scuze i

a reply to Dina's reply

2012-02-19T06:13:00.000-08:00

While trying to reply to Dina’s reply to Gattina’s comment on my post “more on magda and marriage” some text kept disappearing from the "comment box" because I talk too much.

This post is just an extension of that conversation with the full text of what I was trying to say.

Gattina said:

I have nothing against gay marriages as long as they don't want to adopt a child !

I replied:

Hi Gattina, I'm glad we agree about gay marriage.
With respect to children, I can understand your doubts but will disagree. There are already gay people in Australia who have children.

Maybe the real problem is how to make sure ALL parents - whether gay or not - will be good parents.

to which Dina replied:

What ARE the doubts? Are there any that exist outside religiously-inspired prejudices?

It seems to me that two mothers or two fathers could be as capable of taking care of children as a mother/father pair or a single mother or single father.

Or they could be as awful as some straight or single parents.

I don't think gender has that much influence on parenting.

If a child shouldn't be adopted by gay parents; is it better that they have no parents? Better that they have unloving and/or abusive parents?

The whole of what I was trying to say:

I tried to reply to Dina’s reply:

Hi Dina,
I suspect there are still many people who have doubts about the wisdom of letting gay people adopt, and I would like to address that part of your comment first.

The people of the generations who dealt with WWII and its immediate aftermath are now the elders in our communities, and I'm prepared to accept they are a product of a time and place which no longer exists in the west. They deserve a little credit, perhaps, for some of the social changes which have happened in their lifetime. If they were not all responsible for initiating change, many of them have nonetheless responded to the changes in good faith and not necessarily from a position of hate.

Over the past few decades we've learned an awful lot about abuse by too many people in "social or charitable" positions of authority, and as someone who was raised a Catholic it pains me to know that too many of my "own" have been responsible for a range of crimes including physical or sexual assault, mental cruelty, exploitation of children for slave labour, and the transportation of children to fill anticipated labour force needs.

The good news is that these social and religious authorities are now reaping what they have sown, and are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the generations they once claimed to serve. I'm enjoying watching these arseholes squirm. I'm enjoying the death throes of religiously inspired prejudices. Yes, these prejudices were/are religiously inspired and supported. The influence of religion is different from one country to another, but it's shrinking . If anything, the increasingly strident calls on god to justify hate are evidence that the influence of religiously inspired prejudices is waning.

The rules of logic would tell me I shouldn't argue from the particular to the general. On the other hand my own experiences are all I have to go on. I've grown up listening to most [though not all] older people parroting ideas they've never questioned. In this, they were only doing what I have always done, which is filter the world through my own [limited] personal experiences.

Their unquestioned ideas caused me quite a bit of anguish when I was younger, and made me wonder if they would be as hostile to me as the rest of the world if I began to live a more openly gay lifestyle. Thankfully, they were willing and able to question these assumptions when the issues became personal, and see me as a person rather than just as a "difference", and they didn't need any coaxing. In fact, in my whole vastly extensive Irish Catholic family, only one person let me down - and it wasn’t my grandmother who was born in 1902.

The more we learn of the abuse of authority, the more these issues become personal to people who once parroted ideas without questioning them. People like the man in Dunnolly who knows 44 poofs and thinks they are okay has shifted from an unquestioned idea to a positive idea based on his personal experience.

He's no longer neutral but an active campaigner for reason in his own way.

Then there are people like yourself - I doubt you've ever been neutral about anything. You have a passion for reason and justice and have probably always questioned everything. The unfortunate reality is this doesn't make other people “wrong”, so much as it just makes you special. But neutrality is a disappearing norm.

The second point you make, which is spot on, is that gender and sexuality have bugger all to do with the quality of parenting. Again, the neutrals have little to go on except their own personal experiences. To some extent, the power of the pulpit has been replaced by the power of media, and the media can't even claim to come from some inherently good place.

What's unspoken in the unquestioned "they shouldn't adopt" idea is partly the assumption that all poofs are paedophiles and all paedophiles are poofs. Of course this is crap.

Our man in Dunnolly, through personal experience, can be counted on to know this is crap. If he ever once believed or said gay people shouldn't adopt, it was probably because he thought the welfare of children was more important than gay rights.

I’m all for abandoning religious prejudice, and I guess for me the scriptures have been replaced by a new benchmark: to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr, in a better world, people will be judged for the content of their character.

This is not just the right ideal, but it is a value which I have always believed is one of the best things about the real Australia as I see it.

There are public figures in Australia who, I agree, have no excuse for their doubts. Julia Gillard's position on gay marriage is as despicable as it is inexplicable. It totally fails the “content of character” test.

Jeff Kennett recently jumped on the "all children need a mother and father" bandwagon. In this, he reveals himself as someone who is not prepared to allow either logic or personal experience to challenge his preconceived notions.

He was responsible for a huge mental health organisation, but could not see the role of prejudice in suicide.

He sees the same appalling stories in the media that I do - for example a "father" prepared to throw his little girl off a bridge just to spite his ex-wife. Well, examples abound but let's not make ourselves sick.

It seems he’s no more interested in the content of people’s character than Julia.

what next?

2012-02-19T05:17:00.000-08:00

Who leaked this footage? Was it someone from the Julia camp, or just a Liberal stooge?

One of the first public criticisms of Rudd’s leadership was that he was too obsessed with the daily media cycle. But was it all about spin, or was he simply trying to beat the media at their own game?

I had thought the recent media focus on who caucus hates most – Julia or Kevin – was a beat up. The tragedy for Julia is that she could not get on top of the rumours, and has done nothing terribly positive outside this issue to take back control of her image.

But nothing shows who frames the debate or who is deciding what questions are important than this clip of Rudd doing a dummy spit. No wonder Kev was obsessed with trying to control the media cycle. Politicians seem to be more accountable to the media than to voters – so much so that I feel not just impotent but that, as a voter, I am being manipulated.

If the media really frames all political debate, maybe the question is not one of whether we truly get the government we deserve, but one of whether we get the media we deserve.

------------

Rudd is reputed to be a bit of a perfectionist, reputed not to be a team player, and reputed to be someone who does his block over trivial things [like crappy sandwiches on a long flight].

While I don’t know that it’s okay to swear at an innocent flight attendant over someone else’s failure to provide decent food, I must admit that I have, from time to time, lost my temper and used bad words just the way Rudd does in this clip.

It doesn’t change my impression of him one bit.

God help us if the media gets wind of some politician breaking wind.

------------

It does the Liberal Party no credit that Tony Abbott has had their loyalty for so long. If they stood for anything, they would want to be represented by a spokesman prepared to tell us what that is.

What the leak suggests is that the ALP is a party at war with itself.

And if the party is at war with itself, this is because it doesn’t stand for anything, any more than the Liberal Party does.

If no one wins elections, but simply takes power by default because they are the lesser of two evils, who will win the next election? Who do you choose when there’s not even anything left to scrape from the bottom of the barrel?

------------

The Westminster tradition of having the leader chosen by the majority party in parliament is no longer workable, for the majority party no longer sets the agenda or frames public debate. At the moment it seems the media pulls all the strings. Unfortunately, the media is no more offering any leadership or vision than the major parties.

We are leaderless and – no pun intended – rudderless.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it – to myself as usual if that’s the best I can manage – the person who represents this country and sets an agenda and vision for parliament should be chosen directly by voters. It must be someone who is free to speak their mind, not someone beholden to a bunch of movers and shakers.

A reasonably independent agenda would hold parliament accountable, by framing debate and asking those who work against this elected vision to explain themselves.

The corollary of this is that any directly elected leader would be held openly accountable by parliament, not simply threatened behind closed doors.

--------------

more on magda and marriage

2012-02-17T15:46:00.000-08:00

[If you are over the Magda story by now, you probably won’t be very interested in this post. If so, I do apologise, and promise normal transmission will resume soon. But do check out this Smack The Pony sketch before you go!]

While I originally thought Magda’s coming out might be something of an anti-climax – and I did miss the big event on the teev – some of the comments she made on ABC’s Breakfast Radio started me thinking.

It’s only during the lifetime of too many of us that homosexuality has become legal in all Australian states and territories, similarly it’s only relatively recently that we’ve had the right to nominate a same sex partner as the beneficiary of our superannuation.

Well, now that we aren’t being tossed in jail or robbed of our life saving’s, why should we care about the right to marry?

I must confess I’ve been rather lukewarm on the whole gay marriage thing in the past, mainly because Kevin 07 promised all the remaining discrimination had been sorted. This turned out to be a porkie, given gay people cannot qualify for a Prospective Marriage Visa.*

Kids are still committing suicide, or being kicked out of their home for coming out, and some poofta bashing is still happening.

Every time someone like Magda puts their hand up, gays become human again for a while, rather than just a statistic.

No Magda doesn’t think she’s particularly brave, Karen Phelps et al have made their own sexuality public before this and help lay the groundwork. Having lived openly as gay herself, Magda simply thought "coming out officially" would open up the media and provide a forum for a discussion on the gay marriage legislation presented to parliament.

She makes a good point that people don’t stay in the closet for no good reason [e.g. nephews, children etc at school who shouldn’t be at risk of bullying for someone else’s “crime”.]

Magda values love above the promotion of shame and fear and victimisation – and if public acceptance is enshrined in the law then it sets a better standard.

I would add that “tolerance” is not the same thing as “acceptance”. When some complain that allowing same sex couples to marry would cheapen the institution of marriage, that is merely tolerance rather than acceptance speaking.

Presenter Fran Kelly threw a quote from Julia Gillard into the breakfast show discussion:

I think there are some important things from our past that need to continue to be part of our present and part of our future; for our culture, for our heritage – marriage being between a man and a woman.

But marriage, Magda said, is a symbolic union of 2 souls - gender is not the core issue. If marriage wasn’t flexible, if it hadn’t evolved, it would have gone the way of the dodo bird.

After my previous [rather hasty] post about Magda, Windsmoke and Andrew’s comments on yesterday's post prodded a little more activity between the ears.

If our sporting heroes in general, and AFL champions in particular, are reluctant to come out as gay, then there is one truly disgusting double standard at play [in addition to our Prime Minister’s incomprehensible stance on the issue].

Our whole legal system is underpinned by two articles of faith; the sanctity of property, and the notion that we should do no harm.

Why is it then that AFL players can get away with what they get away with?

I don’t particularly care whom Wayne Carey bonks, nor understand why any woman would even go near him, but it’s not okay for him to grab the breasts of a woman he has never met and tell her her breasts aren’t big enough. His subsequent behaviour doesn't really seem to indicate any remorse or attempt to get his act together.

I don’t pretend to understand addiction well enough to judge Ben Cousins, but, let’s face it, he has let a lot of other people down as well as himself.

It strikes me then as a tad unfair that so many players can be forgiven just about anything, or even have our support and prayers for their rehabilitation, while others are held to another standard.

Matthew Newton** doesn't seem to be getting quite the same level of forgiveness - is this because his family are seen as "ours" while footballers are deified in the "them" category? On the other hand, is he getting fairer treatment than an identifiably gay person would get under the same circumstances?

Garden variety gays who quietly get on with their lives, inflicting no harm or distress on others, for the most part have to keep reinforcing the idea that they are more human and less threatening than commonly perceived by some.

*So long as the definition of marriage remains confined to “a man and a woman”, an alternative solution would be to change the Immigration Act to include gay couples.

**Matthew Newton is the son of a long loved TV family: His father Bert something of an Australian Johnny Carson.

shock horror magda admits she's a desi arnez- prime minister still unmoved

2012-02-15T05:12:00.000-08:00

Magda Szubanski came out last night on Channel 10's the Project, talking about proposed changes to Australia's laws to permit same sex marriage. It was possibly Australia’s worst kept secret, but she felt it was time to make a public stand.

Some of us who are older may or may not feel coming out was more difficult 30 or 40 years ago than it is today, but as Mazda points out, young teenagers are still committing suicide because of the problems they face in dealing with their sexuality.

The following [rather dated] sketch shows just how subtle some anti gay messages can be, especially at home where most of us assume there might be unconditional love, or at least hope for a little tolerance.

the year of brendan brodie

2012-02-13T04:23:00.000-08:00

Brendan Brodie was the most envied boy enrolled at Our Lady Help of the Hopeless; he was never there. None of us students had ever seen Brendan, but we had all heard of him. Every morning after assembly Sister Mary Tortia would lead us in a prayer for Brendan’s recovery. His family had come out from England and enrolled Brendan in our school, only to learn he had some unpronounceable illness. He had never attended a single class.

We finally saw Brendan one morning after playlunch. We always had arithmetic after playlunch, and Sister Mary Confusia had just written a sum on the blackboard which said:

Divide £64/17/11 evenly between 17 people.

Sister had a very special way of stabbing the blackboard with her chalk, to make sure her i’s were dotted and her pound signs crossed. After she finished writing on the board she would usually add a few extra stabby dots just for the heaven of it, and this morning was no exception. She stood back to admire her handiwork.

If doing plain long division was Purgatory, trying to do long division with LSD [pounds shillings and pence] was my first glimpse of Hell. I still couldn’t even rule red lines properly without getting finger bumps in them from where I was holding the ruler.

Normally we put the letters AMDG at the top of every page of our exercise books to remind us our work should glorify God. For arithmetic, however, I preferred the more direct cry for help, JMJ.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph [I place my trust in thee]” was a popular ejaculation, as it would obtain an indulgence of seven years each time it was said. [An indulgence is the Catholic equivalent of a remission of one’s sentence, or time off Purgatory for good behaviour. It was not until years later I would learn of another sort of ejaculation; a different type of indulgence which could only add to one’s sentence.]

We were forbidden to use biros, not just because they were expensive and could lead to a sin of pride, but because they were designed by the devil, a protestant, to induce slovenly writing habits in Catholic kids. I scratched away with my fountain pen, praying the inky mess would conceal my ineptitude. I wrote:

£64 ÷ 17 = 3 with £13 remainder.

Convert £13 to shillings:

It was just then, when I thought that even Our Lady Help of the Hopeless couldn’t save me, Brendan opened the classroom door. At first we didn’t know who he was, but we didn’t care. He didn’t stay long; just the few moments it took to open the door, produce a couple of armpit raspberries, and run off. Our prayers were answered.

When Sister Mary Succour, the Principal, went to visit Brendan’s parents they were surprised to hear about Brendan’s illness, and he was exposed as a brilliant but shameless forger.

Mr Brodie found the only way to get Brendan to school was to escort him right up to Sister Confusia, our grade teacher, and hand him over. From time to time he would just get up and run away, but eventually he came to think of school as fun.

Within hearing of the nuns, Brendan spoke only arpy-darpy. To speak arpy-darpy, thereby becoming unintelligible to all but the most practised speakers, one simply inserted the syllables arp or darp into normal words at regular intervals.

When Sister Confusia said “Good morning, class”, Brendan would answer “garpood marpornarping”. When Sister said The Lord’s Prayer, Brendan would begin with “Ourpy Farpytharper”. When Sister upset Brendan, he would smile beguilingly and tell her to “Garpet F’darpucked”.

It was Brendan who told us that the seed pods from plane trees make great itchy powder. It was Brendan who told us how to paint pennies silver and pass them off as two bob bits. More importantly, it was Brendan who had an endless supply of deener sized washers: We could play pinball machines for hours and, eventually, when the coin box was full, every washer dropped in would force a real shilling out of the coin return.

We felt so close to him it hurt us too whenever Sister Mary Tortia, herself the very model of a modern Corporal Punishment, gave him the strap.

Brendan, we discovered, was a child genius. He could not only work out long division of pounds, shillings, and pence: When the government announced our currency was going decimal in a few years’ time, he was the only one who could work out the new, simpler system. He could quickly calculate, for example, that a motor car which cost 999 Guineas today would cost $2,097.90 in the new money. He warned us that a Coke bottle which was now worth threepence [and which would therefore buy 12 licorice blocks] would soon be worth only two cents [or eight licorice blocks]. He also correctly predicted that we would have trouble buying anything with halfpennies unless we had two of them together.

Sister Mary Confusia could not adapt at all. Every time she wrote on the blackboard, her stabby chalk would leave little decimal points all over the place, making it difficult for her to divide the new money up amongst the average sized Irish Catholic family. [Seventeen was the number of children recommended to those with a special devotion to St Patrick, as his feast day is the 17^th March.]

At Brendan’s urging, we all developed crossed nibs, causing little decimal dots of ink to flick all over our exercise books. Sister relented and permitted us to use biros for arithmetic.

Not long after our world went decimal, Catholic services became vulgar. Priests now faced the congregation to say mass, and could see who was fidgeting in Church. [They could also see who was still sneaking halfpennies into the collection plate.] Nuns developed new, ugly little habits, and Brendan’s parents decided to go home to

England

Brendan promised he would come back one day, even if he had to forge his own ticket and passport.

He probably did.

the rich is gettin’ richer quicker

2012-02-11T18:54:00.000-08:00

The other day in The Age there was a reference to something called the Gini Co-efficient. Off goes I to the OECD website to see how this works, only to feel my eyes glazing over and my brain going into a flap when I found the answer.

On moves I quickly – for health reasons – to Plan B, which was to look for something written in English rather than Numberish. [Perhaps the word “numb” is derived from the same root as the word “number”?]

Anyway, here’s the story as at 2011:

In OECD countries today, the average income of the richest 10% of the population is about nine times that of the poorest 10% – a ratio of 9 to 1. However, the ratio varies widely from one country to another.

It … reaches 10 to 1 in Italy, Japan, Korea, and the United Kingdom; around 14 to 1 in Israel, Turkey, and the United States; and 27 to 1 in Mexico and Chile.

So now it’s official: In dollar terms I’m dancing the two steps forward three steps backward uh-oh.

----------

If we don’t think the gap is morally wrong, we might at least think it doesn’t contribute much to social cohesion.

I’ve always been impressed by the idea of personal responsibility. There’s no question that I’ve made some dumb choices over the years, and failed to make the most of some of the opportunities given to me. Gosh, I’ve even failed to make the most of opportunities to create opportunities.

On the other hand, some have more opportunities to create opportunities than others.

-----------

During the great era of privatisation in Australia, Jeff Kennett was premier of Victoria. Recently, while rabbiting on about the government propping up the car industry, he said socialism

“is defined as "a political system which advocates public ownership of industries, resources and transport".

I would define it as the irresponsible use and waste of public monies in the absence of good policy with a single purpose: to buy political support.”

It’s a pity he has tried to pass off the crime of buying votes as socialism. Every democratic country has an economy that is mixed; that is part socialist and part free market:

Those holding socialism up as a bogeyman, more often than not, are usually looking for an excuse to avoid doing something about the gap between rich and poor. [The corollary is that those who hold free markets up as ideal are usually in the top 10% of rich folks].
Public ownership of industries, resources and transport is not such a great evil either.

There is something rather shortsighted about selling our agricultural land to overseas interests. Why aren’t we holding on to the means to feed ourselves? At the very least we should be just leasing the land, rather than flogging it off.

There is something rather shortsighted about handing over control of our public transport systems to overseas operators, even if just on long term contracts.

And as our electricity and gas bills are proving, the great god free enterprise has not necessarily done a better job of providing essential services than the public service used to do.

Large companies can be as bureaucratic and inefficient as any public service arm. Some private employees can get away with being as slack or demotivated as the worst public servants, while the majority in either sector are more productive and motivated when they are treated with respect.

When I look at joint ventures between governments and private enterprise [e.g. Victoria’s desalination plant] I’m not seeing proof that the public service is as great an evil as it has been painted.

The public service is not inherently evil. With the right public servants, we get the benefit of experience, as well as stability in tender processes and contract administration. [Think insulation batts.]

The only thing wrong with the public service is that it can be abused by governments - on either side of politics - as a job creation tool. It's governments that do the abusing, not the public service, just as it's governments that decide which industries or companies to prop up with public money.

----------------------------------

Free market theory holds that if a company goes broke it’s either inefficient or it’s making something nobody wants. This sort of thinking has no place in the area of essential services.

Essential services are, by definition, the services we rely on to keep our world [and economy] running. When the electricity supply in any city in the world comes to a halt, it’s a disaster.

Everybody wants electricity, and while we have government approved “watchdogs” to protect citizen consumers, these private operators will not go broke if they are inefficient, they will simply charge more.

As every person who does unpaid work around the home knows, [whether doing the laundry or fixing their own washing machine], price is not the only measure of what can benefit people.

------------

Just as there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is no such thing as a perfectly free market. There is a role for governments to play in the market place,

making it as free as possible [so there are incentives to succeed, reward for risk etc]
making it accountable to “the people” [just because a free market exists for heroin does not mean it makes the world a better place]

What we are lacking here is not the great benefits of private enterprise so much as the accountability side of the equation.

-----------------

The car industry is a massive creator of jobs and, even if the companies are owned by overseas interests, the job losses involved if they leave the country would be incalculable.

Successive governments on both sides of politics have, from time to time, propped up industries to keep people in jobs. The only thing wrong with this is we don’t always get a share of the profits: Businesses [Australian owned or otherwise] for some reason can get great injections of money, with no obligation to repay anything in the event of a profit. They then sell off a hunk of assets and give nothing back to the government, because the assets are not secured in any way.

This is neither free enterprise nor socialism, it’s just stupid government.

----------------------

Like many industries, the car industry in Australia is suffering because of the high value of the Australian dollar.

The high value of the Australian dollar is largely due to a mining boom.

The stuff in the ground being mined belongs to all Australians. This is not socialism, this has been law in English style colonies/countries for a thousand years. That’s why mining companies have to pay royalties to the government.

Taxes have always been used, not just to raise revenue, but to influence behaviour. If we want to encourage people to take out private health insurance, we subsidise it. If we want to discourage something damaging, we not only tax it but manipulate the tax involved to get the amount of activity just so.

The super-profit mining tax was not just about revenue raising, or even envy or resentment of private investor success. If it’s damaging the rest of the economy, the level of mining activity should be manipulated and taxes are the way to do it.

One party watered down its proposed super profit mining tax, the other objected to the tax altogether.

The failure to control an industry so damaging to the rest of us is, in part, based on the notion that the industry is creating jobs.

Is it creating more jobs than it is destroying?

Every country needs a quota of relatively unskilled jobs, but how many of these mining jobs are unskilled?

How many mining jobs will disappear as the industry becomes increasingly automated? [Think of trains which already run hundreds of miles without so much as a driver.]

Why are we eagerly selling so much ore and other stuff we’ve dug up without even processing some of it first?

No resources are infinite, and every other industry has to adapt to cheap labour in overseas countries. There seems little difference between selling raw unprocessed materials [and letting people overseas do the value-adding], and sending many other jobs [such as telephone room operations] offshore.

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Jeff Kennett has this all wrong, and what is going wrong and causing the gap between rich and poor to grow is not socialism – it’s actually taking ownership and control and benefits from the people and giving preference to private enterprise and large corporations and even filthy rich individuals.

This has been done before. It was done not quite a hundred years ago by three blokes who thought private enterprise was everything. Their names were Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.

Way to go, Jeff.

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more exclamation marks than you can poke a stick at ! ! ! !

2012-02-09T03:23:00.000-08:00

As a kid I loved going into Coles* and looking at all the “stuff” I could buy if I had sixpence. Many a Saturday morning was spent walking up and down the aisles, fondling the merchandise. The texture and smell of stationery is as good as that of a rich chocolate cake any day, but I think my favourite smell was California Poppy Hair Oil.

Now that Coles has changed beyond recognition, I look forward to the arrival of a quarterly seniors’ club magazine. Forget the mag – it’s the junk mail inserts that make compelling reading.

There is a mind boggling array of useful things one can buy for just a few dollars plus p&p, but that’s not all: The catalogues are printed on art paper that doesn’t smell half bad at all.

But wait, there’s more! These catalogues now come with wrap-around competitions, scratchies and other innovative marketing ideas.

One company assures me I am the ONLY PERSON IN AUSTRALIA to receive the WINNING CLAIM NUMBER 23530737 and if I order within 14 days I will definitely receive $25,000 cash OR a stunning sapphire ring OR $5,000 cash OR an elegant Seiko watch.

Just in case I’m sceptical, there are photos of real winners who said they didn’t believe real people really won these prizes.

[I hope this sense of deja vu is not a sign of something sinister.]

All I need to do to enter is order something. So much to choose from, I don't know where to start:

No garden looks complete without a set of 4 cute meerkats.

Ever had to soak your feet for a few hours before attacking your toenails with a chainsaw?

Have trouble reading those digital clock displays?

see time in the dark

If the glow in the dark doo-hickey don’t do it, you could project the time onto your wall so you won’t need to rummage for your specs in the wee small hours.

If you’ve bought or inherited a very attractive couch and want to protect it…these elegant protectors might do the trick:

buy the whole set and save

I'll never know if I can be creative if I don't try one of these:

turn fruit and vegies into unique candle holders

How do I know this snail mail sale stuff is targeting my own demographic?

Because the mere thought of shopping is exhausting, and I always need a rest halfway to the car:

shopping cart with seat

“No need for speed

if you’re caught short”

Safety Warning: Talking on a mobile phone and driving while using the Portable Urinal is against the law.

sturdy plastic with a spill proof cap
and feminine adapter
perfect for long trips - keep one in your car

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*The first Coles discount store opened in Collingwood, Victoria, in 1914. The “3d, 6d, and 1/-”variety store was founded by George James Coles, who had studied U.S. and U.K. chainstore retailing methods.

In 1919 a much larger store was opened, again in Collingwood, with the slogan “Nothing over 2/6d.”

this week in spring street

2012-02-06T06:43:00.000-08:00

With Ted at the helm, Victoria now has a single regulator for both the alcohol and gaming industries.

“There is no truth at all to the rumour”, the Premier said, “that we will be regulating for mandatory precommitments when people buy liquor.”

“Grog and gambling create jobs and contribute to the GDP,” he went on to say, “and if anyone is going to test changes, it should be the Federal Labor Party, using Canberra as a representative sample of the population at large.”

Pending the results of such a trial, the Minister for Transparent Government has announced the Night Rider buses used to ferry drunks home - thus minimising violence in the city – will be renamed Booze Buses. “After all,” said the Minister, “no-one wants to travel around in a bus which looks like an ad for condoms.”

Finally, Allen Fels, who heads up the Taxi Industry Inquiry, believes he has found a way to stop ongoing attacks on Indian taxi drivers: “Get someone else to drive the bloody things”, he said.

“The impact of a strong Australian dollar, is finally being felt everywhere but WA and Qld. As banks outsource jobs to third world countries and carmakers promise to take their bats and balls and go home, unemployment in Victoria will soon be through the roof. I’m fairly confident that in six months all sorts of people will consider driving taxis a viable way to make a living.”

what price the truth?

2012-02-04T18:26:00.000-08:00

A week or two [perhaps 2 point 66 weeks ago] I received a survey from the Herald Sun about that fast approaching time when newspapers are offered online only.

It must have been a mighty powerful survey, cos it got me thinking.

Why do people buy newspapers? [Assuming people do still buy them.]

The sound of racecallers and racing experts and scratchings and tote odds and dividend announcements provided a constant soundtrack to my childhood. Even today there is little that sets my teeth on edge like horseracing radio - apart from cricket, of course.

But I did not set out to complain about how wrong it is to constantly silence children, or how antisocial to cut anyone off in the middle of a sentence because “the race is on”, or even to be told by some grumps to sit still while absolutely nothing is happening during a test match; what I really wonder is how many people buy the Herald Sun for the racing page?

Back in the day, some of my relos bought the Truth for the racing page. The Truth was a twice a week, diehard remnant of the “yellow press”. At the turn of the last century it had played its part in “keeping the bastards honest”, using sensationalism as a tool.

Wikipedia reminds me that in 1975 a Truth headline read “Snedden died on the job”. Billy Snedden had been in parliament for yonks and was at one time the leader of the Liberal party. Listening to parliament was a delight when he was Speaker in the House, because he had a very quick wit.

The Truth reported Snedden had died having intercourse in a hotel room– why else would he be found wearing a condom? – but most people I knew thought how wonderful that a politician be so practical. But I digress again…

If people in another country bought Playboy “for the articles”, it was a truth universally acknowledged that people bought the Truth for the racing pages.

I’m not sure the [near naked] “page 3 girl” had much to do with my adult preferences, as I can’t even remember if the girls wore a bikini top or simply had their modesty protected by a black strip of ink covering their nipples.

My grandmother always enjoyed reading aloud from the Heartbalm column, which featured cries for help from the Truth’s resident agony aunt. There were letters from homosexuals suffering silently in an inhospitable world, men who feared they would fall victim to young nymphomaniacs and young girls who feared the unsettling attentions of family “uncles”, making it obvious everyone read the Truth [after first removing the racing page for later reference].

Asides aside, the survey tested my awareness that hard copies of newspapers will soon disappear and people will have no choice but to go online for their “news”. The survey also tested which of a number of pricing options and packages would be acceptable to me when I took out an online subscription.

So, I told ‘em they were dreaming.

I’m paralysed by a lack of computer savvy, scared of buying the wrong tablet, don’t get the download app thing at all and nobody cares enough about my custom to provide practical advice. In short, they run the risk of meeting some price inelasticity amongst at least some baby boomers or their parent generation.

In any case, I don’t buy papers for the racing page or even for the paid product placements, the politics as sport reporting or the sell-air-brities as real people; I buy newspapers in case I can’t sleep on the train. There must be something better I can do with my time.

no hopers

2012-01-31T05:27:00.000-08:00

“What sort of government closes a railway station?” Frank addressed the crowd outside the old ticket office. “A pack of commies or a bunch of fascists?”

Mary didn’t say the answer. Someone might think she was cheating; might think Frank had told her the answer over breakfast. Which he had.

“It’s neither left not right!” Frank answered his own question, shouting through the cardboard megaphone he’d spent all night making. “It’s crooked! It’s out of bloody line!”

“Plenty o’line right here,” offered Henry, the soon to be redundant signal box keeper. “Railway line.”

Stumpy Ericson, who lived right next door to the station in an old railway cottage, felt he knew the answer. “I know,” he called from his kitchen window, “it’s a city government; government of the country, by the city, for the city.”

“And what colour is a government like that?” Frank wheeled around and looked up at him hopefully. “Is it red, or is it blue?”

Stumpy’s three legged blue heeler Red had a sudden attack of fleabite and fell over trying to stop the nipping. He rolled down the hill, narrowly missing the ANZAC memorial, and coming to a thumping halt against the CFA shed door.

“What colour is it, Frank?” Mary felt sorry for her husband. He was trying so hard to jolly the crowd along a bit, but it’s hard to generate mass hysteria amongst a mob of fifteen people. And she suspected old Ernie was asleep standing up.

“It’s puce”, Frank said.

“What’s puce?” Ernie asked earnestly, with his eyes still shut.

“It’s a government that shuts country railway stations.”

“No, I mean, what is it? What’s it look like?”

“Well Ernie, Puce is a colour: A sort of…”Mary tried to be helpful again.

“Oh!” Ernie nodded, absorbing this new information.

“If something’s not broke, don’t fix it!” Frank tried to bring the meeting back to order; to bring the subject back to governments and railway lines, and to the end of the No Hope Junction railway stop.

“But it is broke, isn’t it?” Stumpy called out, elbows leaning on his window sill. "It’s been losing money for years."

Frank thought Stumpy was rude to cut him off like that, though he should have been used to people being rude to him in this town; after all, he was the only supporter of the Mighty Dons for miles.

This was the only town for miles.

Frank showed great strength of character by not throwing his megaphone down, marching over to that window, and giving Stump a thump. Instead, Frank closed his eyes, counted to three slowly, and regained his composure before replying.

“It’s not brok-en though, is it? It still works, doesn’t it? And it still slows down here to let the express through, so it wouldn’t cost them anything to let us on and off here, would it? It’s crazy making people drive 60 miles north to catch a train coming back thru here on the way to the city.”

“Dunno what you wanna go to Melbourne for anyway, old Ernie had had a thought. "I was there about forty years ago, and it was horrible crowded. In fact, if you didn’t go there in the first place, you wouldn’t have to come back again, would you?”

“It’s that stupid football team of his, isn’t it?” Ferrarro jumped in with his own two bob’s worth. Captain of the local team; the No Hope Junction No Hopers Ferrarro could see right through Frank; this wasn’t about the town being cut off, it was about Frank’s obsession with a city team.

“S’pose if we changed our colours to black and red he wouldn’t need to catch the train at all, Smithy was on to him, too. He could stay here and lend us a hand.”

“And”, Ferrarro was on a roll, “what about that stupid number 1 on his stupid old duffle coat, and the stupid old famous Jack Clarke?”

“Who’s Jack Clarke?” young Stevie asked.

“No one can remember”, Ferrarro said. Frank claimed it would be disloyal to take the name off his coat just cos Clarke doesn’t play anymore, but Ferrarro reckoned it’s cos that name was the only thing holdin’ that grotty old coat together.

“Generations to come will remember us as the Great Infrastructure Terminators”, Frank megaphoned some more. “As GITs!”

“Better than being remembered as Essendon supporters”, Smithy decided to join the fun. “That’s why the train stopped stopping at Essendon last year; no one else wanted to go there ‘cos no one else barracks for ‘em except you.”

“Well you must admit, Smithy, it’s stupid that I have to catch a train that passes through Essendon and go all the way to the city and have to catch a different train back to actually get off at Essendon.”

“I wasn’t saying you’re stupid, Frank”, Smithy said cheerfully. “I wouldn’t think there’d be any need for that.”

Smithy turned and walked away, taking most of the crowd with him.

“Don’t know what you’re so upset about”, Ernie scratched behind his ear. “Like you say, the train slows down comin’ through here, you should just get off anyway.”

Next Saturday arvo, Stumpy was weeding along the back fence of his old railway cottage, just as the train slowed down to let the express through.

“Oi”, Frank called out to him from the first carriage of the train.

His magnificent Dons scarf fluttering behind him, Frank was ready to leap off just as soon as his carriage reached the platform.

“Quick, mate, I don’t wanna break me thermos…”

Stumpy grabbed Frank’s kit bag as his friend came past, then watched as the determined Don leapt clear of the train where the platform began.

The train had been travelling at about 15 kliks as it approached the platform, so when he landed Frank was doing about 15 kliks as well.

Leaning backwards, Frank jogged alongside the train, using his arms and legs to try and slow himself down, while the train continued it’s crawl ever Northward.

Jogging, braking, slowing – he was a graceful sight. Stumpy’s blue heeler Red ran alongside him, three legs pumping away in their own peculiar rhythm.

Frank was fast approaching the end of the platform, while the end of the train was fast approaching Frank. He was just wondering if he would be able to stop before he ran out of platform, when he felt himself hoisted into the air by his britches, and dragged through the door of the guard’s van.

“Crikey, mate! the guard’s voice crowed with pride. "You nearly missed it – the train doesn’t stop here any more!”

drawing a line in the sand

2012-01-29T17:32:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, something horrific happened in Melbourne. It was something disgusting; the sort of thing that can and unfortunately does happen everywhere around the world. Just once would be too often, but it has happened more than just once.

It’s the sort of thing that has happened before, and happened since and will no doubt happen again: An angry parent, cheesed off over a child custody issue, deliberately killing a child to punish the other parent.

The particular case I’m talking about here is the case of Darcey Freeman. A bubbly four year old girl, she was driven by her father up on to the Westgate Bridge at peak hour, taken from the car where she had been sitting with her brothers, and thrown over the side of the Bridge.

Now, Darcey’smum is suing Vic Roads because they ignored repeated advice to install safety barriers.

There is some pain that can’t be measured. I couldn’t begin to understand what it is like for any parent to lose a child, let alone lose a child to such a callous act. But this attempt to sue the Government, like many similar claims, points to a much wider, more troublesome pattern in Australia.

Let’s be fair, there is compensation – along with counselling and support services – available for Victims of Crime. The maximum in Victoria is $100,000.

This is a pretty paltry, almost token payment in many cases. No amount will be enough to bring Darcey back, or to console Darcey’s mum. In many instances it won’t even cover ongoing expenses that result from crime. But it’s a good, and reasonable system.

Darcey’s father broke the law. He has been punished for breaking the law and with a bit of luck he will rot in jail for 32 years. It’s an unusually good sentencing result we don’t always see. Many of us have doubts about the sentencing system, but that is a completely separate issue from civil suits of the sort Darcey’s mum is now pursuing.

Claims for compensation under common [as opposed to statute] law are expensive to launch, and place claimants at great financial risk if they fail. While the amount of damages is decided by juries in the United States, in Australia the amount is determined by the court. Civil claims in Australia rarely make anyone rich, even when the amount awarded is greater than what people are likely to get from something like a Victim of Crime compensation act.

----------------

The key word in civil cases is “reasonable”.

Could a reasonable person have foreseen that someone was at risk if, for example, Vic Roads did not provide safety barriers?

What would a reasonable person expect is a reasonable amount of care for a person or organisation to take? Is it reasonable to expect that a bridge should have safety barriers to prevent suicides or murderers from harming themselves? If so, then every bridge – and every building of any great height – should have safety barriers as a matter of course.

This common law idea of a duty of care has been included in a lot of statute law. The WorkCover acts in each state, for example, allow the law to enforce a reasonable amount of care, saving victims from the expense and uncertainty of having to go to court themselves for compensation. Hopefully, the risk of being sued or fined does prevent a lot of accidents in the workplace.

The question of what is reasonable is a sticky one.

Recently, the Premier of Victoria Ted Baillieu mentioned that there is a fine of $6,000for leaving a wading pool – 30 cm or more deep – unfenced. What is the fine for putting water in a bathtub that’s not fenced? What about the walkways and roadways around lakes, or across dams? What about a day at the beach? Where should we draw the line in the sand – legally speaking?

Are more children hurt by rogue dogs each year than drown in wading pools? If not by strange dogs, by family pets?

When the giant gum in our backyard lost yet another large limb during the drought, we looked at the 150 foot high trunk leaning over the shed next door. We actually like these neighbours. A reasonable person might see there was some risk to these people if we didn't act. The tree was literally rotten to the core.

Is it reasonable that the law required us to get a permit to chop down a tree? Is it reasonable to leave the danger there until we could get a permit? Is it reasonable that we should have to pay for a permit? [It cost $800 to remove the thing anyway].

When a neighbour heard the chainsaws and came charging up the street to ask if we had chopped a tree down, was I immoral to say "No, it fell"?

I’m glad there are now barriers on the Westgate Bridge, don’t get me wrong.

My heart goes out to all the mums and dads of all the Darceys.

Nothing can prevent bad people from harming others, and certainly not from harming vulnerable children. If an adult wants to harm a child, or if a teen or adult wants to commit suicide, they will find a way.

The problem, in every case, is not that accidents happen or that people are sometimes evil, but that people are mostly just human. It only takes seconds for a young child to get into trouble.

At what point do we stop passing laws and ask people to start being more careful? To start taking responsibility for themselves instead of asking governments to wrap themselves or their children in cottonwool?

uplifting ideas

2012-01-28T19:56:00.000-08:00

sweatshop

2012-01-27T06:55:00.000-08:00

By 7 am when the shift starts, the temperature outside the canning shed has already hit 28 degrees. Inside, it’s even hotter as the women make their way in to stand all day, scaling and filleting fish.

Before the sun has a chance to heat the corrugated iron roof, warm air already oozes from one end of the shed, where the fish are cooked. Steam belches through the floor at the other end, where filled and sealed cans are cooked at temperatures over 100 degrees Centigrade.

Sweat runs down the inside of rubber aprons, pools in the toes of rubber boots and fills the fingers of rubber gloves.

One morning the women sense, at first, rather than see, something unusual is afoot. A dark, weird creature lopes into view, breathing through a snorkel and looking through fogged-up goggles; lifting its legs high in an ungainly effort to walk in flippers.

On the mezzanine floors above, there is a stir as overseers and managers pass their greedy little eyes over what is happening below. One rushes to a walkie-talkie, barking at a floor-walker to deal with the distraction.

“You cannot work in that outfit, Nora,” Mary, the Green-Hat from hell leaps into action. “It’s against Health Department Regulations!”

Nora about-faces with her flippers, a sign on her back reading WET SUIT FOR HIRE.

Elsie Tanner is there for her fourth season. She strives, as much as possible, to live a self-sufficient lifestyle at Skink Corner, some 40 kilometres inland.

After three years of court battles, the Council finally forced her to install a septic tank on her farm. Including legal costs, it’s the most expensive septic tank in the country, and Elsie’s never used it. “I’ve got a hundred deserving trees; it would be a waste of good waste,” she has said a hundred times.

“Sure is hot today,” Nora says when she comes back sweating in her regular rubbers and takes up her place next to Elsie.

“Wadda you do when you gotta go on a day like today, Else? I think I’d just do it inside and fling it out the window, meself.”

As a rule Elsie keeps to herself. She’s not here to socialise. Now that she’s paid for her septic tank, she’s saving up to buy a new cow. Her old cow, Moosli, broke its neck one night when it fell into a giant hole – a hole big enough for a septic tank.

Elsie is often the butt of cannery jokes but is neither vulnerable nor the victim of bullying; no one could hold such extreme views of the world if they cared what others think. If the women stir her mercilessly it might be, in part, because they admire her conviction. Besides, she never takes out her earplugs and can’t hear a thing.

Nora never takes off her pink plastic shower cap. She wouldn’t be caught dead in one of the caps the factory provides; she likes pink. Someone once asked her “Why pink?” She replied “Because surveys show more women prefer pink rest rooms than any other colour.”

The pink shower cap hides Nora’s ear-rings which, according to health regulations, must not be worn in the shed, as they might fall into the fillets of fish. Of course, it’s also against regulations to wear her shower cap everywhere, but Nora doesn’t care – she is as convinced as Elsie that most bureaucrats are up themselves.

The bandaids first aiders provide are blue. Blue bandaids are easier to spot if they fall into product. Nora religiously buries a clean blue bandaid in the food every Thursday afternoon, just after she gets her pay-slip.

“It’s quite stupid, really,” she reckons, “usin’ a blue bandaid after you’ve already cut your finger off. By the time you fill out all the forms, your finger’s already on its way to the supermarket. It’s too late then, isn’t it?”

And okay, someone’s gonna open their can of fish and think they got sausages and vegies by mistake, but a blue bandaid still ain’t gonna help.”

When the lunch siren sounds, the women spend five minutes taking off and hosing wetgear, five queuing for the loo, and five queuing for hot water to make tea or coffee. It will take five more minutes to put their gear back on at the end of the break.

For die-hard smokers, this leaves five minutes for food and five for one fag. If time management is an art, Nora is Picassa. She’s the only one who squeezes two fags into her lunch break – three if she smokes instead of talking while she eats.

The tiny lunch room is airless, so most sit outside under a giant oak for lunch.

Nora stuffs a whole quarter of a sandwich into her mouth, crusts and all, and poses a question.

“Families are everything, ripe? I mean, if you card turn to your own pamply for help, who cad ya turd to?”

“Friends?” someone suggests. “My friends are my family, not the other way around”.

“You can’t rely on friends,” reckons Nora, swallowing. “If you ask anyone for help that’ll kill a friendship, that will”. She sucks on her fag, then sucks at her teeth to dislodge some tomato seeds. “But a bit like family; a bit like bein’ married, really. Oh stuff it, I guess yer on yer own when push comes to shove.”

Nora ducks inside for a minute, coming back with a cup of tea. “You know what I dreamt last night?”

No one knows yet, but everyone except Elsie is all ears.

“I dreamt I saw Doug in this really old outback motel we once stayed in. It’s all hot and muggy outside, with mossies hovering near my ears while I spy on him through the louvre windows. It’s quite bright inside the room, cos there’s a full moon. He’s on this bed, see, and I know he’s fast asleep cos he’s snoring. And don’t ask me how but I know it’s a single bed.”

She waits a beat, knowing someone will ask what he was doing there.

Someone asks.

“Well I couldn’t see if he was alone, cos there’s this little clothesline strung across the room, blockin' me view. It's got all these freshly laundered condoms hung up to dry, pegged out like socks.

They were all different colours, too; red, blue, yellow, purple, green, pink.”

“Some of the condoms were all out of shape, and some were bigger than others. That made me wonder; all them different sizes. Maybe he wasn’t alone in that room.”

But isn’t it funny how practical you are when yer dreaming?” Nora takes up the thread again. “I remember thinking Jeez he’s stupid, they’re not gonna dry properly like that, they’re all pegged up by the neck insteada the bottom!”

Mavis, feeding the last of her peanuts to a magpie, imagines Nora in that room with her Doug. Maybe Nora wears her pink shower cap to bed. Doug might snore, but Nora probably talks in her sleep. She could certainly talk under water. Maybe she smokes in her sleep as well.

Nora suddenly asks “What would make anyone have such a stupid bloody dream?”

“It’s that condom machine!” June slaps Nora on the arm, then leans back in her chair. She laughs, embarrassed, behind her hand.

The cannery management has recently installed a condom machine in the women’s toilets. Rainbow Condoms, the dispenser says. Try one of every colour – six exciting colours in all.

“What I wanna know” Nora asked when she first saw it, “is do you find six blokes for one night, one bloke for six nights, or is there some bloke around here who can use them all one after the other?”

Lunch break nearly over, the women pass through the heavy, plastic strips at the packing shed door. Nora calls out to Mary, the Green-Hat from hell, “Can you get me a cuppla bandaids, love? Cut myself real bad gettin Doug’s breakfast. Dunno what happened to the one I put on this morning.”

Nora pulls her shower cap down as she steps back up to the work bench. “Think the elastic in this thing’s startin’ to go. Might look for a new one on the weekend. Wonder if I can find a rainbow one; one with six colours on it?”

championing a cause

2012-01-26T17:50:00.000-08:00

One of the best articles I've read in yonks about gay marriage appears in - of all places - The Herald Sun.
In the by-line it says Martina Navratilova is a former world number 1. She's still a number 1 in my books.

good grief

2012-01-22T05:00:00.000-08:00

A panel investigating ways to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples [A&TIP] in the Constitution has released its long awaited report, complete with recommendations of what to change, and the strategy most likely to help a referendum on the changes succeed.*

I have written in two previous posts** about the 1999 referendum proposing a preamble to acknowledge Indigenous Australia in the constitution. Quite simply the wording of the preamble was an insult, and in the absence of any practical steps to help those Indigenous Australians who need help, a token gesture likely, in the long run, to do more harm than good.

Constitutional changes are worded specifically for a reason, yet once again the movers and shakers say/imply that if Australians do not pass this referendum, Indigenous Australians should take it to mean we don’t care a toss about them or the truth.

In my lifetime, the most common objection to a bill of rights has been that these things are hard to frame in a way that they cannot be misinterpreted, and the last thing we need is a high court – presumably stacked by the "other" major party – making smart-arse interpretations of a binding document.

But let’s be sillier and sillier: The next referendum will be looking at changes to the constitution proper, not just at a non-binding preamble acknowledging our shaky beginnings. So much for the danger of high court challenges. As I've said before: Everyone is equal before the law - if they can afford it.

There is soooo much wrong with these recommendations that I scarcely know where to begin. But, obsessed as I am with issues of race, I’ll start somewhere anyway, and I shall start with the dreaded …

Section 51

In the beginning was the word, and the word was superior. At the close of the 19th century, Britain was reluctant to pass a bill approving an Australian constitution referring directly to a White Australia Policy. [Well, they did have an Empire to run.]

Section 51 of the new, approved constitution originally said [in 1901]:

The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:-

The people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.

This section was not really about Aboriginals, but about solving other “problems” related to keeping Australia white.

The words “any race” could naturally include Chinese, (Asian) Indians, indentured labourers from the South Sea Islands, “Ghans” or Malays (though not New Zealand’s Maori who, because of the Treaty of Waitangi, were British citizens).

In 1901 the new federal government agenda included – amongst other things – repatriation of indentured labourers who had been lured to Australia from the Pacific Islands.

One of the 1967 referendum questions asked voters if they wanted to alter the wording of this Section 51, to remove the phrase banning “special” laws for Aboriginals.

As a result of the yes vote in 1967, we now have S 51 [xxvi] which says

The people of any race, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws:

Honestly not much of an improvement, as it simply elevated Indigenous Australians to the status of all the other inferior races.

But to be fair, in 1967 most Australians believed that by deleting the reference to Aboriginals, the federal government was finally ready to step in and take over Aboriginal Affairs from the states. Sadly, the federal government had already had power over Aboriginal Affairs in the Northern Territory since 1912 and hadn’t done a great deal for Aboriginals there, so there was no reason to expect any improvement.

The new improved section 51

It has now been recommended that we ditch the 1967 bit, inserting in its place a touchy feely 51A which talks about Recognising first occupants, and Respecting continuing cultures and languages etc and – Acknowledging that we’ve done bugger all to help in any practical way to date – parliament should now – for their advancement be able to

make laws …with respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

At least the panel recognises we are talking about many peopleS, which is more than half our hard-nosed journalists have done.

So far so good; we’ve rearranged the furniture [I don’t dare refer to sinking ships just now] and achieved a glow of smug self-congratulation.

Because we’ve “Acknowledged” the need for advancement of A&TIP, the old legal interpretation catch – the intention is in the words – is covered. We can’t make special laws for A&TIP if they are not linked to advancement.

But just to be on the safe side there’s to be a new section 116A which outlaws discrimination

on the grounds of race, colour or ethnic or national origin

unless for

overcoming disadvantage, ameliorating the effects of past discrimination, or protecting the cultures, languages or heritage of any group.

This might be meaningless pap, or it might be useful. But I could imagine a certain disaffected little corporal identifying strongly with wording like this some time around 1920.

Where does it say we have the right to over-ride a group’s culture if one or more of those cultural practices are undesirable? [Female genital mutilation would probably be too extreme an example…]

One really nice thing about being able to make laws for Aboriginal advancement is that we can still stop “their” dole payments if they don’t send their kids to school. This is important, because otherwise they will use these enormous sums of money to buy grog and drugs*** or to travel across the country to attend to ceremonies or perhaps even spend up to ten months of the year going to funerals or even spend 3 or 4 months of the year trapped by closed [soggy] roads.

Please bear with me, I’m almost done bitching!

Notwithstanding the total indifference of major parties to the possibility of using a bilingual approach to the education of Indigenous Australians, we might soon have a section 127A which says Australia’s official language is English and A&TIP languages are part of our national heritage.

Perhaps the National Trust might get involved?

Fixing the woopsie

Section 25 has got to go. It was there to help calculate how many politicians we should put up with, and this had to take into account whether the people of any particular race were barred from voting in state elections.

I lied – one more bitch to go:

This bit – which I just love – goes to the heart of my problem with the implication that if I vote NO it’s because I don’t care:

“In the interests of simplicity, there should be a single referendum question in relation to the package of proposals…”

Seriously, when will these people drop their delusion that everything can – or worse yet – should be controlled by legislation? No, it is NOT necessary to say yes in order to protect existing legislation such as that relating to land rights, because if we already have legislation on land rights then it must have been possible.

Put forward the preamble proposed before John Howard got his hands on it, and I’ll vote yes. In the meantime, Andrew Bolt is going to have a field day.

*currentconstitution

thereport

**post containing text of 1999’s proposed preamble

subsequent post explaining why I voted no in 1999

***from whom?

nosey government

2012-01-12T05:27:00.000-08:00

Teresa Gambaro, an MP from Brisbane, is in hot water after suggesting employers should provide cultural awareness training for new Australians wanting to fit into the workforce.

Headlines with words like ‘stink’ or ‘armpit’ show that her comments were considered outrageous, because she implied newcomers don’t know how to wear deodorant or wait their turn in queues. Some journalists have also thrown the name “Pauline Hanson” about in their stories.

Many papers have dismissed her claims that her words were taken out of context, but few have bothered to provide the context so we can decide for ourselves.

A bit of the context includes the following:

"You hear reports of people using public transport (without deodorant) and I think Australian residents are guilty of this too," she said. "I think we all need to be mindful of our fellow traveller. Sometimes these things are not talked about because people find them offensive but if people are having difficulty getting a job, for instance, it may relate to their appearance and these things need to be taken into account."

A large number of the public’s responses to her comments reflect just how polarised Australians have become about immigration, temporary workers, and cultural differences generally. One citizen says the outcry shows we need a referendum about whether we even want immigration. Another adopts the “Australians stink more than immigrants” stance, and so on.

This whole kerfuffle might seem a storm in a tea cup, but it would also be fair to say it’s indicative of a far deeper and more petty malaise; a malaise that results in part from a news media focused on sell-air-brity and shock horror headlines than the information that might help keep a democracy democratic.

Over the years I’ve heard plenty of complaints from immigrants that they were promised the earth by our embassies, but abandoned once they arrive. Many of the people who help immigrants settle in are volunteers. Their generosity is particularly important for non-westernised arrivals.

At some point, however, we seem heavily dependent on the notion that training or education is the answer to any and every problem.

Every day I stare, on a train, at a series of pictograms explaining what’s required of train travellers;

buy a ticket;
keep feet off seats;
don’t drink alcohol;
don’t use crude language; and
some others I can’t remember.

These seem to have little impact on those travellers who have no interest in social norms or who are born, and determined to remain, self-absorbed arseholes.

Some people, like a new chum I chatted with years ago, want to ‘fit in’. After 24 hours on a fishing boat doing nothing much but sitting around, this chap was surprised to see all the other fisherman having a shower before they retired for the night. Realising this must be the done thing, he made a point of doing the same even though the idea was completely foreign to him.

A Chinese Malay student once told me the thing which astonished her most when she first came here to study was that everyone stood patiently in a queue when they wanted to buy something.

There are plenty of things people do that I find personally irritating, in particular sniffing [or snorting and spitting]; wearing too much perfume; and standing in busy doorways to chat while people are trying to get through.

At some point, though, we need to accept that people are different because if we don’t we’ll simply become dictatorially petty people. At some point, we need to make our own contribution to encouraging positive change: For example, whenever I’ve had a job serving people, I’ve steadfastly refused to serve people who don’t wait their turn. When they ask why they are being ignored I tell them.

When people ring me and would rather be abusive than have a rational discussion, if they don’t calm down I’ll tell them because I’m not allowed to hang up I’m going to put the phone down and ignore them til I hear they’ve stopped.

Would I tell a dozen drunken youths not to vomit all over the floor of a train? No. Only an idiot argues with an idiot - and only a moron would argue with someone whose likely to punch their lights out.

At what point did we become incapable of negotiating some behavioural change without saying we need laws against bad behaviour, or that someone else should educate others to behave differently?

In part, the problem seems to stem from all the laws we have to protect people from arbitrary discrimination. I’m all for laws against blatant discrimination, but laws which don’t allow for grey areas simply force social problems underground.

Employers will always come up with some excuse for not hiring someone they don’t want to hire, and nobody hires anyone – skilled or otherwise - they don’t like or fear other workers won’t like.

But why can’t employers simply say what they want, or have enforceable dress or hygiene or behaviour codes that are clear to all their employees?

Why can’t a shop keeper or service provider refuse to serve someone who stinks so badly all the other customers will leave?

In context, what Gambaro said did not deserve the over-the-top reaction it got. In truth, she could have said it in a far more diplomatic and inclusive way.

Immigrants should not be abandoned when they arrive; they should at least be given a chance to understand the legal and social issues that will help them get the most out of their lives here. On the other hand, we need to remember that no-one will remember all of the advice, and that some people will be more adaptable than others.

Instead of proposing solutions full of words like “must”, “should” or “educate”, we “should” keep a sense of proportion, allow people to speak a little more freely, and all take some responsibility for demanding the behaviours we prefer.

'fessing up

2012-01-07T05:03:00.000-08:00

By the time I was nine, our little family was ready for its ninth move – after some arguments between mother and a couple of power points, our little home in Moonee Ponds was checked by an electrician. Soon after that, The Housing Commission issued an order that the house be rewired. The landlord, presumably, was unhappy or broke or both. Once again, we packed our belongings, this time for a move to Flemington.

Flemington and its small, adjacent suburbs are respectable addresses today, and parts of Flemington always had been pretty posh.

The famous Flemington Post Office

Naturally, there were also parts that weren't so posh:

Of course this home is worth a fortune today,
but I'm sure you can see a difference between this home
and the home above

In the early 1960s parts of Flemington were vastly different from the way they are today – the Newmarket part was not just a world of racehorses, but a world of working horses, cows and sheep.

Before traffic became the challenge it is today, and the value of land shot through the roof, this little area was littered with urban house blocks occupied by small stables accommodating between two and four horses. There were also several farriers in the area, and a huge stock feed store in Newmarket St.

View Larger Map

Near the top of this little map is Illawarra Road, which was to be our address for the next two years.

At the bottom left of this map [where the number 35 appears] a roundabout marks an entrance to the Flemington Racecourse, home of the Melbourne Cup.

Somewhere in the centre and along the bottom, the map has a blue “tram” symbol, marking the corner of Racecourse and Smithfield Roads. These two roads formed two of the boundaries of what was once the Newmarket Saleyards.

The Newmarket Saleyards in Flemington provided a central stockmarket for sheep, cattle and who knows what else from 1858 til they closed in 1987. At one time, during World War II, this market was the largest sheep and cattle market in the world.

A few of the buildings have been preserved for posterity, but most of the ten hectares the stockyards once occupied have been developed with new housing.

Off the map and further along Smithfield Road was an even larger area – 23 hectares – occupied by Melbourne’s Abattoirs. This area, too, has been converted into a new housing estate.

For those who don’t know Melbourne, Racecourse Rd is rather close to the city centre, and a major traffic artery. Trams, cars and trucks travelling along Racecourse Road once competed for room with mobs of cattle and sheep that were being herded by dinky-di drovers and working dogs.

When we first moved to Flemington, the surface of Racecourse Road was pitted with huge potholes, sometimes awash with dung.

On market days, two men drove up and down this road in a little, motorised, three wheeled van, gathering up dazed or confused stray sheep and ferrying them to the stockyards in an effort to keep the road reasonably clear.

One of the reasons this crazy situation had developed is that a branch line of the railway passenger service looped around behind the site of our new home in Illawarra Road. Moving stock from these holding pens to the sale yards proper was – you guessed it – a job for drovers and working dogs.

When the market closed, this branch line had no further use; Crown Street and Newmarket Street were extended, and the rail yards area behind Illawarra Road was also converted for new housing.

But before all this modernisation took place, these holding pens were a great source of fun for my brothers and me.

One really fun trick was to climb up onto our back fence and wait til a mop of sheep or cattle were passing nearby and, just at the right moment, start kicking at the corrugated iron fence furiously. The idea was simply to scatter the herd and enjoy watching as dogs and drovers tried to round them up again, but occasionally a bull would go berserk and charge the fence. It took two hands and two feet to hang on, but what a ride!

Some days the pens over our back fence were empty and all was quiet. Up onto the fence, from there to the shed roof, then onto and down the power pole on the other side of our iron curtain we had room to run! It was also a great place to practice imitating the drovers’ voices as they swore at us. [There were even one or two words I understood!]

As a traffic-free thoroughfare it was the ideal spot for tippity runs* – naturally the first time the ball was delivered the batsman hit it straight into the muck in one of the holding pens.

In the winter this muck in the bottom of the pens was green, stinky and viscous.

Poo fights were not that frequent, but even on days when we were really well behaved, somehow Mother knew where we had been.

“Have you been over the back fence again?” she would ask threateningly.

“No, Mum,” we tried to sound convincing, hoping the muck all over our clothes and limbs looked like normal kid-dirt.

At this Flemington address we dealt with grubbiness in the same way we always had; clothes started in the copper and, when transferred to laundry tubs, were given a final wash and rinse by hand. We all had our own assignments. If I never have to wash a trough full of dirty socks by hand again, it will be too soon.

There was no gas geyser over the bath in this house; the fact that the copper was both indoors and gas heated seemed a small consolation when water had to be transferred by the bucketful to the bathtub.

Enrolment at a Catholic School along with fasting, compulsory church attendance, scapulars, prayers and other reminders of God’s all-seeing eye had no impact at that age; bashing a fence to annoy animals and workers did not prompt questions of right or wrong.

God occupied a separate compartment in my mind, and it was a long time before I realised there was even supposed to be a connection between the spiritual and the mundane.

I must confess - we were naughty children.

In this street there were two stables, each big enough to accommodate about three horses. Apprentice jockeys slept in the tack rooms at night, and in the middle of the day had too much time on their hands. It was easy for them to impress local kids by bringing horses into the yard and making them “pigroot”*.

Few of the stables in these streets were as grand as the Crown Street Stables
Most consisted simply of wooden horse boxes surrounded by corrugated iron fencing

My oldest brother - who has always lived in the space between the lines of books rather than in his body – somehow found himself one day watching one of these “shows”. He and some other lads were balanced precariously on the side of a float when a horse kicked out, hitting the side of the float and dislodging my brother.

He was taken to the Royal Children’s Hospital to have his broken arm reset. When my mother came home later that afternoon, he told her woefully that although they weren’t clean when he got to the hospital, he had put clean underpants on that morning.

So much for telling kids they must always wear clean underwear in case they have an accident.

For many years my mother’s sole source of income had been, and continued to be, from a number of cleaning jobs.

For relaxation she often took us to the trots [harness racing] time trials at the Showgrounds – entrance was free and the prize when a family member managed to ‘pick a winner’ - the right to feel smug for at least twenty minutes – was also free.

A pacer moves its front and rear legs on one side in the same
direction with each step [e.g. here both right legs are moving backwards]

Another [and for me far more loathsome] form of entertainment was fishing. I never have been and doubt I ever will be an early morning chirpy. We were dragged out of bed before the sun came up, and taken down to Station Pier in St Kilda.

The whole business was made more boring by my mother’s insistence that we remain quiet to avoid disturbing the fish. I saw this story for the load of old bootmakers* it was: After all, “new” Australians of Mediterranean extraction were always there, their tinnies* banging against the pylons beneath us as they harvested mussels.

A few years on, we moved from Illawarra Road to Edinburgh St – one whole street away. This time we were right next door to some stables. We might have lived in a sewered suburb, but living directly next door to stables taught me that there is more than one use for phenyl. Phew.

It was in these stables that one of my mother’s friends kept a pacer. The mare was a dead loss when it came to racing, but her owner was devoted to her.

My mother had grown up as a horsey person of sorts, but this mare was unusually crabby and unapproachable . For some reason, though, the horse had taken a shine to me.

As a short-stop, I thought it was hilarious to stand under the horse on my tip-toes and push at her belly with my head. [Yes, someone 11 years old can be that short].

Occasionally Ron would harness the mare to a sulky and ride down to the Showgrounds, where she could stretch her legs. Sitting on the [unpadded] side of the sulky when I was invited along, I became quite familiar with many of the pot-holes in Racecourse Rd.

At the Railway end of Edinburgh street was a long, rabbit warren of buildings, about three stories high and constructed almost entirely of timber. Of its original purpose I’ve no idea, but by this stage small areas had been leased to light industry, while some parts of it were deserted.
[So many places to play, so little time away from school.]

In one part of the building, I watched fascinated one afternoon as a lone worker fed flat sheets of metal into a press and converted them to corrugated iron*.

It was an era when neighbours knew neighbours, so the streets around our house had a community feel to them. Our neighbours were so into sharing that, on Sunday mornings, we could listen to broadcasts of Newsbeat without turning our own wireless on at all. In the 60s Newsbeat was Reality Radio at its best.

Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, the presenter somehow showed up at every fire engine or ambulance callout in the greater Urban area – or at least created the illusion that he was. He was always on the spot, painting word pictures and recording the atmosphere and horror of each tragedy as it unfolded, just so we could hear about it on Sunday mornings.

oh, this is dreadful; just dreadful. I can see where the little pink Consul has left the road, gone over the footpath and then hit a lightpole.
I don’t know who was driving the car, but they might have been drunk. But, oh, it’s a mess. There’s broken glass everywhere.
The car has such a huge dent in the passenger side that it looks like it must have been wrapped completely around the lightpole before the lightpole fell over from the impact of the crash.

The ambulance workers are trying desperately to resuscitate someone on the side of the road. We don’t know yet who it is, but I can see a pair of ladies’ high heels poking out from underneath a blanket. They’re good shoes, perhaps she was just coming home after dancing the night away.

If I just move a little closer I might be able to … OH! Oh dear, this is awful...

And there are people out here in their pyjamas, shaking their heads, they must have rushed out to see what all the noise was.

Excuse me, this is Newsbeat, did you see what happened here?

“Yeah”.

So, did you come rushing out of your home because you heard a loud bang? Was there a sound of squealing brakes?

“Nah. Came outside cos a lightpole smashed frew me roof.”

You must have had a terrible shock!

“Nah, I knew not to touch the wires.”

Was anyone in your family hurt?

“Nah, but the lightpole knocked down me TV antenna, and the antenna hit old Mrs Smiff from next door on the head when she came out to see what the loud bang was.”

Oh… oh, do you have any idea yet of the harm done by your antenna crashing?

“It prob’ly doesn’t matter, mate, I never could get channel 9 on the tele anyway.”

[Personally, I don’t understand how anyone could find such ghoulishness entertaining.]

A country cousin of mine had been a sickly child, and often had long stays at the Children’s Hospital. On these occasions her mother stayed with us, as the hospital was only a short tram ride away. Aunty always squished in with me in my tiny bed. At some point in the night she always shook me awake and told me to stop snoring. Before I could count to 3 she always rolled onto her back and started snoring herself, keeping me awake for the rest of the night.

Coming from a quiet place to the city, Aunty was nervous and jumpy at the slightest background noise – especially stock trains shunting into the yards over our back fence. If she wasn’t complaining about snoring, she was shaking me awake to ask “What’s that?”, though by the time I was awake, whatever noise she’d heard had usually long ceased.

One New Year’s Eve, shortly after midnight, we were both awoken by an almighty explosion. The whole family was awoken. Through the window we saw what looked like walls of flame next door, and all rushed out into the street frightened the stables had caught fire and the horses were trapped. But the flames were just a reflection of what was happening down the other end of the street.

About 300 yards away, clearly visible at the end of our street, was the sight of the three story rabbit warren of wooden buildings ablaze.

People in New Years Eve finery stood side by side with residents in pyjamas, nighties and dressing gowns to watch the spectacle; the cheapest and most impressive New Years Eve fireworks display I’ve ever seen. [The Arts Centre Spire Fire looked like a mere spark in comparison.]

I don’t remember hearing about this on Newsbeat.

The burnt-out buildings were replaced by a massive overpass* leading stock directly over Racecourse Road to the saleyards proper. The overpass, in turn, was pulled down when the stockyards closed, and the land was redeveloped.

Notes:
Tippity runs; a form of backyard cricket wherein if the ball and bat connect in any way, the batsman must run. I can't tell you more than that because my brothers kept changing the rules. If you don't know anything about cricket there is only one thing you really need to know - it is the sports freak's version of Waiting for Godot.

Making horses pigroot or buck and kick out wildly was a sadistic business which involved pinching a nerve in the horse's back. Amazing to think someone invested megabucks in buying, stabling and training a horse, yet 15 year old apprentices were treating them in such a 'cavalier' manner.

A load of old bootmakers i.e. a load of cobblers. BS.

Tinnies, in this context, means aluminium dinghies.

Corrugated iron is not an Australian invention, but it is almost the Vegemite of building materials.

The mass production of Prefabricated housing in Australia began with corrugated iron during the gold rush era.

During the great depression, kerosene tins became the poor man's "corro";

The overpass
Some web-sites claim this overpass was constructed in the early 1970s, but this date doesn’t gel with my memories of where I lived and when. I know this bridge was built before we moved yet again: I could go to the State Library and trawl through old papers free of charge to see if I’m right, but of course I won’t. Just saying, that’s all.

a day in the sun

2011-12-27T15:34:00.000-08:00

My goodness. Red Nomad Oz at Amazing Australian Adventures has bestowed upon me – and nine others - The Sunshine Blog Award. I’m chuffed Red has said nice things about my blog, because she is an intelligent, witty and polished writer.

Accepting the award or even following the rules of acceptance are not mandatory. It’s a chain award of sorts, but not really a chain letter per se, as I’m not required to provide my bank account details, nor will I be looking over my shoulder if I break the chain.

One rule is that recipients of this award do not have to make long winded speeches acknowledging great-aunt Myfanwy’s match-making etc etc while ignoring wind-up signals.

Darn.

Another of the problems is a requirement that I nominate ten other blogs I think deserve the award. This is a tad difficult, because I’m rather new at blogging and don’t follow an enormous number of blogs yet. My list would have to include some what’s already got this award from someone like Red. No doubt I’d even have to award the award to someone who has no idea who I am.

How embarrassment.

Finally, it is not in my nature to impose obligations on others. As my sidebar already provides a list of blogs I like I’ve decided to complement that list today with some comments and thank yous - an obligation free award, if you will. [Nothing original here – it’s what most bloggers do anyway.]

A logical place to start is with Amazing Australian Adventures.

Red - and her partner in crime, Pilchard – travel to parts of

Australia

few of us ever see. What with the photos and all the details of who did what when, this is armchair travel and companionship at its best.

Dina at That Weird American Who’s Obsessed With Australia was the one who inspired me to start blogging, offering lots of encouragement along the way.

Her blog has taught me heaps I never knew about Australia, for example, it is legal for Australians to marry first cousins.

If only I’d known sooner.

Dina is a self-confessed Flickr stalker, and provides links to good photos. This saves me the trouble of trawling through heaps of mediocre photos to find a good one. I probably wouldn’t bother if I had to do it myself.

Lately, this weird American woman has been providing links to quizzes about Australia. My score is consistently lower than hers. Hmmm.

Some of the stuff Dina explores during her day is of no interest to me at all. I tend to scan this for the real gold – some thought provoking moments about life in general, all offered with real and refreshing personal honesty. It’s hard to provide an example from her 'Weird' posts which works when lifted out of context, so I offer, instead, a quote from her “unschooling” blog – a simple comment that made me question an idea I’d never questioned before:

Yes, I'm worried that something might happen to Jack...VERY worried. But it's not because I fear being childless. It's because I fear being Jackless. For those of you who feel it's better to have multiple children just in case you lose one....will the living ones really replace the child you lost? Are children that interchangeable?

Comfort Spiral.

Cloudia’s posts at Comfort Spiral are most often [though not always] a collection of stunning photographs and inspiring quotes. With music.

Visiting Comfort Spiral puts me in mind of the days when I’d go to work and turn over the next page of the desk calendar, hoping to find something witty and inspiring.

The key differences between those old desk calendars and Comfort Spiral are that Comfort Spiral is inspiring rather than disappointing; it contains colour and great pictures; and there is music.

Me and the Boys.

This link will take you to the post that hooked me on Angie’s blog.

If you like people who like their kids, and if you want to read something warm written by a woman with a sense of humour, this is the place to go.

High Riser.

What first drew me to High Riser is Andrew’s interest in Melbourne.

Not living in the inner city, I let Andrew live there for me; whether going out to dinner, waiting for a glimpse of Her Majesty, or doing some high-quality people-watching.

As a bonus, Andrew is fascinated with machines and buildings. Looking at these particular posts has an element of past-people-watching. It would be nice to go back in time and interview people about where their inspiration came from, or what obstacles they overcame to get things done.

Every now and then Andrew says things in a way that makes me jealous of his writing; a recent gem was this:

“A black man, a red head, an Asian and a fair haired guy with dreadlocks walked into a bar together. That's all.”

Another thing I like about Andrew's posts is that he often has the same opinion as I do. I like that in people.

Jayne, at Our Great Southern Land, has a good sense of humour, and a great nose for stories with ‘local colour’.

I tend to think of her blog as a sort of “lucky dip”; there’s always something in her posts that turns out to be a treasure for one reason or another.

Jayne sometimes gets outraged about important social issues. I like that in people.

What first drew me to Blue Skies Sunny Days was colour.

As a monochrome type person, I was bowled over by the colours of the classic paintings Rubye Jack displays on the sidebar of her blog.

Rubye Jack has also reminded me that sometimes when people talk ‘quietly’ I can’t help but listen quietly.

Windsmoke’s Fair Dinkum Haikus create fantastic images. He likes to spin a yarn every now and then, with both his yarns and riddles revealing a rare appreciation of gentle humour.

A must-read – at least until I find out if he once lived in St James St and if so, at what number, and when? A man of mystery, indeed.

Bizarre Scribble is a Bonza Blog.

I’m just getting to know a little about Kath Lockett who writes Blurb from the Burbs.

So far I’ve worked out that Kath – an Australian adapting to life in Geneva – is an excellent writer, loves her family, has a great sense of humour. Just as importantly, Kath likes dogs.

This is another must-read for me – at least until I work out who the musical parent was.

Diane B at Adventure Before Dementia is another excellent photographer/writer – her travel writing is wonderful. Her recent trip to see Western Australia’s wildflowers has made me extremely jealous – of the writing, photography and the trip.

It’s fortuitous that Diane likes travel, because it seems she has lived everywhere at some time or other.

A sucker for biographies, I’ve loved what I have read so far of Diane’s life story as well.

more memories

2011-12-26T15:17:00.000-08:00

At the age of 7 and 8 respectively, one of my brothers and I took the first of many journeys from Melbourne – unaccompanied – to holiday in Porepunkah.

Single parents rarely had any financial support in the 60s, and my mother had to keep working. Holidays with relatives or family friends were a win/win child-minding option.

Our journey began at Spencer St [now Southern Cross] station.

Country lines had the interior of their carriages laid out in much the same way as one would see in old black and white movies – two bench seats in a little compartment, luggage racks at the top, and a corridor along the side of the train.

A standard feature of Victorian carriages was a series of black and white pictures of Victoria’s main attractions, including the Mount Buffalo Chalet. The Chalet belonged to the Victorian Railways and provided accommodation for those who were more “well to do”.*

Railway toilet deposits went straight through onto the railway line. It was always fascinating to me, to peer through the toilet and watch the sleepers below as the train rushed its way from one location to another.

No need to worry about pollution, a friend suggested as we reminisced years later: Mass = force x acceleration, and everything exploded into tiny biodegradable fragments as it hit the bed of the railway line.

A standard sign inside the toilets prompted someone, somewhere, long ago, to compose a song which begins*:

Passengers will please refrain

From passing water while the train

Is standing in the station

I love you…

From the train we checked our distance from Melbourne at regular intervals, with the help of Griffiths Tea signs.

At Wangaratta we left the train, gathered our luggage and headed for the bus stop, where the driver on the Wang to Bright bus was expecting us.

Australia

’s private bus lines have a tradition of being friendly and flexible with “stops”, and the bus driver delivered us safely to Mo – waiting on the side of the highway at Porepunkah – sometime after midnight.

A long time friend of my grandmother, Mo had lived for years in this house as a ‘resident housekeeper”. It was no stately home, just a cottage where she’d found lodging in exchange for housework when the owner’s wife had died, leaving him and 3 young children on their own.

The kids had long since grown up and moved on, but Mo had stayed.

a cottage much like the one at porpunkah

Country cottages or farm houses often had a “front parlour” in those days – a lounge room off limits to any but adults, and reserved for special occasions. A wall mounted telephone, rarely used, had a crank handle for connection to an operator.

The next room after the parlour was the width of the house. Here there were lounge chairs, a huge wooden dining table, open fire place, and on the door of a linen press, a giant hand painted portrait of Donald Duck.

Behind that room was a large kitchen with a wood stove. Bench tops ran along two walls, with lots of cupboards and drawers underneath.

Many homes today still have a traditional “junk drawer” or two where people store little bits of “stuff” that might come in handy. In the 60s this would include pencil stubs, lengths of string that could still be used to tie parcels, drawing pins, scraps of paper, screwdrivers and whatnots. Fred, the owner of the house, had the most interesting “stuff” I’ve ever seen.

One day he pulled out a small vial of mercury, explaining this was used in thermometers and blood pressure machines, and that people who worked in mercury mines usually suffered brain damage. In those few minutes I learned useful things could be dangerous, and that poor people often did unsafe jobs out of desperation.

Fred wasn’t one to initiate conversations, but usually had something interesting to say about anything. Like most of the adults in my life he had a knack for creating more curiosity than he satisfied – something for which I’m eternally grateful.

The door of the kero[sine] fridge had long ago lost its grip on life, and was held shut with an old bicycle inner tube.

Like many other older cottages, it had a bathroom which was something of an afterthought, this one had been cobbled together with crate boards. During our stays here we were expected to have a bath once a week – whether we needed it or not – and lit the chip heater ourselves. A retired sawmill worker, Fred had access to an endless supply of perfectly sized wood chips and offcuts.

The toilet was quite some distance from the house, but close to a dirt road so the dunny can man could “drive to work” when he came once a week.

Locals in the few houses Porepunkah, at the time, all pumped water from the Ovens River, so having a night soil collection was a jolly good idea.

Photo source here

At the risk of being indelicate, let me tell you the only thing worse than the smell of phenyl when a can had just been replaced, was the smell a day later. To use one of these thunderboxes in the summer is to have all of one’s senses assaulted by damp heat, along with the noise and itching as one is repeatedly hit by a frenzy of blowflies desperate to lay their eggs.

The contents of a used pan are at once mesmerising and repulsive. Of course the contents warranted investigation! Who would want to sit over a pan that’s too full, or trap a blowfly inside the pan while closing a fly’s only exit with a bare bum?

Luckily, Fred owned several acres. During my stays I fertilised every corner of those paddocks. I much preferred to take my chances with the snakes than the blowies.

The cottage had been designed to take good advantage of prevailing crosswinds. Doors and windows were invariably open. There were no window or door screens, but the population of flies inside the house remained at a tolerable level. When blowies came looking for me – perhaps feeling rejected because I so assiduously avoided their nursery – they most often flew in one door and out another.

As we sat at the table to eat it was often a choice between fork or knife, because one hand was always shooing flies.

Using a spritzer to control flies in these conditions was as effective as a water pistol in a bushfire.

Fly papers suspended from the ceiling like so many elements of an art installation were far more useful. Once tacked to the ceiling it seemed they were never to be removed, their numbers simply increasing from year to year.

Each spoonful of an occasional baked custard with sultanas in it was scrutinised carefully before it went into my mouth.

Every two days my brother and I crossed the highway and walked up a long dirt road with a clean billy, to swap for another with a quart of fresh milk in it.

No kid’s education is complete until a dairy farmer squirts fresh milk directly into their mouth.

Inside the house, jug covers were used to keep the flies out of the milk.

Further at the rear of this large block, and much closer to the river, was an even older shack where Fred’s daughter lived with her husband and very young children. The kitchen was – in the tradition of its day – in an outbuilding behind the main rooms of the shack. The walls were lined with newspapers which made for interesting reading, and some of the floors were still compacted dirt.

At the back of the kitchen building was a fairly common sight in the 60s – a carefully stacked pile of beer bottles: Three deep and much taller than me [which isn’t saying much].

One day my brother and I were down at the river behind the house when we heard some loud shotgun blasts, and the sound of breaking glass. The kids’ grandmother was baby sitting, and had seen a black snake slither behind the bottle stack. Some people are like that about snakes.

Unless sunning themselves on warm asphalt, I’ve rarely seen snakes, though people are often keen to say they’ve spotted them, even in my own yard.

We’d always been told they are shy, so whenever we tramped through long grass were careful to make a noise announcing our presence and giving them time to move away.

The river was quite shallow behind this block, and a trickle of water had made its way around a small sand bank. If it had been of any significant size it might be called a billabong.*

Mo always blanched sausages in boiling water to remove some of the salt and fat before she fried them, and was happy to donate sausages and a heavy frypan to the cause. We would light a campfire of sorts when my brother and I went “camping” during the daytime on our little “island”. Bro spent a lot of time fishing as well, and was quite good at catching redfin which no one wanted – when he was older he developed a habit of going fishing with sinkers on the end of his line but no bait or hook. As he dislikes fish as much as I do, it seems pointless to catch them for nothing, but he enjoys sitting quietly surrounded by nature and I guess “fishing” is part of the treat.

One of Fred’s neighbours worked for the Mount Buffalo Chalet where he led people on horse-trail rides. I know he took us there one day and although I remember the hairpin bends on the road up Mt Buffalo I have no memory whatsoever of the Chalet then.

On another occasion, he took Mo and I up to the Buckland Valley* where her elderly parents lived in an old mining shack. I accepted an offer to stay a few days with them, astonished that people lived without electricity or generators.

At dinner I was offered a strange new food called “potted meat” which I didn’t like at all but felt I must eat because it was the polite thing to do. It also proved to be a big mistake. After dark I felt a desperate urge to get rid of the meat but as it was pitch black I couldn’t find the door latch in time. Mo’s mum eventually came and found me, and then cleaned up by the light of a kerosene lamp. That was the night I decided it’s less trouble in the long run to politely refuse anything I don’t want to eat.

Porepunkah was a small town then; I remember a butcher’s shop, a post office where the mail was collected, and a pub as well as a handful of houses. Somewhere away from the highway was a sawmill. Across the bridge over the river was a general store /caravan camping ground and, behind here, was a dredged out swimming hole.

Ovens River

Driving through there a few years ago on the way across the mountains to Omeo I was gobsmacked to see Porepunkah had become such a crowded suburb of Bright.

It’s staggering to compare the enormous freedom and trust we had back then compared to kids – or even adults – today. We never stole anything, polluted anything, burned houses down, or drowned; instead we were able to stretch and test ourselves and learn what we were capable of.

A large yard next to Fred’s house had the standard clothesline held up with a wooden prop, and it was also the place where chooks roamed free during the day. To this day I can recall the smell whenever Mo plucked a chook she had killed, and I can still see the disappointed look on her face when she took a naked bird into her kitchen one day and three unlaid eggs slid out.

The rooster was a ratbag, but when he had his eye on a hen he was lucky if he didn’t wear himself out too soon chasing it for miles around the large yard.
I remember one day when a local pair of elderly spinsters, on their way to collect their mail “in town”, stopped for a breather by the fence. The rooster was up to his usual trick, chasing a chook up and down, round and round. Feathers and dust were flying and the hen was squawking. Occasionally she would flap her wings and make a little leap in the air, but we didn’t think she would win the battle. Somehow, she finally found a small hole in the fence and broke out to freedom. The spinsters did not take their eyes off the hen as she ran from the fence line, across the grass verge, and onto the highway just in time to be caught by a car roaring through.
For a moment my brother and I, and the spinsters – perhaps even the rooster – watched in open mouthed disappointment at what we had just witnessed. Then one of the spinsters turned to the other, nodding with a dour and knowing expression on her face, and said “See, Suze: she preferred death!”.

Notes:

photo cottage

I must confess the train carriage in the photo was actually a NSW train [much the same as Victorian trains].

photos ovens river and chalet http://www.travelvictoria.com.au/porepunkah/photos/

The Chalet operated from 1910 to 2007. http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2010/05/08/2894085.htm?site=goulburnmurray

http://www.flickr.com/photos/historyinphotos/3266569446/?q=mt%20buffalo%20chalet%20history

The train song appears to be nearly one hundred years old and probably originated in the UK, though versions of it exist in the U.S. as well. The Other first heard this song from her mother [now 90] The Other's mother probably learnt it from her father, who had been and actor and music hall performer. The tune is Humoresque.

A billabong is sometimes known as an "ox-bow lake".

The Buckland Valley was the location of some anti-Chinese gold mining riots in 1857
[The following clip is a bit fuzzy, but brief and quite interesting.]

memory lane

2011-12-18T03:31:00.002-08:00

About 50 years ago, my family moved into a small semi-detached home in Moonee Ponds. This was in one of the streets, not far from Moonee Ponds Junction, named after British poets.

At the rear was a cobblestone laneway, a reminder of the pre-sewerage “dunny-can” days.

One of my grandmother’s two standard jokes went like this:

Q: Who is the strongest man in the world?

A: The dunny-can man, for he picks up what everyone else drops.

“New Australians” – i.e. almost white Europeans – were still arriving in Australia to settle, bringing with them strange new ideas and, in return, being paid with loud advice like “Yer in Orstraylya now, ya order lern ta speke Inglish!”.

When our new-chum neighbours were joined by their family and friends for a sauce or wine-making day, they always carefully hosed their carefully concreted back-yards when they finished. The lanes behind our house on those occasions were awash with tomato or grape pulp, and the smell of either can still transport me back to that house.

Gas Stove

The house had a wood stove [which smoked too much to be any use], an early Kooka gas stove, and in the lounge room, a briquette heater.

Gas geyser
[connecting pipes insulated with asbestos lagging, of course]

For hot water in the bathroom there was a standard gas geyser, and for hot water in the kitchen there was the standard large kettle.

The laundry copper was under a back verandah of sorts. Not a gas copper like contemporary ones, it was still wood heated.

Gas Copper

Coming home from school [St Monica’s] meant either negotiating the junction, or taking some back streets to avoid the blokes spilling from the pubs out into the street. Mostly, I took the back streets.

One day, a lovely old Italian lady was in her front garden in Margaret Street when I tripped and fell, skinning my knee. She, without a word of English took me [without a word of Italian] into her home and washed my knee then put some antiseptic on it. At home such things were tended with [pink] mercurochrome, but whatever this lady put on my knee was brown [probably Betadine].

From that day on I knew that different people had different ways of doing things; that despite their differences most people are kind; and that actions speak louder than words.

Known variously as the Moonee Ponds Town Hall or the Essendon Town Hall, the council building which occupies one corner of the junction was largely destroyed by fire in 1978, and today only the clocktower remains.

The ballroom dances held there were a little before my time, though I do remember school concerts in the hall. What I remember more vividly than anything was going there for my “needles”.

The secret of comedy is timing, and for most of my life my timing has sucked.

While people in other parts of the world were administering an oral vaccine for polio, in the early 1960s yours truly was one of thousands who were given the Salk vaccine by injection. Not long after my last polio ‘needle’, the oral vaccine was introduced.
Some years ago a GP delighted in explaining that ‘in those days” the needles were of a much thicker gauge [he forgot to mention the intimidating length], and that after a dozen or so kids had been vaccinated the needles were sharpened for further assembly line use.

A Bills water trough in Beechworth
[the kids belong to the bloke wot runs the website mentioned below]

Another feature of the junction at that time was a water trough for horses. This was very useful at the time, because milk was still commonly delivered by horse and cart all over Melbourne, and the ice we used at home was also delivered by horse and cart. The bottle-oh was a rather grubby and surly looking man, who always had a woman sitting atop the cart with him. Rumour [amongst us kids, at least] had it that she only put up with him because she was a deaf mute. This ‘fact’, along with my conviction the bottle-oh had what was called a ‘club foot’, helped me almost get over the trauma of having polio injections – the world was obviously not a very nice place for anyone remotely ‘handicapped’.

The bread was delivered in the modern way – in a motorised van. There wasn’t a lot of variety, and our unsliced loaves were simply handed over with a small piece of tissue paper wrapped around them. Sometimes there would be a little corner of the loaf broken off and, with the logic of a seven year old, I sat one day and nibbled at the corner a little, figuring that another missing crumb wouldn’t be very noticeable. The next crumb didn’t seem to make much difference, or the next crumb… or the next. When it finally occurred to me that a whole heap of crumbs made a big difference compared to the original loaf, I knew I was in trouble.

The incidence of Tuberculosis [TB] in Australia had peaked in 1953, but in the early 1960s it was still a problem. Today, Breastscreen vans rotate from one area to another, but in the ‘60s it was chest x-ray vans on rotation.

Whenever the van was in Moonee Ponds, the footpaths were stencilled with the legend “Have you had your chest x-ray?” [or something darned close to that]. Anyone looking for the van had only to follow the trail of footprints stencilled on to the path.

Of nearly 40 members of my own extended family tested for TB, only two had no trace of the disease. As one of the disease-free pair, I had another 4 needles [not at the town hall], while most others were simply given thousands of pills to swallow.

A range of crystal radio sets were available in the 60s
usually small enough to fit into a breastpocket

A few of the family’s adults were sent to Fairfield or Heatherton for total bed rest. When the authorities said “total” bed rest, they meant it. To survive the boredom, most used tiny crystal set radios, which worked well when the alligator clip was attached to one of the ancient old metal beds. They were also easily hidden from the ~~concentra~~ sanatorium staff.

As for comfort and care while being cured, the motto of the sanatorium [according to parolees] was “You can’t die of TB in here – though we make no promises about anything else”.

With rigidly limited trading hours, for anyone who worked Monday to Friday there were only a few hours left on Saturday morning to do the shopping – most often for us this was in Puckle St.

If my memory doesn’t deceive me, there were three Gilbertson butcher shops in this one small street. Meat and three veg was a balanced meal, and meat meant either lamb or beef – the lamb in reality was usually ‘two-tooth’ mutton. City dwellers who wanted a chicken for dinner had to buy one frozen, or kill one themselves.

Sawdust was commonly used on the floors of butchers' shops, as well as some fishmongers or pubs. In Gilbertson’s stores the sawdust was so thick it was as good as a walk along the beach.

One frequently visited store was a wool shop. Socks were made of wool and so any holes were repaired by darning. Most people wore hand-knitted jumpers, cardigans or vests. It was a do-it-yourself world. Knitting patterns usually specified how many balls of wool were needed for a particular garment, and expert knitters would ask for the right amount of wool – which had to be from the same “dye lot” – to be put away, and were bought as the garment progressed.

A little further along there was a haberdashery shop. Fabric was bought by the yard, and the shop assistant would complete a docket, then send the docket and cash to a central cashier using a ‘flying fox’ system. The flying fox in Puckle St was much the same as the one used in George’s in the city.

A docket and cash canister is
attached to the flying fox

The cool dude then waits for the countdown

And the docket and cash arrive at the store's space station

The manufacturer’s publicity for flying fox systems stressed the inefficiency of having shop assistants walking to a cash register and giving change when they could be serving other customers. Perhaps using a central cashier meant running adjustments could be made to stock figures as each piece of fabric was sold. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but I bet the flying fox system also made sure no shop assistants could pocket any of the cash, under-ring a sale, or fudge the yardage on too many dockets.

Early model shopping jeep
[not collapsible because few people had cars]

The first super-market-like store I remember seeing was also in Puckle St. Customers were invited to leave shopping bags, shopping jeeps or coats and brollies with a “cloak-room attendant” of sorts. It wasn’t a large store, but customers queued at checkouts to pay for purchases.

If we were planning to buy honey or peanut butter, we brought our own jars along, which were weighed before and after filling. Biscuits were weighed out for sale in brown paper bags. I doubt broken biscuits really are healthier because all the calories have leaked out, but they were definitely cheaper.

Around this time there was some kerfuffle about whether it was okay for bakers to sell “yesterday’s bread” cheap or not. I was not the most politically astute 7 year old in the world, but I believe one group held that stale bread was unhealthy, while the opposition claimed this was all bunkum, just a con to ensure pig farmers could get cheap supplies. Yesterday’s cakes [for a penny] however, were way cool and I think I would remember if it was illegal to sell them.

Once in a blue moon I am asked if I like horse riding. My usual response is that I don’t any more, because I once fell off a horse and hurt myself – the shop had a concrete floor. [The real story is that I don’t like heights.] Kifts shoe store had the perfect lure for kids in need of school shoes – a mechanical horse that was FREE.

There were always heaps of kids waiting patiently [or otherwise] for a turn, and I don’t remember whether I ever scored a ride on the grey beast or not. Probably not. I was small, and easily ignored.

Across the street was the movie theatre – where we saw many a Disney movie for the first time.

After we moved closer to the city, we still found ourselves in Puckle St from time to time, as various family members moved to or from the area. It was in a hardware store not far from the theatre that I watched, rapt, as the following took place in 1966:

“That’ll be one and ninepence please love,” the shopkeeper asked as he handed over the goods.

The elderly lady customer rummaged in her purse for a moment, then handed over a two shilling coin.

The shopkeeper - complying with the law by confiscating old currency and giving out change in new currency – handed over a two cent piece.

The elderly lady peered at the strange brown coin she had been given, then asked “What’s this?”

“It’s a two cent piece, love,” the hardware man explained.

I would be surprised if the lady could actually see the coin properly, but she was definitely surprised. “Two?’ she asked. “You owe me threepence.”

“Nah, love, it’s decimal currency. See, three pence is equal to two cents…”

“How can it be two cents when you owe me three pennies?”

“It’s the changeover, love, see… there’s only ten cents now, for a shilling. See, it’s twelve pennies in an old shilling but now ten cents is… well, anyway… it’s that way, you see…”

“Well if it’s the same, why don’t you just give me a threepence, or three pennies?”

“Because…”

“Oh, I don’t know why they don’t just wait til all us old people die, before they change things.”

Notes:
Early gas stoves did not have user friendly thermostats, hence older cookbooks usually had a page explaining how many inches high a gas flame should be for a slow, medium or fast oven temperature.

Lighting the gas geyser involved turning on the water, then lighting the gas pilot, then turning the pilot around so the flame reached the gas ring inside the unit. Amazing I'm still here.

The secret of doing laundry in a copper is simple - hot water sets a stain. Start with cold water, and as it heats up this generates movement. BT - before tissues - this was the ONLY way to get handkerchiefs clean. Boil clothes if you want to kill germs, but don't boil man-made fibres [or wool].

Milk or soft drink bottle recycling was done mainly through milk bars. A "bottle-oh" collected and recycled beer bottles. Beer bottles were more common BW & BC - before wine and before cans - and there were more than enough to keep several people in business.

The ice man cameth until 1962 when he advised my mother nearly everyone had a fridge now, and he was going to retire. Most photos I can find of ice chests are of carefully restored oak chests. Ours was decidedly tatty and thinly veneered. People who have used ice chests know better than to attack iced up fridges with knives or hair dryers - just turn the fridge off, leave the door closed, and the melting ice will keep everything cool.

The changeover to a new currency was protracted and, for many people, quite painful - hence the name "dismal currency".

Horsetrough photo from a website dedicated to the Bills charity.

For more on the flying fox system, start here.

For more on vintage water-heaters start here.

For more on the bottle-oh [Georgie Singles] start here [you'll have to search for the relevant story]. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ipad/in-black-and-white-how-not-to-transport-a-tramp/story-fn6bn9st-1226177416950

wotalotta rubbish

2011-12-15T00:52:00.000-08:00

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Call me naïve or call me an ostrich; I’m a global warming sceptic. I do believe ocean levels are rising and ice caps are melting, but this is a belief in things that are happening, not a belief in the reasons they are happening.

Like many others who are not scientists, I can only rely on experts for advice about causes. Choosing which experts to believe is a little like choosing which self-appointed expert I should trust to tell me what god was thinking when he dictated the holy scriptures.

----------------------------------------

I’m rather sceptical about emissions trading schemes, whatever name or form they take; I’m certain they are neither a priority nor the great planet saver it is claimed they are.

Quite simply, carbon dioxide emissions are a form of pollution, but it is for the effects of all pollutants we must make ourselves accountable to current and future generations.

There are many forms of pollution we should be concerned about; carbon dioxide emissions are one, but the most toxic are the trade in arms and weapons, and the by-products of all Uranium mining. For this reason, the ‘carbon tax’ seems no great victory to me, and whatever its worth, this has been more than cancelled by the decision to extend uranium sales to India.

-----------------------------------------

There is something either sick or surreal – perhaps both – about the arms industry. Who are these people, who devise bigger and better and more efficient ways of killing and maiming people while, hopefully, destroying as little infrastructure as possible?

As someone more original than I once pointed out, they are perfectly normal people who love their families, cherish freedom and go to church on Sundays.

It is one thing to defend ourselves, or to show that we can defend ourselves, but how is it self-defence to plant mines in third world countries where people live at subsistence level and depend on crops for survival?

Let’s not dwell on the detail of how grenades do their job, or the engineering genius behind this or that type of land-mine: How is it self-defence to decide we’ve won our battle, then walk off and leave this grisly pollution behind?

----------------------------------------

We have national laws designed to ensure we all get along with our neighbours, and that we take good care of ourselves. We need permits to cut down dangerous trees, we are forbidden to put “For Sale” signs on cars parked by the side of the road, we must register pets and prove they’ve been neutered, and alcohol and tobacco are heavily taxed to protect us from ourselves.

Yet it is seen as perfectly sane, sound business practice to manufacture arms in quantities above and beyond those required for our self defence. Weapons are traded to different factions involved in any number of civil wars around the globe – and let’s call these wars what they are in most instances; ethnic cleansing.

We sell guns to warlords and then need guns to defend ourselves when we try to send aid to the people who are starving because warlords have guns.

How about a weapons trading scheme as a useful tax priority?

-------------------------------

A second form of pollution, with a different kind of toxicity but an equally serious one, is the mining of uranium.

Left in the ground and undisturbed, uranium is relatively harmless. Mining creates radioactive tailings and destroys water resources.

Uranium has some value in providing advanced medical equipment, but like arms for self-defence, the medical benefits of uranium cannot justify the quantities we trade.

The hypocrisy of continuing to mine and sell coal for electricity generation while we cry about carbon emissions is one thing. The stupidity of arguing that nuclear power is cleaner and safer is staggering.

Working on a health and safety project for a manufacturing firm, the question “What is the worst that could happen?” was asked. Of course, no one is expected to plan against the worst that could happen, because the probability of the worst that could happen is so low. If we had to allow for the worst possibilities all the time, we would have to stop breathing.

None the less, this question of “the worst” provides a benchmark for working backwards and deciding what we ought to worry about.

When asked what is the worst that could happen to our factory, I naturally said “A plane could fall out of the sky”. Perhaps I deserved the flak I got because I’m sometimes too flippant, but 3 weeks later the Twin Towers were hit.

Accidents happen:

Disasters are what happen when the thing that was least likely to happen happens.

--------------------------------------------

After Three Mile Island we seemed to say to ourselves “Phew, that was close! Right, what lessons can be learned and how do we idiot-proof the process?”
After an appropriate length of time we can distance ourselves from cover-ups like Maralinga or Windscale, and say “thank goodness that sort of thing wouldn’t happen now”.
After Chernobyl we could say “oh well, it was inevitable but the Soviet Union has crumbled and the world is now safe from the inefficiencies of command economies”.

But what do we say after Fukushima?

Fukushima shook me the way no previous accident could. When the tsunami first hit the power plant, I was confident the Japanese would be able to deal with the problem better than any other people in the world.

The Japanese embraced quality-system-thinking 60 years before any other country in the world, and it helped Japan become the economic power it is today. They had the foresight to build a massive retaining wall to protect their nuclear plants from a worst case scenario – a tsunami. Unfortunately, their worst case scenario was not improbable enough, and two plate movements created the monster that very quickly killed thousands and destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands.

Fukushima is still spewing radioactive waste into the ocean which, ultimately, every country shares. A nation with very little arable land now has even less, and less chance to make a shift from being reliant on seafood to reliant on anything else.

-----------------------------------

Mining uranium and using nuclear power not only involve risk, they create waste. Who should take the waste? How can we bury it safely so that following generations will have a few hundred years to leisurely discover a better way to use it, or even store it?

“Not in my back yard!”
Should those who buy uranium be responsible for its storage, or those who dig it up in the first place? One popular answer seems to be “let’s just bury it on Aboriginal land which, as we know, has no value and is wasted anyway”.

-----------------------------------

One of the biggest causes of carbon dioxide emissions - and pollution in general - is the west’s insatiable appetite for crap.

For years I was naïve enough to never use aluminium foil or plastic food wrap because I cared about the planet. Then I worked for a company which produced about 3 container loads of non-biodegradable waste a week.
Most of this waste resulted from a combination of engineering incompetence, poor management, and ridiculous customer specifications.

The cost of dumping this waste was such that the manager seriously contemplated buying cheap farmland so he could just dig a bloody great hole in the ground and bury it himself.

Like many people, I use plastic food containers, and have plastic bowls and spatulas and measuring cups. At least these have a reasonable life span. But I have just bought some Christmas presents made of plastic [as if the world needs yet another Barbie doll]. Guilty as charged.

Many of the consumer goods we buy have a very short life and are made of non-biodegradable materials. Some plastic can be recycled, but in many cases this would simply be impractical – the waste is too small to bother with, and is in any case unusable because it is mixed with other materials.

Somewhere ‘out there’ pollution is being created to generate power to run injection moulding machines using plastics made of fossil fuels to create manufacturing and warehousing and transport and retail jobs by producing crap like this:

Drink Holder Cowboy Hat

which will, after we all have a good laugh for ten minutes, end up in landfill.

---------------------------------------

In India, there are communities where people make a living of sorts by salvaging materials from decommissioned nuclear powered vessels. The life expectancy of these people is [from memory] just over 30 years.

I remember a picture of an elderly Japanese man sifting through rubble near Fukushima, looking for food. He was not looting; he and his wife were starving. And when he was caught on camera he broke down, crying “I’m so ashamed, I’m so ashamed…”

Yes, ocean levels are rising and people living on small islands are threatened and species will die out. But this is all wrong, and I feel impotent in the face of it all.

I suspect, on balance, the Labor Party’s achievement in pulling off a ‘carbon tax’ and compromising on a mining tax have been pretty insignificant in the scheme of things.

a gay little party

2011-12-05T05:06:00.000-08:00

One hot topic at the recent ALP national conference was whether party policy should be binding in favour of gay marriage, or whether parliamentary members should have a conscience vote on the issue: Both options would represent a departure from previous party policy.

There were quite a few people writing letters to editors, moaning about the insignificance of this issue and that it was a distraction from more serious matters such as pay rises for MPs, whether it is okay to lie about carbon tax proposals, and how to expand the current party membership to at least 17 before the next election.

In The Age today Dennis Altman – an early campaigner for the decriminalisation of homosexuality – suggested this is a serious issue because it is a human rights issue.

[Interesting, he says, that this human rights issue is open for a conscience vote when the equally important policies relating to asylum seekers were not.]

On the same page of The Age Amanda Vanstone outlined her idea of a sensible approach to the gay marriage issue, stressing that regardless of marital arrangements, every child is entitled to know who both of their biological parents are. Most of her comments work for me.

Not having given the issue enough thought in the past, I was confident that moves to give same-sex couples equal treatment before the law had covered all the bases [e.g. taxation or social security], but there recently arose the case of someone who is unable to get their same sex intended a visa, because there is no way they can marry here. On the other hand, I know of a couple who were able to organise visas some years ago because their same sex relationship was recognised. This called for a little clarification on my part.

The Marriage Act is a federal act, and so has significance if a gay couple are affected by any federal law.

Some states have recently made allowance for gay couples to register their relationships.

In Victoria there has been a long-standing entitlement of same-sex partners to exemption from or reduction of taxes for transactions such as property transfers to a partner. This benefit applied before the registration of gay relationships was proposed by the state. In this sense, perhaps, state registration amounts to little more than symbolic recognition.

Importantly, State acknowledgment of a relationship has no power to over-ride a federal law.

For the purposes of immigration visas for same-sex couples, the federal government does not discriminate where it can be shown that there is a long-standing commitment by a couple. Unfortunately, in order to show this commitment, some Australians have had to live overseas as a couple for an extended period, before applying for visas.

Where the law does discriminate is in the case of Prospective Marriage Visas, which permit fiancé[e]s to travel to Australia to marry – obviating the need for living overseas to prove the relationship is fair dinkum.

No one can be a prospective spouse if the law won’t allow them to marry.

With a conscience vote, there is no way any attempt to change the law will succeed. The Liberal coalition have a binding policy on the matter, and Julia would look a right prat if she voted in favour of change now.

The ALP might be able to increase its membership to 17 before the next election, but I doubt many of that number will be gay people or friends or families of gay people.

Amanda Vanstone suggests – and I agree – that any religion should be free to refuse to marry same-sex couples if that is against their beliefs.

She proposes that all marriages should be formalised by the government, with people holding religious ceremonies later if they so choose. As most religious ministers [or their equivalents] are registered celebrants and do complete government paperwork as an adjunct to religious ceremonies, I’m guessing what she is really on about is separation of Church and State with respect to marriage.

Some members of the public suggest that gays should generally not be discriminated against, but gay marriage will make a joke of the institution. This smacks a little of “some of my best friends are poofs but I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one”.

There is no other way to interpret this sort of nonsense than, as Orwell put it, “all pigs are equal, but some are more equal than others”.

Anyone who claims to be in favour of human rights yet objects to gay marriage on one pretext or another should either pee or get off the pot.

The ALP shot themselves in the foot years ago, by moving to the right of Genghis Khan in order to steal coalition votes. In doing so they left their left flank open - conscience votes will do nothing to soak up green votes, and the only reason the ALP are getting coalition votes is because Tony Abbott is a vote repellent.

a gringe

2011-12-03T05:43:00.000-08:00

Gringe: [n] from the v to gringe, to whinge about Christmas; to be a Grinch

Things to like about Christmas:

The sheep and cows in the stable are cool, even if you are not into babies;
The Myer Christmas window is dorky but you get to go out at night-time in your jim-jams and stay up late;
Buying an old hand-bag from the op shop and filling it with fascinating little colourful bits and pieces for young kids to play with. [There’s something rather cool about the way three-year old boys carry handbags];
Eating til you are sick or til you find a threepence in the pudding – whichever comes first;
Imagining what it would be like to hear the Cathedral bells pealing at midnight if there wasn’t a law against noise;
Buying Oxfam chooks as presents for people who don’t really need more crap;
Having fun with people you really like;
Having a Kris Kringle limit for get-togethers and seeing who can buy the most ridiculous crap for $5;
Keeping in touch with people you care about but don’t have much to do with, by sending a Christmas card and/or letter;
Getting Christmas cards and/or letters from people you care about but don’t have much to do with;
Hand-made cards and decorations;
Leaving work early on the last day before Christmas without losing any pay;
Fruitcake [sic] made with brandy or whisky;
The story of how the fairy ended up on the very top of the Christmas tree.

Things not to like about Christmas

Fake spray-on snow;
Christmas trees with snow on them;
Christmas cards with snow on them;
Office parties;
Drunks;
Dry, over-cooked, tasteless poultry;
Ham;
Useless or tasteless gifts from people who expect you to keep/display them;
Tinsel and balls that invade other people’s personal space;
Forgetting that some people have religious or other reasons for not being as excited about Christmas as everyone else;
Bing Crosby singing about snow and sleigh bells for two bloody months – everywhere you go – year after year – [one sixth of your life!!!];
Schmaltzy movies or TV episodes about Christmas.

Happy Man Bottle Stopper

Stupid things to do at Christmas

Buying gifts for people you don’t like;
Buying gifts you don’t like for people you do like;
Spending time with people who are horrible every other day of the year and expecting that on Christmas Day it will be different.

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value matters

2011-11-27T03:58:00.000-08:00

There are many ways to value “things”.

Things might be worth

what it cost to design/make/market and deliver them;
what it cost to buy them;
what we are prepared to pay for them;
how much they have deteriorated or been superseded; or
what someone is prepared to sell them for.

All of these possible valuations will differ depending on such variables as how scarce they are; whether we can afford them, or how useful they might be in the long term.

Then there are things which might be precious simply because they mean a great deal to us.

----------------------

Can we judge what a society values most by what it is prepared to pay for different assets and services?

By this measure it seems the Occupy Movement has a reasonable axe to grind.

Is a woman who is ludicrously rich because her father had the vision to dig holes in the ground really worth so much more than everyone else in the country? Is a woman who spends 120 hours a week doing piece work on a sewing machine really worth so much less?

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Of course, our intangible values are more difficult to measure in terms of money.

Government budgets or even legal decisions can reveal something about what we value, but not everything.

We might quibble about the details, but we value the environment and pass laws to protect it for the future.

As a predominantly omnivorous nation, we have legislation reflecting our belief every animal deserves a clean life and a clean death.

We have many laws [perhaps too many] reflecting our belief that we should respect or care for each other, even strangers.

We have a free, universal health care system built on the notion that if we encounter someone in distress our first instinct is not to ask if they have insurance, but to ask what we must do to keep them alive.

------------------------------

We can walk into the emergency department of any hospital and see the values of doctors, nurses and allied health workers in action: A throng of people – washed and unwashed, whiney or stoic, weak or strong in character, victims of chance or those who are the causes of their own suffering – are all treated equally. For most people who work in medical fields, life itself has a greater value than the temptation to pass judgment.

No person can survive for long in any job that challenges their core values and convictions, or where they are under-appreciated. The few who are judgmental are statistical outliers, or jaded after years of working in a system that is not built on the values it should be.

---------------------------

The current campaign by Victorian nurses for better pay and fixed nurse:patient ratios is not driven by greed, it’s a reaction to the long term, ongoing neglect of the health system by governments whose budget priorities are out of sync with what I hope we value most as a society – life.

The value we place on life and its quality is not being pooh-poohed by nurses, but by those directly responsible for a scarcity of health resources.

--------------------------

Our reasonably free market economy is fuelled by demand; by the notion that when we value a resource this value will motivate others to provide it. We might think of democratic governments as entities we buy with votes, but it seems our democracy is a “free” market place where none of the usual rules apply. For example,

We are ruled by an oligopoly, for there are few political brands to choose from and they are not very well distributed.
When the promises we buy are defective; when our governments let us down, we have no consumer affairs organisation which will refund the vote we paid.

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The Baillieu government insists nurses cannot have pay rises unless they deliver an increase in productivity.

If the question of nurses’ pay is nothing more than an exercise in sound budgeting, then it is fair to assess what government – the nurses’ bosses and business managers – are themselves contributing to productivity levels.

Would we expect printers to churn out magazines or books without paper or ink? Similarly, should we expect hospital staff to be productive when our hospitals do not have enough beds, or enough equipment to cope with demand?

What equipment they do have is in a poor state of repair and in short supply.

When Mother Other was finally placed on a special emergency room cardiac bed – after three hours in a queue – absolutely none of the equipment needed was functioning, with some missing altogether.

The Other herself once spent hours in agony experiencing a full blown heart attack in a hospital corridor. The corridor space was only available because she has connections. Such was the demand on resources that other, more life threatening cases were attended to first, on the understanding The Other would survive and could be helped once the attack was over.

These two situations did not arise because of industrial action, they arose at times when it was ‘business as usual’ in Victorian hospitals.

------------------

The Baillieu government claims the system has enough nurses; that some of the traditional nursing tasks could be handled by ancillary staff. Today, certificated PSAs strip, wash and disinfect every hospital bed then make it up with fresh sheets, after use and before a new patient takes over. In practical terms, what should nursing staff do when a patient soils themselves, or is bleeding profusely – press a buzzer and wait for a free PSA to arrive?

If a patient’s head must be elevated to keep their airway open, who is the best person available to immediately prop up the head and provide jaw support? If a patient needs jaw support – which might mean physically lifting someone’s head and holding it in the correct position for an hour or more – how many patients should one nurse be expected to care for? Even with a one:to one nurse:patient ratio, where does the help come from if the bed of a jaw-support patient needs changing, or drugs must be fetched, or a doctor called?

----------

A printing press uses floor space. Floor space is also required for storing paper and ink, for a guillotine to cut the paper to size, a place to store finished product before it is trimmed, and somewhere for a printer to stand or move backwards and forwards.

Similarly, in a hospital emergency department space is required for a bed, up to three or four nurses or doctors at a time for each bed, an equipment cart, privacy and more. But space is something in very short supply in hospitals.

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If our economy requires an investment in resources to provide the services we need, it also requires incentives to attract workers into service industries. If someone chooses to become a nurse, what’s in it for them? What’s the reward at the end of an expensive university degree?

Under the 2010 award, these are the weekly wages of a Div 1 nurse with a 3 year degree:

Level 1
Pay point 1	697.00
Pay point 2	712.00
Pay point 3	730.00
Pay point 4	750.00
Pay point 5	774.00
Pay point 6	797.00
Pay point 7	821.00
Pay point 8	843.00

This makes an entry level rate of $35,000 rising to $44,000 over 8 years.

The average minimum graduate entry salaries [per annum] for other career paths are:

Accounting	25,000
Engineering	30,000
HR & Recruitment	40,000
IT & Communications	35,000
Marketing	35,000
Sales	35,000
Trades & Services	75,000

[Nov 2011]

Economists have long acknowledged that all wages or salaries contain a ‘transfer’ component. As an example, this means that someone who enjoys a great deal of job satisfaction in their current position would need an irresistible increase in salary to be lured away by a new employer.

Hospital staff – especially public hospital staff – deal every day with

verbal abuse,
threats of physical abuse, and
real physical abuse.

The small proportion of patients who are feral or aggressive might

be suffering a psychosis over which they have no control,
be under the influence of some very heavy duty drugs,
feeling they need to compete for medical attention, or
simply antisocial.

Nursing staff often lift people far heavier than themselves, deal with unpleasant bodily functions, and accept responsibility for making life or death decisions all day every day.

They deal with death, the grief of relatives and friends of patients, and their own grief. Theatre staff, and in particular recovery staff, are often punched or kicked by people coming out of an anaesthetic and desperate to remove tubes and lines from their face and arms. Some of them even lash out simply because they can [until someone calls their bluff].

--------------

The Baillieu government claims nurses were placing the welfare of patients at risk by closing beds; by excluding cases of elective surgery.

The system which has evolved for prioritising surgical cases is, in itself, an indication that the system is under-resourced.

Elective surgery is surgery that can safely be delayed for more than 24 hours. The term ‘elective’ is used only to distinguish it from emergency surgery, which is required within 24 hours to save a life.

Elective surgery does not mean that the surgery is optional – elective surgery is often life saving (for example removal of a tumour) or very important to a patient’s health and well-being (such as a hip replacement). It is also known as planned or booked surgery. Elective surgery can be postponed and, unfortunately, too often is postponed for far too long.

But there are different categories of elective surgery. What has not been made clear in the government's criticism of the nurses' industrial action is which category of elective surgery is on hold, and how often exceptions to these bans are being made.

Table 4.1: Elective Surgery Urgency Categories

Cat 1	Admission within 30 days desirable for a condition that has the potential to deteriorate quickly, to the point that it may become an emergency
Cat 2	Admission within 90 days desirable for a condition causing some pain, dysfunction or disability, but which is not likely to deteriorate quickly or become an emergency
Cat 3	Admission within 365 days for a condition causing minimal or no pain, dysfunction or disability, which is unlikely to deteriorate quickly and which does not have the potential to become an emergency

With the current state of affairs in our public hospitals, one in ten patients do not receive their surgery within the recommended time frame, and 3 quarters of these are people living in Qld, Vic and Tas.

[The Tasmanian figures should not be surprising as even Hobart is classified as “Inner Regional” as it is so short of essential services - usually provided to Tasmanians by Victoria].

Nurse patient:ratios have an impact on these delays.

--------------------------

The Baillieu government has recently closed 100 hospital beds.

Victoria is struggling to hold on to paramedics.

Churn numbers relating specifically to nursing are hard to find, but a 2008 paper makes the following quite plain:

There is currently a severe shortage of experienced nurses in Australia, as in many other developed countries. This is considered to be the result of both decreasing enrolments in nursing education, and poor retention rates of those in the nursing workforce. Retention rates are generally thought to have worsened over recent years. There is also concern over the ageing of the nursing workforce since this will cause critical shortages in the future as greater proportions of nurses reach retirement age.

I do hear plenty of anecdotal evidence that a large number of nurses desert the hospital system within 6 months of graduating.

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When it comes to government priorities, health, child protective services, aged care and education are all competing with everything from transport and other infrastructure to motor or horse racing for funds.

I am hopeful that the yartz will obtain continued support, and that Flinders St Station will be preserved and revitalised. I am also aware that as much as a couple of months in Europe would add to my quality of life, I have to sacrifice or postpone some things in order to pay for other priorities in my own life.

When it comes to the wages of nurses, the usual government tactic of shifting the blame is not a very productive solution to a systemic problem. Blaming nurses or letting their "accounting value" further behind will do nothing to increase productivity.

sibling saga episode 666

2011-11-25T05:53:00.000-08:00

Fear not! Football may have been ditched by fickle fans in favour of cricket as the weather warms up, but the sororal competition continues unabated.

Followers of this blog may be interested to learn the pathology report for The Other’s recently removed knob-oma came back with a disappointingly indeterminate ‘envenomated’. The absence of proof that The Other’s bite was definitely caused by a redback may not entitle The Other’s sister to her husband’s Ka-Ching, but it has still left her with a wide but knowing grin on her dial.

My lovely Aunt Fruitcake has made her annual trip south for the summer, arriving in Frankston today. Coincidentally, The Other’s sister is also at Frankston while her hubby –aka Spiderman – recovers from knee surgery in a local horse’s piddle.

Naming names – while changing names to protect the innocent – let us now christen The Other “Daisy” and her younger sister “Geranium”.

Aunt Fruitcake’s two daughters are, in a different order of preference, named “Geranium” and “Daisy”.

Tonight, Geranium Other suggested to Aunt Fruitcake that Geranium must be Aunt’s favourite name if she named her first daughter Geranium rather than Daisy.

To this, Aunt Fruitcake replied that it was Uncle Fruitcake who had liked the name Geranium, while she had given her favourite name – Daisy – to her second daughter.

What’ll it be customers, KA-CHING or OUCH?

food glorious food

2011-11-23T03:45:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that

Australia

is no longer the cultural backwater it once was:

Back in the day - so long ago it was even before my time - while billies boiled and damper cooked on the campfire, old swaggies swapped recipes. To them we owe details of the best way to cook a galah:

Place galah in large pot with 2 quarts of water and 3 large rocks;
Boil for two hours;
Drain pot, dispose of galah, eat rocks.

Wood stoves might be efficient for heating hot water and warming houses as well as cooking, but trees are now sacred and firewood is expensive.

The 1950s and 60s gave us electric frypans, and Sunbeam Mixmasters, along with migrants seeking a little more variety than mutton with 3 veg;

We stopped taking our saucepans to “the Chinese” when fast food franchises arrived in the 70s, and in this new millennium we can eat at restaurants serving food from every conceivable cultural tradition.

Why, Australian cooking has even been paid the ultimate compliment by providing fodder for a whole swag of reality TV shows.

But since 1940, William Angliss institutes in one form or another have quietly worked behind the scenes, training people to produce reliably good, nutritious, tasty and attractive traditional grub.

The government people for whom I currently work are very big on team building. They care more about bonding than the people at Tarzan’s Grip, and so today I went with my ‘team-mates’ to lunch at the William Angliss Institute of TAFE Bistro.

The buffet offered soup and pasta as entrees, a range of salads, vegies cooked in different styles, rice, sweet and sour pork, cantaloupe with prosciutto, asparagus with beef, roast beef, roast pork, cheese and fruit, more fruit, and pastries.

Although short for my weight I am a rather fernickety eater; don’t much care for roast beef, don’t do pork, and assiduously avoid any food tainted with bacon, basil or parsley. For all that, I had so many little bits of this and that for my $22 that I came away in need of a good sleep.

Thinking it would be a bit rude to knock off a linen napkin I decided against wrapping up one of the massive great hunks of cake as a treat for The Other while sampling some of the desserts.

Fruit platters always call to me, because it’s just impractical to buy honeydew melons, cantaloupes, watermelons and a heap of other stuff for home without a starving horde to make sure it doesn’t get wasted.

Some of my work buddies were happy to divvy up profiteroles, brandy snaps and the like so we could just have a taste of everything without making ourselves sick.

One or two had a wine or beer [not too expensive] while I opted for a post-prandial coffee [which, I later discovered, was covered by my $22].

Many years ago someone gave me a William Angliss plum pudding and it was yummy, so I dropped into the bakery to ask if they still sell them. For thirteen dollars I put in my order for 6 small puds and some brandy custard which I can pick up in mid December.

The bakery, I discovered, sells some rather fancy and expensive looking cakes for $10... so if you are in town and need to buy a birthday cake, this might be the 'shop' for you.

To cap off all of today’s treats, I worked out how to take a photo with my phone AND how to download it so I could upload it for my salivating friends in blogland.

about the shape of it

2011-11-12T03:07:00.000-08:00

The 2010 theme for sand sculpting on the Frankston Foreshore was

‘Events that have changed the world’

The theme for 2012 will be ‘Toytopia’

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After living in Frankston for more than twenty years, The Other announced she wanted to see the McClelland Sculpture Gallery. The weather today was perfect, so we got in the car and drove off, arriving about six minutes later.

The Sculpture Park and Gallery’s 16 hectares – situated on McClelland Drive – were once home to Harry McClelland (1884-1954), local artist and philanthropist.
In 1971 the gallery was established under the terms of his sister’s will, growing over the next 40 years with the support of several government bodies, and some private foundations including the Elisabeth Murdoch Sculpture Foundation.

Large sculptures – a mix of both classical and more contemporary works – are scattered across the site.

Some of the works sit in carefully landscaped and quite formal gardens, while others are waiting to be found in native bushland settings.

No, they aren't the work of Mr Curly

I don’t believe I’ve ever heard bellbirds anywhere but Sherbrooke Forest before today, but bellbirds there were!

Some parts of the gallery invite visitors to go on a
journey of discovery

There are indoor exhibitions as well but, following some recent heavy storms, parts of the ceiling in the gallery centre caved in leaving a dreadful stench of mildew, and no hope of exploring indoors today.

We spent more than two hours exploring outside, and also visited the gallery café which – surprise, surprise – had a rather arty farty ambience with matching menu and prices.

There is one review on-line somewhere suggesting the service in the café was a tad snooty, but the woman who took our order was quite pleasant.
Unfortunately, the waitress has a severe problem with anorexia. This did not put us off our tucker, but it does give one pause. I looked around the room and saw that everyone else was of a reasonably average weight – healthy or larger. The Other commented that the young lady probably weighed 30 kg and probably wouldn’t live to 30.
It’s a tragedy because she would have quite a pretty face if it wasn’t so gaunt. I don’t know what causes such self-loathing, and I’m not sure what I would do if I managed a café and she asked me for a job. I would probably stick my neck out and risk handing her a card with the name of a counselling service on it, though I doubt it would help.

On a happier note, other gallery visitors today included a family with a Jack Russell [on lead], a couple sharing a blanket under the shade of a tall gum, and another family who had brought their own picnic.

One chappy with a ginormous camera round his neck [and partner several paces behind] seemed inspired and excited by the whole place, taking more pictures than steps and sometimes causing his respectful partner to bump into him.

It would be wrong of me to include too many photos, because part of the fun is being surprised and some of you may want to visit the gallery yourselves one day. You can check out the hours and details of free entry at the gallery website.

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In a spirit of full disclosure, I should point out the gallery is on the Langwarrin side of McClelland Drive, not the Frankston side.

Recent news articles about a couple ‘from Frankston’ who were not so much ‘missing persons/ feared victims’ as ‘on the lam’ do not mention that they are actually from Langwarrin, so goshdarn it all, if it’s good and it’s in Langy I’ll claim it.

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If the gallery is 6 minutes from home, it’s only 4 minutes to Dame Elisabeth Murdoch’s Cruden Farm. The next Open Garden Day is on the 20^th November, and if life doesn’t get in the way it sounds like a good way to pass an afternoon.

operation ka-ching

2011-11-07T05:01:00.000-08:00

The Other has requested I provide a score update in the great spider bite competition of 2011.

Approximately 2 weeks after she was initially bitten by a red back, the swelling from her forearm to fingers subsided, but a large infection remained above one knuckle. A lovely GP lanced it and prescribed a course of strong antibiotics. Although the infection has cleared, a granuloma now remains. This photo really does not do justice the size of the lump. But... at least I worked out how to turn the camera flash off.

To oversimplify, in this instance the lump [oma] is most likely made up of dead macrophages [biological goo-munchers] which gave their lives that The Other may live.

The Other believes the lancing deserves a point but I disagree. Pus, after all, is common as muck. I will, however, award a point for the gross inconvenience and discomfort the granuloma is causing.

Patients recovering from surgery, when they come out of anaesthesia, like to grab hold of something. [In the case of male patients, they like to grab something specific first, just to make sure their greatest nightmare has not been realised. Then they grab at the limbs of recovery room nurses. Recovery room nurses often go home with thumping great bruises.]

Thus, at work, both surgical gloves and patient activity have been exerting pressure on The Other’s knob-oma, in turn putting pressure on nerves and tendon.

I’ll also award another point [ka-ching] for the appointment with a plastic surgeon next Wednesday a.m. to remove the thing.

We haven’t heard in recent days of how the Bro-in-law's bite site is progressing, but he will be here later this month to have a knee replacement [ka-ching] so I guess we’ll learn more about it then.

This sibling rivalry is serious, but began with no book of established rules. Should The Other’s sister be awarded points because of her husband’s bite, or should she earn points on her own merit?

How far back should we go – is this to be a life-long competition, or a series of games, sets and matches?

Does The Other score points for having surgery on her Morton’s Neuroma before her sister had surgery on hers? Does the sister earn an extra point for unsuccessful surgery, then an extra point again for needing surgery to correct the surgery, or does she lose one for not going to The Other’s recommended surgeon in the first place?

Whenever a medical issue arises The Other simply discusses it with this or that person at work, and has it dealt with as casually as one might borrow a pen. This adds a whole new dimension to the idea that people with private health insurance are free to choose their own doctors and surgeons. Since I can't work out how to keep score, I've decided to disqualify The Other for insider trading.

no point arguing with logic

2011-11-05T19:49:00.000-07:00

It seems a neighbour has a family of black cockatoos making babies in his grevillea. I hadn't heard cockatoo-like noises, but then, before moving back to Melbourne I was used to having two or three hundred settle down in my gum trees every night at dusk. It's the sort of noise I'd learned to block out.
The Other, on the other hand, has been gardening and mowing and making hay before the cool change, and always has an ear cocked at this time of the year, because rainbow lorikeets love trees full of green almonds.

Around lunch time the cockatoos had moved to the other side of the court and into a tall gum, so everyone emerged from their homes in stages to check them out. Funny how babies can bring people together.

Armed with nothing but my "this'll do til I find the good one somewhere in a box somewhere in the shed" camera, I was lucky enough to snap one clearly enough to identify it properly.

Seems they are yellow-tailed black cockatoos. While I had long believed black cockies were, like black swans, a WA thing, surprise surprise I was wrong! [Who'da thunk!]

A neighbour told us black cockatoos are a sign of bad weather to come. If this is true, then we have had bad weather for as many years as black cockatoos have been around. I personally thought the gathering clouds, the change in temperature and the few drops of rain were a sign of bad weather to come, but I think she was talking about global warming and the way Melbourne's climate is getting more like Queensland's.
At the risk of offending the 6 million followers of this blog, all I can say is "tosh".

Some websites provide lists of widely accepted beliefs about weather. 'When spiders come inside, bad weather is on its way". In the summer, huntsmen do seem to move indoors when the barometer climbs, but this might mean that it's breeding season and a house seems like a pretty good tree.

Another good claim is that 'when worms come out, the rain has stopped'. I think it would be easier to just stand outside and see if you get wet than to carry around a worm farm. It's a bit like people who have been looking everywhere for something and then say they only ever find things in the last place they look. Well... yeah!

words’ worth

2011-11-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

Words [of any language or dialect] are one of mankind’s greatest inventions. The strengths of English, and its position as lingua franca is due, ‘they’ say, to its adaptability and its incorporation of useful words from other languages.

This has led to – amongst other things – the useless abomination known as International English: A type of jargon in which each word or sentence makes total sense but which, in total, leads to paragraphs and speeches which are ultimately meaningless.

An example lifted from Wikipedia goes something like this:

“In order to solve the stress that international students have, some scholars gave some suggestions, including deal with the problems with a positive attitude and educate international students to use various ways to help them solve their problems…”

[If you need further examples of correct but meaningless English, please see any scuzei bog.]

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Whether the need for an international language or simply an increase in levels of mass communication is to blame, the English language is being bastardised by unnecessary changes in otherwise adequate words and expressions, so that ‘sign’ has become ‘signage’ and to increase the value of an asset is now ‘to grow an asset’ – as if all we need do is add water.

--------------

One source of fascination for me is the way speakers of English as a second language might misinterpret an English word and rework it so that it makes more sense today than the original English.

For example [before built-in-robes became standard in new houses] a friend increased her English vocabulary with the word “walldrobe”.

This improvement now lacks a reference to the origin of the original word – ‘keeper of the robe’ – but I’m not sure it matters.

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Many speakers of English as a first language have completely lost the plot, believing, for example, that the person who hires and fires in a company is the ‘Personal” manager. No doubt if the mistake were pointed out to them, many might reply “I could of got that editing job if only I’d of known’.

----------------

In the 1960s a series of books written by Alastair Morrison were published, the first volume of which was Let’s Talk Strine. The pen name adopted by the author provides a clue to the idea behind the books– Afferbeck Lauder [for Alphabetical Order] – that idea being to help English speakers understand what Australians are really saying.

One favourite piece of Strine [Australian] which many my age still tend to use and understand is ‘Emma?’, from ‘Emma Chisit – an inquiry about the price of something’.

----------------

Portmanteau words were first explained by Lewis Carroll in 1871, in Alice Through the Looking Glass, where he uses the word ‘slithy’ to mean ‘lithe and slimy’.

Modern portmanteau words include ‘globish’ [global English] and ‘Brangelina’.

-----------------

Perhaps the greatest contribution to English was the book by Douglas Addams and John Lloyd, The Meaning of Liff. Using nothing but genuine place names, they came up with words to describe those situations and things for which no word yet existed, e.g.:

Cromarty (n.): The brittle sludge which clings to the top of ketchup bottles and plastic tomatoes in nasty cafés.

Dalmilling (ptcl. vb.): Continually making small talk to someone who is trying to read a book.

Which brings me to what prompted this pompous post: When trying to explain the steps involved in using a computer program, unbearable frustration makes you want to just take over and do it yourself. For this, a workmate invented the word ‘mouseturbation’.

a man of vision

2011-11-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

Some favourite bits [Fit the Second - The Bellman's Speech] from a favourite work [The Hunting of the Snark] from a favourite author [Lewis Carroll]:

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies--
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity, too! One could see he was wise,
The moment one looked in his face!

The Bellman

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
"They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best--
A perfect and absolute blank!"

The Map

This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out
That the Captain they trusted so well
Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,
And that was to tingle his bell.

----ooo000ooo---

all saints day

2011-10-31T06:50:00.000-07:00

It’s official: The Other has been having fun for 23360 days now [plus a couple of Feb 29s]

Happy Birthday!