer needed to isolate. “The irony of this happening on the same day as receiving the first test result is not lost on me,” he said.

Even then, the health department told him it would likely be another week before the C.D.C. could confirm that he had monkeypox.

“Two blisters and a rash on my butt is not the worst I’ve had in my life,” B said. But given his experience, “I don’t think we’re prepared for another pandemic of something that’s actually serious.”

A senior Biden administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, acknowledged that implementation of monkeypox testing had not been as convenient nor fast as it needed to be.

Negotiations between government officials and commercial labs began in the third week of May, soon after the first cases were identified, he said. But it took time to settle contracts, scale up test supplies and train personnel to handle the virus.

Still, the official noted, the C.D.C. published test procedures in early June, and the F.D.A. authorized additional test supplies to allow any interested lab to participate. The wait time for test results has dropped from 15 days to nine days from the start of symptoms, and is expected to drop further as lab capacity expands in July.

Another barrier to containing a disease like monkeypox is a dearth of sexual health clinics. 

Monkeypox was thought to present as a body-wide rash, but in the current outbreak, most patients have developed only a few pox, primarily in the genital area. Patients with genital symptoms are much more likely to seek care at sexual health clinics, because they tend to offer confidentiality, convenience and free or low-cost care.

But funding for these clinics has dropped by about 40 percent since 2003, after accounting for inflation. Partly as a result of the decline, about one in five Americans had a sexually transmitted infection in 2018, according to a C.D.C. report, and those numbers have surged during the pandemic.

If monkeypox can’t be contained, it may become a permanent threat, especially among men who have sex with men. “The fear is that this will become entrenched as an S.T.I., you know, just like, say, syphilis is, or H.I.V. for that matter,”  commented Dr. Varma, Professor of Population Health Science, Weill Cornell Medical College. 

“Without high quality sexual health services, you’re never going to be able to control it, because you won’t identify people fast enough,” he added.

The experts did offer praise for one aspect of the administration’s response: the messaging to men who have sex with men, which hews to the “harm-reduction” approach, urging caution while recognizing people’s needs.

Rather than “stigmatizing them for wanting to have sex and enjoy themselves, you meet them where they are,” Dr. Varma has said of the C.D.C.’s monkeypox messaging. “In terms of things that have gone well, that is among the best sort of harm reduction advice I’ve seen.”

A case too horrible to be true — except that it was

This report below written by Sahar Fatima first appeared in The Boston Globe, and it has been referred to on several twitter entries. If it wasn’t Mid- America, who would believe it? I remember that in one issue, Ripley Believe It or Not reported that a pregnancy had occurred in a Peruvian five and half year old in 1939. 

Ripley Believe It or Not was a syndicated compendium of bizarre facts authored by one Robert Ripley, publication of which he started in 1918. He worked on the basis, for as he said “Facts, to be interesting, must be very close or very far away”. The pregnancy was even more shocking in that the child Peruvian suffered from Albright’s Syndrome, one of the components of which is precocious puberty. It was a “gee whiz” moment – you know Peru is far away, and it’s 1939, many other things were going on. Just a bizarre happening to report in a cartoon without any social context.

However, some of the reactions to this pregnancy are equally shocking if different. Note the intervention of Murdoch and his minions setting a bar below ground. Ripley would have been in his element illustrating this freak of nature – Rupert being able to set a bar below ground. But on reflections it has not been a first.

A 10-year-old Ohio girl who was forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion after being raped, since her home state no longer allows abortion exceptions for rape and incest. The disturbing example of fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade was first brought to light by Indianapolis physician Dr. Caitlin Bernard in an interview with the Indianapolis Star.

The case quickly prompted a backlash from conservatives who claimed there was no record of such a victim and that the details had not been verified. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board published a withering takedown of President Biden for repeating the story when he signed an executive order on abortion, referring to it as a “fanciful tale.”

Turns out, the story was all too real.

A day later on Wednesday, the Columbus Dispatch reported that 27-year-old Gerson Fuentes was arrested and confessed to raping the girl. The story said police learned about the pregnancy from Franklin County Children Services, to whom the child’s mother had reported the abuse on June 22.

Confirmation that the story was true made for an awkward situation for those who had publicly raised doubts about it, notably Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost.

Yost said Monday on Fox News that he had heard “not a whisper” of evidence that such a case existed and said it was likely a “fabrication.” After Fuentes was arrested, Yost said he was grateful police got “a rapist off the street”.

Meanwhile, Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan quietly deleted a tweet in which he referred to the 10-year-old story as “another lie.” Jordan is infamously accused of ignoring allegations that wrestlers were sexually abused by Richard Strauss, a former doctor in Ohio State University’s athletics department, when Jordan was assistant coach there, which Jordan denies.

The Wall Street Journal added a note to its original editorial and published another one “correcting the record” while defending the editorial board’s initial misgivings.

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, who had published a fact-check column raising questions about the story’s veracity since he had been unable to confirm details, updated the column after the arrest.

“While reporting this story, the Fact Checker had contacted the Franklin County agency to ask if such a referral had been made. Unlike similar Ohio county agencies we contacted, Franklin County officials did not offer a response,” Kessler wrote.

The episode frustrated abortion rights supporters, who argued that the story was subject to a level of doubt and skepticism that is rarely applied to other single-source stories, such as news reports that take police at their word or stories with anecdotes from doctors about transgender teens being rushed into taking hormones. Publishing details about the case is also complicated by the fact that it concerns the sexual assault of a child, whose identity is protected by law.

These types of stories are bound to become more common, reports my colleague Deanna Pan, underscoring the outsized impact of abortion bans on adolescents, who already face complex legal, social, and logistical hurdles to accessing reproductive health services. Experts told Pan the Supreme Court decision is also likely to reverse the decades-long decline in teen birth rates, and increase stigma and shame around youth pregnancy.

Instead of expressing contrition for scoffing at a story about a child nearly forced to give birth to her rapist’s baby, the Right is getting angry at the doctor who performed the abortion. Vice News reported that Indiana’s Republican attorney general is looking to investigate Bernard for not reporting the sexual assault to Indiana authorities, even though the crime took place in Ohio where police were already aware. In fact, Bernard had actually reported the abortion to Indiana authorities too, according to the New York Times.

A billboard read ‘Welcome to California where abortion is safe and still legal’ on July 12, 2022, in Rancho Mirage, Calif. The billboard was paid for by Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest. The number of patients from outside states increased 900 per cent at Planned Parenthood clinics in San Bernardino and Orange counties the week following the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health case, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

Ruminations on British Breakfast

A small indulgence in a World where the pillars of civilisation are crumbling in the wake of climate change and populist barbarism. There are two personal culinary delights, as British as John Bull, but extremely difficult to find in Australia. The first is kippers, which remind me of a leisurely breakfast at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford gazing out on the hustle and bustle of people hurrying to work in the greyness of an English morning. Some people cannot stand the smell of kippers, and my wife is one of them, leaving me to my indulgence alone.

Kippers, Atlantic herring, halved, salted and smoked, are high in the “good” fatty acids and protein but low in calories, in butter and oil is so simple – and it seems that although it fell out of favour for a time even among the Poms in the face of Kellogg “cereal serial invasions”, it is making a comeback.

The other experience occurred on the Channel Island of Guernsey. Soft boiled eggs and “soldiers” on the breakfast menu. On the surface they are very simple to prepare, you say. Yes, I remember once having them for breakfast in a hotel in St Peter Port of all places, and in the world of Goldilocks, the breakfast was just right.

The soldiers were coated in Marmite and were cut so that they fitted perfectly into the “runny” centre, which was evenly “runny” so that the soldiers could complete their dipping task. Something so simple; but until last Sunday morning not replicated (with substitution of Vegemite) with the same purity as that memorable day in the world where once The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society flourished.

Strange, what little things stick in one’s memory, and how much one values such a memory.

Mouse Whisper

As my son, MouseWit said to me. No wonder he calls himself Antony. As MW said – just imagine if he were introduced in the USA as Tony Albanese – especially in Chicago.  Sounds like the padrone rather than the padre del paese – scusi, Prime Minister.

But Albo? Well, Robert Gordon Menzies was either “Ming” or “Pig Iron Bob”.

But mostly for our leaders it has been “that Bastard” or worse…

Signor Tony

Modest expectations – Three hundred and four thousand four hundred and eighty

COVID-19 comes to all. I thought I had some idea where I picked it up. I have limited contact with people, because my disability makes it difficult moving around, especially when there are steps. Until you are disabled, you do not realise how difficult it is to avoid them; the world is not a level field.

The virus is harassing my upper respiratory system, and it has been a challenge to dislodge the tenacious phlegm. The whole picture is that of congested misery.

On Wednesday last, we drove from Swan Hill to Albury, a distance of about 400 kilometres. Lunch was a Cornish pasty and coffee in the shade of pepper trees in Wycheproof.

By the time we arrived in Albury, I had developed a cough, and initially my RAT was negative; but next day it was positive.  The inevitable march of the Virus through the house had commenced.  By the weekend, we were all RAT positive. For us, it was inconvenient to say the least to be away from home, but at least we were isolating ourselves.

I was prescribed Lagevrio (molnupiravir). Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir/ ritonavir), the other antiviral drug, was contraindicated.

Of course, there are no controls to confirm whether Lagevrio had any effect, but now with the cocktail of vaccines and anti-viral capsules, I seem to be holding my own. I have just taken my last four capsules. The congestion has much improved, but is still lingering.

In Albury there has been a supply shortage of antivirals. For a time early in the week Albury may have been in danger of running out of the antiviral drugs if promised deliveries didn’t eventuate. Familiar? Here we go again. Governments blithely change the conditions for availability without determining whether there is a sufficient supply. It is a nightmare, when we – like so many others – are confined to home and depend on the drugs being delivered.

I remember my last tussle with the flu about five years ago. That lasted six weeks with a residual cough for months afterwards., I could see the long dark corridor where there are no open doors and no light at the end.

The pandemic has persisted. Public health measures are now a matter of choice in regard to responsibility. No longer any of those public measures – such as contact tracing, hand washing, masks, social distancing observed. They work, but just as our forefathers did not throw away their weapons because WW11 persisted for more than two years, there is no reason why we could not have adapted if we had had anywhere decent leadership, beyond shutting borders.

Quarantine facilities have been built at great cost, but it seems nobody has thought how to use them. This is very ironic given the decades long experience of confining boat people. Having experienced a period of being in lockdown without any ability to go out, these facilities present the opportunity to enable that group of people to have a shelter until the infective status changes.

It is amazing to see how technology, through the manufacture of new vaccines, anti-virals and diagnostic tests, even down to improved masks, has occurred.

But such improvement in the efficiencies of social practices has lagged, and we all should share the blame, not just Dr Murphy. Nevertheless, it was a time when, except for brief flashes of government accepting responsibility and not blaming everybody else, our social structures have been found lacking. The pandemic still rages; thank God for the scientists and technologists who have provided some weapons, but the virus is far from unconditional surrender.

By the way, a week after testing positive, I am still positive, albeit weakly.

Can you believe these remnants of the Dark Ages!

When I was a first-year medical graduate working at a suburban hospital, one of my earliest memories was coming out of one of the emergency bays on my way to the next when I looked up. At the end of the corridor of flapping curtains against the emergency department wall was a trolley. On the trolley was a young woman who had apparently just been wheeled in and was waiting for a bay in which she could be seen. She was very pale, very grey; she looked very sick, even from where I was standing.

Immediately, I remembered I had seen her in the emergency department the previous day.  She was complaining of a vague lower abdominal pain.

She said she was not pregnant, but she did have some tenderness in the left fornix. She was unmarried; and it was a time when if you were unmarried and under the age of 21, there was a mixture of denial, stigma in her history, and yesterday she had not looked unwell, certainly not as she was now.

I could suspend belief or rationalise why I had missed the diagnosis, so obvious as I looked at her with that grey pallor of impending disaster.

In those days, when you graduated you were considered fully fledged. That was it. Your training wheels had been removed. You could practice unsupervised after you had been through six years of undergraduate education.  I had stuffed up. Looking at her lying on a trolley I knew that I had missed an ectopic pregnancy. I had stuffed up.

I moved with the speed of a penitent, and I immediately ordered that she be taken to the operating theatre. The senior obstetrics resident was alerted and in turn the general practitioner obstetrician. The operation to remove the ectopic pregnancy was successful. Nobody stood around, arguing her clinical diagnosis. They just saved her life; no problem.

I learnt a lesson that day; and my peers were forgiving. It just confirmed  that if you stuff up, admit it and learn; then recriminations are somewhat superfluous. There was none of the huge panoply of undertaking root cause analysis or any of the fancy names designed by bureaucrats to define the scapegoat , the sacrificial offering to protect the system from the predations of legal jackaldom.

Where am I leading? Ectopic pregnancy requires termination for the health of the mother. The embryo is developing outside the uterus, and undiagnosed or untreated will eventually cause a catastrophic haemorrhage and maternal death.

When I was a young doctor, chemical treatment of ectopic pregnancy did not exist. The drug methotrexate was introduced to destroy the ectopic pregnancy. Methotrexate can kill a wide and diverse number of targets, including the ectopic embryo. Usually given in a single injection, methotrexate has a cytotoxic effect on the trophoblastic tissue – the cells that enable the embryo to stick in normal circumstances to the uterine wall.

Methotrexate treatment of ectopic pregnancies is considered safe, effective and cheap, with no major side effects. Intramuscular methotrexate has the advantage of tubal conservation and saves patients from requiring surgery. It is easier to administer than intraoperative route, which these days is laparoscopic and hence needs expertise.

Now what is happening in the Redneck States of the America?

In addition to surgical abortions, anti-abortion laws in some states such as Texas have also banned several drugs that can be used for inducing abortions. Among the medicines banned under these laws include drugs such as methotrexate, mifespristone, and misoprostol. Besides inducing abortion, these medications are also used for the treatment of other conditions.

Moreover, these laws allow the state to prosecute health care prescribers and pharmacists for dispensing such abortion-inducing medications.

Recent reports suggest that the reversal of abortion rights has also indirectly impacted women who use these medications for conditions other than for a medication abortion.

Although States such as Texas have banned these medications for terminating pregnancies, the laws permit the use of these drugs for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies.

However, the fear of penalties, including being criminally charged, has resulted in some pharmacists refusing to dispense these drugs for the above.

In addition to ectopic pregnancies, methotrexate can suppress the activity of the immune system and is used in the treatment of autoimmune conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, and lupus. Methotrexate is also used for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease and a variety of cancers, including breast cancer, lymphoma, leukemia and lung cancer. Depending on the nature and severity of the disease, the dosage required varies; for a period I was prescribed the drug but in a far lower dose than required for neoplasia – or ectopic pregnancy for that matter.

Nevertheless, in these anti-abortion States , believe it or not, there are reports of disrupted access to methotrexate for patients with autoimmune disorders. Some rheumatologists have stopped renewing prescriptions for methotrexate, and moreover pharmacists are refusing to dispense.

Paradoxically, methotrexate can cause birth defects.

This has had a knock-on effect. The risk of birth defects and the lack of access to abortions have made rheumatologists wary of prescribing methotrexate to women of childbearing age with these concurrent diseases. As one source has said: “Frankly, methotrexate is one of my go-to medications for any number of diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, myositis, and systemic sclerosis. I expect that some rheumatologists will understandably worry about prescribing methotrexate to patients because if the patient inadvertently became pregnant, the foetus has now been exposed to this medication. This is really worrisome as methotrexate is a very effective medication that we rely on to treat a number of debilitating and serious autoimmune diseases.

Indeed.

Justice John Roberts

Now America has John Roberts as the de facto Surgeon-General. He presides over a Supreme Court which could be reasonably considered is now the legal equivalent of the untreated ectopic pregnancy – eventually if left alone it will all end up in tears – however you pronounce it.

America remains untreated. We await the death of this motherland in the eventual haemorrhage of a Constitution constructed when the population had a median life expectancy of 35 years.

Eventually, the blood of all is shed. See, your gloves, Chief Justice Roberts, are smothered in the blood of your country, shed for no-one but the hubris of your colleagues.

The Unsinkable Molly White

Anissa Gardizy a 35 year old reporter on the Boston Globe. Her short biography states that Anissa Gardizy is a general assignment business reporter. She graduated from Emerson College with a B.S. in journalism and took economics classes at Framingham State University. Prior to joining the Globe full-time, Anissa was a co-op on the business desk, and she held internships at the Telegram & Gazette in Worcester and The Information in San Francisco. 

Below is her recent profile of Molly White, who had to take time out because of her robust criticism of cryptocurrency. She has been verbally attacked; which probably means she has obviously come too close to the festering centre of cryptocurrency activity.

Ms Gadizy writes:

Depending on whom you ask, cryptocurrency is either digital snake oil or revolutionary technology. Crypto markets have plunged in recent weeks and everyone is looking for answers.

So it makes sense that a website dedicated to documenting mishaps, failures, and scams in the industry is suddenly taking off. And who’s behind it? Molly White, a 29-year-old Wikipedia enthusiast and former HubSpot employee who has emerged as one of the industry’s most pointed critics.

How the 2016 Northeastern University graduate, who lives in the Boston area, came to be one of the most listened-to people on crypto and blockchain tech is complicated. But it started in the past year, when the field became impossible to ignore.

The price of bitcoin surged to an all-time-high of nearly $70,000 in November. Ads for crypto companies were featured during the Super Bowl. Celebrities changed their Twitter profile pictures to non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Some of White’s friends began quitting their traditional tech jobs to work for crypto firms.

White, a longtime Wikipedia editor on the side, started to research the technology. But the more she learned, the more she realized crypto was being marketed as something everyone should be getting into, despite a history rife with fraud, scams, and predatory marketing.

“[I was] seeing people get screwed over again and again and again,” White said. “There wasn’t a permanent record of what was actually happening and how poorly a lot of these projects were ending.”

Her first instinct was to start writing Wikipedia articles about crypto and the related field of web3.” But she quickly realized Wikipedia wouldn’t be the best place for her work — among other things, it would have required her to take a neutral approach.

“I have a pretty strong opinion,” she said.

Software engineer Molly White at work on her laptop

So late last year, while working full-time at HubSpot, White created a website called “Web3 is Going Just Great”. (The name is as sarcastic as it sounds, with the longer version ending with “…and is definitely not an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already smouldering planet.”) On the site, she chronicles  sometimes several times a day — bad things happening in crypto.

“There’s a narrative that’s become so loud and pervasive, that everyone should be getting involved in this,” she said. “It feels like I have this obligation to speak out about it.”

And others are listening.

She is regularly quoted by national news outlets, was a guest lecturer at Stanford University, and has advised US senators, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, on blockchain and cryptocurrency.

As White has learned over the past year, criticizing crypto isn’t easy. In a space known for unwavering optimism and “bro culture,” she’s the outspoken opponent pointing out its problems.

White has been the victim of online harassment, doxxing (when private information is revealed about someone), and threats of violence. As a result, she doesn’t share much identifying information about her family or where she lives.

White, who grew up in Maine, started editing on Wikipedia around the time she was 13. “My family knew I was doing it, and to some extent my friends knew,” she said. “It was kind of just like, ‘Oh, that’s one of Molly’s weird hobbies.’”

Though she got started writing about her favourite bands, White now focuses on controversial viewpoints and male-dominated spaces, including right-wing extremism and “involuntary celibates,” or incels. She has also served on the site’s arbitration committee, which settles its toughest disputes.

Andrew Lih, a Wikipedia veteran who has known White since she was a teen, said most editors concentrate on topics they take a personal interest in. White, he said, tackles things “she absolutely doesn’t like.”

“She wants to make sure the record has the best information,” he said.

Lih credits White’s rise to her ability to present information in a way that is digestible. On her crypto website, she writes in a terse, matter-of-fact style and uses hashtags such as #yikes, #badidea, and #hmm. She isn’t condescending or alarmist, either.

Unlike some critics, White doesn’t think all crypto is a scam. Rather, she believes there has been an explosion of “really scam-y projects” that downplay the risks. She worries crypto is being cast as a “ticket to financial freedom” to people who don’t have money to lose.

According to data published by the Federal Trade Commission, more than 46,000 people have reported losing over $1 billion in crypto to scams since the start of 2021.

Long term, White believes crypto will likely exist as a niche, speculative vehicle for high-risk takers.

Most people would agree that regulators need to address crypto scams for the industry to be viable. More controversial is White’s sceptical view of blockchain, crypto’s underlying technology, which has been hyped in recent years as a potential cure-all for problems related to Internet security, privacy, and financial systems. Blockchains are public, electronic databases that are distributed across a network of computers. The technology is intended to be immutable (meaning records can’t be modified) and decentralized (meaning data are stored across the network and not held by any central party.)

Proponents believe blockchain tech could eventually transform everything from financial systems to social media, creating a digital world where individuals have increased control over their own data. Many people refer to this blockchain-based vision as “web3.”

There’s been a proliferation of venture capitalists, startups, and politicians touting its potential, including a growing cluster in Boston. Late last month, hundreds of people attended an all-day summit on web3 on the top floor of the MIT Media Lab, put on by venture capitalist John Werner. It drew industry heavyweights, including cryptographer Stuart Haber, who co-invented the blockchain.

But White doesn’t think blockchain is revolutionary technology. Last month, she and a group of about two dozen computer scientists, researchers, and academics, signed a letter to US lawmakers to express their concerns about the field. Signatories included well-known technology figures like Harvard lecturer and cryptographer Bruce Schneier, Boston-based entrepreneur Miguel de Icaza, and software engineer Grady Booch.

“By its very design, blockchain technology is poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit,” they wrote, calling it a “solution in search of a problem.”

White’s critics say the technology is in its early stages and will improve. But she disagrees, noting that the two most popular cryptocurrencies have been around for more than a decade. She also thinks blockchain, by design, contains inherent flaws — such as the inability to edit or delete data — that will make it difficult to use and potentially even harmful.

Greg Raiz, managing director of Techstars Boston — which just launched a crypto accelerator program with Boston-based blockchain firm Algorand — disagrees with White’s assertion that crypto is past its early days. In fact, he said it feels like “we’re still in the first inning of this game.”

While he doesn’t think blockchain will be the “solution to everything,” he isn’t writing off its potential to address social, monetary, and business problems. He added that criticism of web3 is “super healthy.”

“Any type of unbalanced exuberance toward a technology isn’t great,” Raiz said.

Sounds that he is pronouncing an “Amen” to the unsinkable Molly.

Parliamentary staffing

The first reaction to the protesters of the newly-elected backbenchers – not aligned to any particular party – to a reduction in the four advisers to one  in line with other back benchers, was that of the howls of the deprived. Really, you poor diddums – only one adviser and four electorate officers. When perceived as privileged already, complaining about the level of the porks, is one way to lose the electorate, especially before you have even placed your toe in the political water. I was surprised when Dave Pocock started the Whimper.

In 1973, the Leader of the Opposition had a Press Secretary, a Principal Private Secretary (PPS), a Deputy Private Secretary and an Assistant Private Secretary. There was one other adviser who was from the government and picked up much of those tedious jobs and fashioning questions on notice and an add on to the Parliamentary Library. Needless to say, we were all male, and the secretarial staff who did all the work were women. I was the PPS. However, the Leader of the Opposition was thus limited to four advisers, including the Press Secretary – not one backbencher.

I believe it was more important not to interfere with the electorate staffing. For senior members of any party the electorate secretary is very important to remind even the Prime Minister that he represents an electorate, even if it may be traditionally very safe. Nowadays that cannot be guaranteed. Thus, the electorate office is an important bastion. In the case of the backbencher, especially those who have gained their seat by the adroit use of social media to win the popular vote, their activity will be augmented by an electorate office, government funded. Cathy McGowan in the northern Victorian electorate of Indi is an important bellwether since she developed an electorate office system, which was shown to be transferable to her successor, Helen Haines.

Cathy McGowan

As the sociologist Max Weber observed, charismatic leadership is very dependent on the individual’s appeal, but in her case McGowan (an unlikely charismatic) was able to “bureaucratise” the electorate staff so her successor did not need to change the systemic aspects of the McGowan legacy. In other words, the model was robust enough to survive the transition from one to another strong-willed woman.

McGowan concentrated on her electorate and where she thought relevant generalised the needs to that of Australia. Maybe the fact that she came from a large cohesive family provided her with a model for an electorate office, but whatever it was, her electorate brew worked.

Developing her model from an electorate base provides a challenge for the new raft of independents, whatever their colour. She had a strong personal appeal, which translated into strong personal loyalty by her staff. She did it with a strong electorate profile, which contrasted with the dysfunctional style of her predecessor.

A backbencher needing Canberra advisers is presented with the aspirant jetsam seeking to float as a successful “factional candidate” onto a red or green parliamentary cushioned sinecure. At this pupa stage the adviser may be more akin to N’drangheta Consigliere admixed with a tincture of Undergraduate Puerilism. Policy development is not one of the skills of this Canberra hybrid. More, it is a question of hanging out, gossiping, and covering the underlying boredom of those without any constructive thought coupled with outbursts of anti-social behaviour – sexism,  drunkenness and sexual harassment.

Policy becomes a joke; so-called policy becomes exercises in plagiarism – or just the “smart-arse” taking the role of the cynic – tearing down all constructive thought on the grounds that they are protecting Absolute Truth – otherwise excused as the role of the Devil’s advocate. Undertaking policy development is a skill, imperfect at best. It is a special quality requiring knowledge, so you know that you are not re-inventing policies that have been shown not to work, and enough knowledge to provide objectivity in an ocean of bias coupled with an ability to write clearly and succinctly. These skills lie outside the normal skill set of the normal adviser appointee.

Staffers aplenty

Well, minimising the number of advisers minimises the number of people designed to irritate and thus it seems leaving it at one each for all backbenchers is probably about right. Only need one person to get your dry cleaning, run errands, and ensure that the backbencher has his or her ego combed daily.

Mouse Whisper

Don’t know whence it came. Just a scrap of paper with the title “Death of a Babyweight.”

…needless to say, the comment was met with gales of laughter, but then that was another time when the sun shone and they were feckless and shallow students; and yes, the Associate Professor was as Federico would say a total bunghole who played the World for cheap laughs a person who always knew the mouse to kick – and now lies increasingly forgotten – someone essentially trivial. 

Perhaps you will understand the allusion, illusion and in the end the confusion.

 

Modest Expectations – SXM

Here we are in Mungo National Park. The power is off. My computer needs re-charging. Thus, after this sentence, there will be a lull. Transmission will resume after we get to Balranald.

When you write something as disconnected as that, there must be what they call in the trade a prequel, and there must be a postscript as well.

But first, the scene should be set for both.

Mungo National Park was the site of an ancient lake, Lake Willandra, dry saltbush expanse disappearing into the horizon.  On one side of this lake is a long stretch of dunes caused by the winds blowing the sand and grit into have termed “The Walls of China”. There has been differential erosion across these dunes leaving a series of obelisks in the sand. They are a small version of the famous Pinnacles in Western Australia.

I first drove around Mungo National Park 30 years ago. The Park had been given WHO Heritage status in 1981, the remains of the modern Indigenous Australian man, at least 40,000 years old, were discovered in the Willandra Lakes in 1974, with the remains of a perhaps equally ancient female having been discovered in 1968. They were labelled Mungo Man and Mungo Lady.

The bones have languished in Canberra, until Mungo Lady was returned “to country”, and is kept under lock and key in the Visitor Centre while a suitable burial site could be designated. Thirty years have passed. The then Minister of the Environment in May this year gave permission for reburial. Having been given the gravedigger role, the NSW Government has baulked.

Meanwhile Mungo Man’s remains await, to be interred in an ancient river red gum box.

The Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa share the land, saying their people have effectively been there forever – well for at least 40,000 years, but when I first went to Mungo, there was not much evidence of their occupation. One could freely drive around the Walls of China; you could walk around the ancient site without the benefit of an Aboriginal guide. Sensitivity towards these lands did not require a boardwalk. The country was full of kangaroos; this time there was not one to be seen.

Then there was a seasonal Lodge at the entry to the Park, where you could stay, except during the summer months, and water was at a premium. Today, there is a renovated Lodge, well set up with cabins clustered around the administrative and dining facilities. The highlight of the evening meal was the rack of lamb; after all, in the land of sheep in the saltbush, how glorious was the taste of a very generous serving. We agreed that it was the best lamb we had eaten since one memorable meal at Wanaka in the altoplano area of the South Island of New Zealand, where Canterbury lamb is raised, and until this Mungo experience was the most succulent lamb meal.

Strange, in search of an Aboriginal masterpiece, it was the product of imported fauna which provided the most memorable experience, apart from the cold which, although not unexpected, when combined with a wind chill factor pushed the thermometer well below zero.

As the reader may discern, I was disappointed being locked out of the self-drive tour, and there were suggestions that a sunset tour with two adults and two children at $200 was expensive, but then life is not cheap when you stay in the Park.

On the road to Balranald

Although it is stated that there is no need for a four-wheel drive, some parts of the road to Balranald were, as they say, challenging, especially as it seemed not to have been graded after the floods, and deep dried ruts dotted the roads and in the sandy areas, the bull dust concealed potholes in the road. On the other side of the coin, the asphalt roads are creeping outwards, especially where mining interests are concerned. On reaching the junction with the Balranald-Ivanhoe road, I was surprised by this newly sealed road.

Why? Mining means improved access.

Mineral sands mines had been opened 175km south–west of Ivanhoe. The heavy mineral concentrate (HMC) from the mine is trucked to a new rail siding just outside of Ivanhoe, then transported to Broken Hill for further processing. Unsealed roads used to go in all directions from Ivanhoe, which existed as a place where the rail fettlers lived and where once the Indian Pacific stopped at 3am to let me get off. If you want to emulate that feat just remember the station is approximately a mile from town – and there are no taxis.

There you are, the future of the NSW Far West, tourism and mining, not forgetting the traditional overlay of cattle and sheep. Just setting the scene.

The Prequel

David Lyle

We had been invited to a farewell of Professor David Lyle who, for the past 27 years, has headed the first University Department of Rural Health (URDH) created in Broken Hill. The concept was bitterly opposed at first by some elements of the Federal Department of Health and certain then influential general practitioners. The brainchild of these university departments of rural health was Dr Sue Morey, then the NSW Chief Health Officer, who believed that teaching of medical students should be available in a structured rural facility and should have a strong public health component with equally robust community involvement. Sue delegated me to sort out the structural barriers and importantly secure local involvement. As it turned out, Clyde Thomson, the remarkable CEO of the local Royal Flying Doctor Service, was that person. I have written extensively about Clyde elsewhere and it is about time that his status of being a “national treasure” is fully recognised.

Clyde trained as a pilot, but he grasped very clearly what we were about and how an air transport facility, an almost untouchable icon delivering emergency medical care to the outback, could be further broadened to be an integral part of the clinical life of the community, including most tellingly of the Aboriginal people. Clyde embraced the ideas and demonstrated very clearly the essential need for a “local champion” to work in the planning and implementation.

Although Clyde was Chair of the Hospital Board at the time and a university department of rural health being attached to the local hospital seemed an attractive option – in this case we avoided the danger of parochialism in that even if it were considered successful, there would always be a number of reasons advanced that a “Broken Hill Department of Rural Health”  would not be a generalisable model.

Also, medical education at an undergraduate level is the preserve of universities in Australia. We decided that despite a locational problem, the University of Sydney should be invited to participate in the project. At the time university medical school thinking about having a rural component was to have it located on a campus on the outskirts of Sydney, not 1,200 kilometres away in a mining town which was closer to Adelaide.

Crucially, Broken Hill was located in NSW. As time went by, the rural involvement of the University of Sydney moved towards Sydney to Dubbo, then to Orange, over a number of years. This would have been impossible if Broken Hill had been linked to one of South Australian Medical schools, which initially appeared to be the easy option given Broken Hill’s medical relationship with Adelaide, but would have assured failure. There was some academic resistance in University of Sydney Medical School; it was overcome. The Dean, Steve Leeder, helped – a crucial ally.

I was asked to do a Rural Stocktake across Australia by the Department of Health in 1999, and I reported early in 2000.

There is no doubt that Minister Michael Wooldridge’s dedication to rural health improvement drove implementation, in particular securing funding for the program in the 2000  Federal Budget, which was distributed to universities with medical schools, with the proviso that the Universities could not skim any of the funding for “administrative expenses”. All the funding went to the various programs.

The final keystone for this Broken Hill project was David Lyle. He is a public health physician who had been involved, even before his appointment, in determining the extent of lead poisoning in the children of Broken Hill. He has always had a reputation as a great teacher, and ensured that his URDH was expanded to embrace other health professionals, including Aboriginal Health workers.

He oversaw the conversion of disused wards at the back of the hospital into a tangible Department and attracted a significant amount of research funding. There are now 19 UDRHs across the country, and the fact that David, until now, has been the unmovable champion and therefore crucial in the growth of rural training of health professionals, including public health.

His replacement has yet to be named and the University of Sydney advertisement suggested that the office would be based in Camden, where apparently the university has some agricultural facility, such is the systemic idiocy in the university bureaucracy. There is a problem among medical deans where there is an obsession about ranking, largely determined by research citations. Most of the medical deans have had professional careers within academic cloisters where the sun of rural Australia doesn’t shine. It is alleged that rural health money is taken and strewn around the city campuses.

This response by the University of Sydney indicates the bane on any program – lack of corporate memory without a record of the genesis of the program.

David Lyle must leave a written legacy or podcasts to ensure that 27 years of experience is not lost, given he is the last of the original heads of the URDHs.

The Postscript – What’s in a Name!

Years ago, I was asked to review an alleged problem in the delivery of medical care at Hopetoun. Hopetoun is a small township just South of Wyperfield National Park – an area of mallee desert country which lies in the far north-west of Victoria. During my time there, a case of a pregnant woman with no access to ante-natal care, was raised with me.

It was an anecdote raised in passing as an example of the general lack of access to medical care.  Strangely over the years the name of this tiny place, Lascelles, has stuck in my mind.

This week we were returning from Broken Hill and decided to go across to Victorian border to visit the pink lake, Lake Tyrrell. Because of its colour, it has become a destination for Chinese tourists because of their association of pink with luck. When we visited the wind was blowing and sun was reflected from the water against a cloudless sky. You could pick out fragmentary pink colours in the shaded areas of the lake, but there is a far better pink lake in the South Australian Coorong. Anyway, Lake Tyrrell has put the Mallee town of Sea Lake on the map, but also on the map has been inserted the Silo Art Trail. Many of the silos in the district have murals painted on them. One of these silos was at Lascelles and at Sea Lake there was a signpost to Lascelles.

Lascelles silo art

The signpost evoked my memory of the name. I thought that it was a speck even further into the bush than Hopetoun, but for the first time I could put a face on this hamlet, where the major medical centres of Mildura and Bendigo were about two hours away. Lascelles is a pub and a few homes and on the silo wall there were beautifully painted, in sepia tones, portraits of a farming couple, the Hormans.

That is the endemic problem of small settlements, so small they do not merit any shops, but most do have a pub, a hangover from the time the trains stopped there and now a place for the locals to come and have a drink. The pub is often the only community resource and would be a perfect place for regular clinic by a visiting medical team.  As a model, the flying doctor provides  the excitement in community by arriving by air.  I remember in the 90s flying with the RFDS when they provided medical care at the Noccundra rodeo; and boy is Noccundra remote! Yet a plane on a gibber plain air strip indicates that the doctors and flight nurses have arrived.

Noccundra in Far West Queensland had a permanent population of four, but there was a pub made of stone. The RFDS provides a model for a visiting service, with provision of a regular clinical schedule and being available for outback events such as the rodeos where inevitably there will be injuries, some of which may require evacuation, either to Broken Hill or Adelaide.

There is much discussion about the lack of doctors in the bush. I believe the root cause is that there is no coherent succession planning, but for such planning there needs to be a facility which can appropriately both monitor and supply a regular flow of doctors.

To me all programs of clinical care must have a teaching component to assure the flow, as occurs in teaching hospitals.

Therefore a university facility, whether it be a university department of rural health, rural clinical school or a rural medical school, could provide a regular means of servicing the small communities with clinicians and providing two elements – one: clinical experience and two: continuity.

Much of these ideas have sprung from my own personal experience of providing a visiting medical service. For a number of years when I was newly graduated I would do evening consultations by visiting patients who, for one reason or another, could not present at the rooms for ongoing care. I did it twice a week, and if I encountered any deterioration, I would let the general practitioner know. Here the General practitioner was my educational resource and I went out on my visits -five or six patients generally had to be seen each evening.

The principle is simple – a travelling medical team connected to a teaching centre, where public health is an essential ingredient. As I have found out, if you provide a mixture of collegiality, teaching, recognition and succession planning, then you can build a coherent team of health workers.

Such a concept where you use colourful cars in lieu of aircraft to attract attention as the means of providing a regular service to remote settlements need to have a David Lyle to implement such a simple but obvious concept. But make sure that the travelling band arrives in each township with panache and always come when they said they would -punctually.

Incidentally, there was no problem with the medical care in Hopetoun, but that is another story, but instructive in trusting your on-site observations to strip away the hearsay and gossip. 

Sarah Jane Halton and her Stomach Knot

Jane Halton has bobbed up again. The incoming Health Minister, Mark Butler, has asked her to review the existing vaccine contracts and whether the country had a regular source of vaccine supply – a guaranteed pipeline.

The background is the dilemma being posed by the surge in the number of cases of the virus and the fact that the new variants seem to be more contagious. The fact that the level of vaccination including boosters has declined and there seems to be a growing complacency in the community with the removal of public health safeguards presumably is driving the review.

His action follows on from a national surge in case numbers, with health department estimates showing around 200,000 people are actively infected. He also confirmed that COVID-19 vaccines for children aged between six months and five years, which have already been approved in the United States, are progressing towards approval in Australia. Pfizer has been granted provisional approval to put in an application to provide a paediatric COVID-19 vaccine.

At the same time the impact of the transmissibility of the new variants BA.4 and BA.5 has introduced another variable, because of the unknown factor around the virulence and the effectiveness of current mRNA vaccines against these variants. That is the problem with mRNA viruses – they are fickle, mutating regularly.

Reading between the lines, Butler wants a “quick and dirty”. Despite what has been provided in the media release, and a comment that he was only interested in the future, the lessons come from the past.

Butler’s appointment of Halton is a shrewd one. She is a Howard-Abbott warrior. Therefore, her appointment has a “Teflon” quality. As a Deputy Secretary in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Halton was convener of the People Smuggling Taskforce in the Children Overboard Affair. This was a convenient vehicle for Howard’s scare tactics in relation to the “Boat People”. She was the dummy in believing false claims, but she was rewarded with the post of Department of Health Secretary, where the then Minister, Abbott obviously saw her as a person in his own image and when he became Prime Minister Halton moved upwards into a central agency – that of Finance.

She became a member of the ill-fated Executive Board of the Australian National COVID-19 Coordination Commission in March 2020. That would suggest that she was engaged in the whole sorry process from the start, the entrails of which she has been asked to examine. Maybe she will be able to airbrush any involvement of Sarah Jane Halton from her report to Minister Butler.

After all, the Chair of the Commission, Neville Powers was convicted of breaches of COVID-19 rules. Maybe the activities of this Commission will figure in her solution. So far, the only public contribution by Halton as a result of this association was an indifferent report on hotel quarantine.

However, there is no doubt that Halton is an expert on integrity having been a member of the Board of the Crown Casino which presided over a raft of corrupt practices, the criminality of which has not been tested in the Courts.  Nevertheless, the former judge Patricia “Paddy” Bergin, who ran the Inquiry  on Crown, noted that despite her involvement in some of the deceptive practices, her integrity emerged intact.

James Packer had a business model which relied on an ongoing river of Chinese money replete with all the attendant malfeasance connected with the movement of large amounts of money, including junket tours and money laundering. It seems that ASIC is not prepared to take the matter further – “too big to fail” is the mantra.

Halton is a beneficiary in that the level of her involvement in the shenanigans will not be tested in court. Nor unsurprisingly, this involvement was not mentioned in the Butler media release, where she is described as “a vaccine expert” and Chair of an international organisation – the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI) based in Oslo, which is the brainchild of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Government of India. Given the generous description of her as a vaccine expert by the Minister, the published description of the CEPI Board, acknowledges her starkly by a single word “Chair”, a position to which she was re-appointed last year for a further five years. Yet others on the Board are clearly defined as vaccine experts. It is as though the authors of the CEPI Report were unsure why she was there.

I therefore was surprised with the Ministerial comment: “I make no judgment about the existing arrangements. I think it’s entirely appropriate for us to have some independent advice about incredibly important arrangements that we have inherited.”

Excuse me for gagging on “independent”.

Now that ex-Minister Hunt has retired, also excuse me by speculating if there is now one remaining person with a target on his chest. Also let’s hope that she does not get that knot in her stomach – her own shorthand for the times she has stuffed up.

Climate Change

Ravenserodd – site of sunken Medieval town

The worst manifestation of this deteriorating climate was the Grote Mandrenke (Great Drowning of Men) of 1362, the greatest North Sea disaster in history which saw up to thirty thousand dead and almost half the population of the marshland districts along the Jutland coast drowned, not to mention the inundation of substantial chunks of the city of Dunwich and the port of Ravenserodd on the North Sea coast of England.

This above excerpt from a newly-published examination of ancient Britain settlement, Shadowlands by Matthew Green describes the changes in the British coastline because of climate change in the early part of the last Millennium. There is the description of Old Winchelsea where, over a period of a hundred years, this settlement – an important port on the Kent coast – was washed away. The intervention of King Edward 1 in acquiring land in the hills above Winchelsea was not without controversy because it meant a shift of Winchelsea being superimposed on existing settlements on this higher land.

These were turbulent times as the Northern Hemisphere moved from a calm Mediaeval Warm Period (c. 900-1200) into the turbulent Little Ice Age (c.1300-1900).  During this time, hundreds of settlements on both sides of the Channel were inundated with extensive loss of life.

As Green says, this period  was instructive for our time, when climate change is very much in the hands of manmade intervention, which as he says, it is probably much worse than the thirteenth or fourteenth  century “ever dreamed up.”

May I suggest that the inhabitants of Lismore and other places that were once ports and which are now being repeatedly flooded, read what happened to this mediaeval port of Winchelsea. It took time but, in the end,  the once thriving port of Winchelsea was no more, death from repeated flooding.

Mouse Whisper

My Bushrat relative, Rafferty, turned up the other day. He had hitched a ride on a number of trucks around the southern part of the Far West of NSW with a mate, Jack Kerourat. Anyway, he said that the Hay Plain was so flat you could see the curvature of the Earth’s surface.

The other thing he mentioned was in the bar of the Penarie pub where he heard one of locals say, “Look mate, you know what a remote place is in Australia. It’s where there’s no TAB betting agency.”

Penarie pub