Published The Advocate, April 18, 2006
BEFORE I go let me leave you with three things that are not quite right about Tasmania. EDUCATION: Parents want the best for their children. Most people will make sacrifices to give their kids the best education they can afford. They do not want their kids to suffer unemployment and poverty. Yet Tasmanians are less well educated than other Australians, which helps to explain why Tassie wages are lower than the national average. Student scores for reading, maths and problem are the worst of the States; 44 per cent of Tasmanians do not finish Year 12 compared to the national average of 32 per cent. The kids are not dummies. They have the same innate abilities as the rest of Australian kids; indeed, at primary school, many of their performance scores are above the national average. And then it all falls in a hole. I blame the two-tier school leaver system, where some high schools finish at Year 10 and some at Year 12. It creates a dumbing-down mindset for the Year 10 mob; the expectation that Year 10 is when you finish school. There are plans afoot to use technology such as video conferencing to bring Year 11-12 college courses to all high schools. Embrace them. Believe in the power of education for the sake of your kids’ future. There is no bigger issue in Tasmania. PLANNING: The planning approval process is a joke. Councils act as the promoter of private projects, even to the extent of contributing council resources to help get the plans off the drawing board, and then change hats to sit as a supposedly independent planning authority to consider those same plans. And expect people to take the process seriously. There is no greater potential conflict of interest in local government. Mark my words, one day a thwarted developer is going to sue a council for millions in damages. The planning system needs an independent Development Assessment Committee attached to each council, comprising a mix of councillors and outside experts. JUSTICE: A jury trial is the cornerstone of the criminal justice system. Twelve fair-minded people are chosen to sit in judgment of the accused. To select a jury requires a filtering process intended to produce a final group of people who have no personal knowledge of, or bias for or against, the defendant. That’s not easy to achieve in the North-West where the community is small enough for everyone to know everyone else’s business. I am not saying the close-knit family and community networks have skewed any verdicts but Burnie jury decisions are notoriously unpredictable. There you go, another mainlander giving unwanted advice. There’s the ferry now. My editorship of The Advocate has run its course, as have these Saturday columns. Next week, this space will be occupied by former MLC Tony Fletcher, who did such a fine job covering the recent State election. It’s been a privilege. Thank you.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Published The Advocate, April 1, 2006
DAYLIGHT saving ends this weekend and not before time. We’ve been getting out of bed in darkness for weeks. The sleeping dog cannot figure it out. The dawn chorus of birds starts up as you leave for work. I have been feeling unusually lethargic. My brain thinks it should still be dead to the world when the clock is demanding I get up in the dark. Daylight Saving Time lasted an extra week this year to accommodate the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and to keep us in sync with Victoria. Sounds like an April Fool’s Day trick. Farmers have always opposed daylight saving. Dairy farmers have to milk the cows an hour earlier to catch the milk truck an hour earlier; hired labour arrives at work too early when the crops are still dewy, and leave too early when there is still daylight left to work. I read recently where our European ancestors never expected to sleep the night through. Their night was divided into a first sleep and a second sleep; in the early hours they awoke in the fire glow: some meditated, some prayed, some talked and no doubt some made love. Then they went back to sleep. For us, we begin to fret if we don’t sleep a straight eight hours. Which is why so many people use sleeping pills to get what they consider to be a good night’s sleep when they are actually mucking up their natural sleep patterns. My first sleep never lasts more than five hours. Then I get up and do stuff, read or whatever. Sometimes I get a second sleep, though often not. Some researchers suggest we should be allowed to sleep within our internal rhythms to lead a long, healthy life. Tell it to the boss next time you are late for work. The same research says an undisturbed deep sleep at the start of the night – the adage being an hour’s sleep before midnight is worth two hours after it – is essential for learning and to make us work more efficient. The problem is my second sleep wants to kick-in at 9am and then I’m looking for a nanna nap by mid-afternoon. The southern Europeans have perfected their sleep patterns into a lifestyle. They arise late, open their shops around 10 o’clock, then close for lunch and take afternoon kips. The Spanish call it siesta; in Greece it’s called ypnos, or sleep time. Greek banks close at lunchtime and re-open at 4pm – if you are very lucky. Then the Greeks eat and drink all night, and wonder why they need to sleep all day. Studies have shown that from childhood to adolescence, the time we go to bed and get up becomes later and later, peaking at the age of 20 – when my son seemed to turn into a Greek – and then becomes earlier again. Tonight at 2am, between your first and second sleeps, put the clock back an hour and return the night to where it belongs.
DAYLIGHT saving ends this weekend and not before time. We’ve been getting out of bed in darkness for weeks. The sleeping dog cannot figure it out. The dawn chorus of birds starts up as you leave for work. I have been feeling unusually lethargic. My brain thinks it should still be dead to the world when the clock is demanding I get up in the dark. Daylight Saving Time lasted an extra week this year to accommodate the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and to keep us in sync with Victoria. Sounds like an April Fool’s Day trick. Farmers have always opposed daylight saving. Dairy farmers have to milk the cows an hour earlier to catch the milk truck an hour earlier; hired labour arrives at work too early when the crops are still dewy, and leave too early when there is still daylight left to work. I read recently where our European ancestors never expected to sleep the night through. Their night was divided into a first sleep and a second sleep; in the early hours they awoke in the fire glow: some meditated, some prayed, some talked and no doubt some made love. Then they went back to sleep. For us, we begin to fret if we don’t sleep a straight eight hours. Which is why so many people use sleeping pills to get what they consider to be a good night’s sleep when they are actually mucking up their natural sleep patterns. My first sleep never lasts more than five hours. Then I get up and do stuff, read or whatever. Sometimes I get a second sleep, though often not. Some researchers suggest we should be allowed to sleep within our internal rhythms to lead a long, healthy life. Tell it to the boss next time you are late for work. The same research says an undisturbed deep sleep at the start of the night – the adage being an hour’s sleep before midnight is worth two hours after it – is essential for learning and to make us work more efficient. The problem is my second sleep wants to kick-in at 9am and then I’m looking for a nanna nap by mid-afternoon. The southern Europeans have perfected their sleep patterns into a lifestyle. They arise late, open their shops around 10 o’clock, then close for lunch and take afternoon kips. The Spanish call it siesta; in Greece it’s called ypnos, or sleep time. Greek banks close at lunchtime and re-open at 4pm – if you are very lucky. Then the Greeks eat and drink all night, and wonder why they need to sleep all day. Studies have shown that from childhood to adolescence, the time we go to bed and get up becomes later and later, peaking at the age of 20 – when my son seemed to turn into a Greek – and then becomes earlier again. Tonight at 2am, between your first and second sleeps, put the clock back an hour and return the night to where it belongs.
Friday, March 24, 2006
Pubished The Advocate, March 24, 2006
I HAVE a mate Bill, who is 79, and he has a mate Harry, who is 80. Bill is an author and Harry is an ex-teacher. I know Bill personally and have a sense of Harry through Bill’s anecdotes about him. Boyhood friends, Bill migrated to Australia 38 years ago – he describes himself now as a 'Possie', for Pom-Aussie – while Harry remained in England. Though apart for all those years, Bill says their lives have run in parallel. In countless coincidences, starting with their mothers sharing the same birth date, the same kinds of events and mishaps have occurred to them through the years. I will not bother listing all the overlaps but the parallels include the deaths of their wives in the same year and developing similar health ailments. Both have failing eyesight. In other respects they have their differences. Bill is an old socialist and Harry is a Liberal Democrat. Bill talks at 1000km/minute in a language that is long-winded and old-fashioned. When his eyes went on him and he lost his driver’s licence, Bill spoke of 'adopting a bicycle as my primary means of locomotion'. His everyday language is peppered with such roundabouts. Harry deliberately mispronounces certain words. For ‘schedule’ he says ‘schoodle’, so Bill tells me. Harry apparently uses so many of these invented words that he speaks in an idiosyncratic language of his own. Together the old pals recently spent a month walking through France and Italy, following in the steps of Hilaire Belloc, as you do when you are elderly and have poor eyesight. Belloc walked the route in the 1890s musing on the meaning of life and produced a book of the trip, and Bill wanted to do the same. Bill being Bill, before they left, 'every possibility had to be taken into proper account to guard against untoward eventualities,' including the possibility that he and Harry might find they did not get on after spending so long apart. They reached a pact: Should one do or say anything that irritated the other, rather than leave it to fester and spoil the trip, he should make the complaint known. This possibly is also the secret of a long marriage. Or not. After a couple of days on the road, Bill noticed Harry was unusually quiet and asked if anything was wrong? Harry said he was offended by Bill’s casual use of the F-word. Bill, a former merchant navy seaman and journo, agreed not to utter the effing word for the rest of the trip. At the end of a hot and tiring day, they were struggling to reach an Italian village atop a steep cliff. Exhausted and exasperated at not finding their hotel around each new corner and the one after that – in the fading light with not a good eye between them – they began to worry if they were in the wrong village. Onwards and upwards they struggled and after climbing 452 steps – yes, of course Bill counted them – Harry turned to him. 'Bill.' 'Harry?' 'Permission granted.'
I HAVE a mate Bill, who is 79, and he has a mate Harry, who is 80. Bill is an author and Harry is an ex-teacher. I know Bill personally and have a sense of Harry through Bill’s anecdotes about him. Boyhood friends, Bill migrated to Australia 38 years ago – he describes himself now as a 'Possie', for Pom-Aussie – while Harry remained in England. Though apart for all those years, Bill says their lives have run in parallel. In countless coincidences, starting with their mothers sharing the same birth date, the same kinds of events and mishaps have occurred to them through the years. I will not bother listing all the overlaps but the parallels include the deaths of their wives in the same year and developing similar health ailments. Both have failing eyesight. In other respects they have their differences. Bill is an old socialist and Harry is a Liberal Democrat. Bill talks at 1000km/minute in a language that is long-winded and old-fashioned. When his eyes went on him and he lost his driver’s licence, Bill spoke of 'adopting a bicycle as my primary means of locomotion'. His everyday language is peppered with such roundabouts. Harry deliberately mispronounces certain words. For ‘schedule’ he says ‘schoodle’, so Bill tells me. Harry apparently uses so many of these invented words that he speaks in an idiosyncratic language of his own. Together the old pals recently spent a month walking through France and Italy, following in the steps of Hilaire Belloc, as you do when you are elderly and have poor eyesight. Belloc walked the route in the 1890s musing on the meaning of life and produced a book of the trip, and Bill wanted to do the same. Bill being Bill, before they left, 'every possibility had to be taken into proper account to guard against untoward eventualities,' including the possibility that he and Harry might find they did not get on after spending so long apart. They reached a pact: Should one do or say anything that irritated the other, rather than leave it to fester and spoil the trip, he should make the complaint known. This possibly is also the secret of a long marriage. Or not. After a couple of days on the road, Bill noticed Harry was unusually quiet and asked if anything was wrong? Harry said he was offended by Bill’s casual use of the F-word. Bill, a former merchant navy seaman and journo, agreed not to utter the effing word for the rest of the trip. At the end of a hot and tiring day, they were struggling to reach an Italian village atop a steep cliff. Exhausted and exasperated at not finding their hotel around each new corner and the one after that – in the fading light with not a good eye between them – they began to worry if they were in the wrong village. Onwards and upwards they struggled and after climbing 452 steps – yes, of course Bill counted them – Harry turned to him. 'Bill.' 'Harry?' 'Permission granted.'
Friday, March 17, 2006
Published The Advocate, March 18, 2006
A DAY sailing from Melbourne on the Spirit ferry - I forgot to check which one - is a classic case of having nothing to do and all day to do it in. There cannot be many more relaxing journeys if you are not in a hurry. One of life's little pleasures, time suspended in the gentle swaying of the boat, and I love the taste of sea salt on the ship's railings. Ten hours on Bass Strait surrounded by grey nomads: People in physical decline, veined and blotched, wearing socks and sandals and more spectacles than a Salvation Army convention. I see in them signs of my own near future. Ah, we all were beautiful once. Rust spots also mottled the white painted railings. Within 15 minutes of leaving Station Pier, one group of pensioners hurried to the front of the ship, not wanting to miss The Rip - still two hours away. I always make for the smokers' deck at the rear, not to smoke but because it provides the best views and is a good place to observe suspicious characters, à la Hercule Poirot. Among them, a dark-bearded man clung to a moulded black security case, reinforced with metal bands and two combination locks. It had a sticker: "Bundy made me do it." I hoped Devonport Security was on extreme alert. The smokers' area is located on the deck below the oily exhaust fumes of the funnels. Here gathers a dying breed, sucking the life out of their ciggies. How are they still alive? I thought smokers of their vintage surely would all be dead by now. Four men stood side by side, smoking, each with a foot resting on the bottom railing, jeans stretched below overhanging beer guts and Swiss Army knives attached to their straining belts. Their wives were trying to figure out a digital camera to take a photograph of the ship's wake, a vein of porphyry green quartzite in a slab of bluestone. The Spirit is not a vessel for young trophy wives. But other women, wearing smug little victory smiles, I guessed to be newly widowed or divorced. Their greying hair had suddenly gone blowsy bleach blonde for the first time in their lives. One was wearing a necklace that looked like an iced doughnut on a rope. A couple of sun-fried women, their skin the colour of tanned leather, were chatting in German and writing postcards home. Ayers Rock, kangaroos, the usual stuff. What they will remember of Australia are the souvenir shops they visited. Members of the Ulysses motorcycle club were wearing T-shirts boasting they were growing old disgracefully. A woman wore a name badge: "Say hello to June from Mt Isa." Disgracefully naff. In the bar, bikers wearing moulded body armour were comparing trip meter readings. Odd. None of which explains why the Spirit should be a terrorist target. Yet last weekend, berthed at Station Pier, Spirit I was evacuated after the unexplained sighting of a scuba diver below. I cannot help thinking our "terrorist" got the target wrong.
A DAY sailing from Melbourne on the Spirit ferry - I forgot to check which one - is a classic case of having nothing to do and all day to do it in. There cannot be many more relaxing journeys if you are not in a hurry. One of life's little pleasures, time suspended in the gentle swaying of the boat, and I love the taste of sea salt on the ship's railings. Ten hours on Bass Strait surrounded by grey nomads: People in physical decline, veined and blotched, wearing socks and sandals and more spectacles than a Salvation Army convention. I see in them signs of my own near future. Ah, we all were beautiful once. Rust spots also mottled the white painted railings. Within 15 minutes of leaving Station Pier, one group of pensioners hurried to the front of the ship, not wanting to miss The Rip - still two hours away. I always make for the smokers' deck at the rear, not to smoke but because it provides the best views and is a good place to observe suspicious characters, à la Hercule Poirot. Among them, a dark-bearded man clung to a moulded black security case, reinforced with metal bands and two combination locks. It had a sticker: "Bundy made me do it." I hoped Devonport Security was on extreme alert. The smokers' area is located on the deck below the oily exhaust fumes of the funnels. Here gathers a dying breed, sucking the life out of their ciggies. How are they still alive? I thought smokers of their vintage surely would all be dead by now. Four men stood side by side, smoking, each with a foot resting on the bottom railing, jeans stretched below overhanging beer guts and Swiss Army knives attached to their straining belts. Their wives were trying to figure out a digital camera to take a photograph of the ship's wake, a vein of porphyry green quartzite in a slab of bluestone. The Spirit is not a vessel for young trophy wives. But other women, wearing smug little victory smiles, I guessed to be newly widowed or divorced. Their greying hair had suddenly gone blowsy bleach blonde for the first time in their lives. One was wearing a necklace that looked like an iced doughnut on a rope. A couple of sun-fried women, their skin the colour of tanned leather, were chatting in German and writing postcards home. Ayers Rock, kangaroos, the usual stuff. What they will remember of Australia are the souvenir shops they visited. Members of the Ulysses motorcycle club were wearing T-shirts boasting they were growing old disgracefully. A woman wore a name badge: "Say hello to June from Mt Isa." Disgracefully naff. In the bar, bikers wearing moulded body armour were comparing trip meter readings. Odd. None of which explains why the Spirit should be a terrorist target. Yet last weekend, berthed at Station Pier, Spirit I was evacuated after the unexplained sighting of a scuba diver below. I cannot help thinking our "terrorist" got the target wrong.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Published The Advocate, March 18, 2006
IN POLITICS you can be better than your opponent and still be thrown out simply because people are sick of you or your party. In the Tasmanian state election many candidates will be defeated at the hands of a fickle, unkind electorate. Almost certainly, some sitting members will be beaten too. They’re not supposed to take it personally. But they do. It’s hard to keep a stiff upper lip when your bottom lip is trembling and tears are welling in your eyes. Nothing personal? Yeah right. Like having a stake driven through your heart. For some in politics, the pain of defeat is so shattering, they suffer mental breakdowns. I have a fairly high regard for myself but even so I would never go into politics. I already have enough aggravation, thanks. To enter politics you need a strong stomach and a thick hide. Voters are not interested in what’s inside you but in what they can get out of you. And trying to keep your footing on the treacherous political slopes can be as difficult as a one-armed man climbing a rope. I have known some really decent people who went into politics. Some of them have remained friends even after they became captives of their party factions. But there are too many lawyers in Australian parliaments for my liking. It is in the nature of the legal profession to spend most of your time in the company of criminals and then to go into parliament. I have also known many mediocre people to be elected to Parliament. Don’t knock it. They provide a necessary voice for lots of other mediocre people. The question to be resolved at the polls next Saturday is whether Paul Lennon has done enough to get his government unelected. Unelected, because oppositions rarely win elections, governments lose them. It was the former Federal Opposition Leader Billy Snedden who said something like "we didn’t lose, we just didn’t win" after being defeated in a poll. He was correct in the sense that oppositions have nothing to lose. Election outcomes are all or nothing; you win or lose – unless Tasmania’s unusual electoral system pops up a minority government this time. Do Rene Hidding or Peg Putt look likely to form an alternative government? Not together, they don’t, although local politics can produce strange bedfellows. Politics seems much more important in Hobart than it does on the Coast. Hobart is like Canberra. Everyone there seems to be obsessed by politics. Spend too much time there and you begin to think it really is important. But hop in the car and drive back to North-West Tasmania, and the further you are from Hobart, the less important politics seems. The air is cleaner here, too. Anyway, look, I’m not having a crack at politicians. No cheap shots. No finger-pointing. Truth is, none of the candidates has the qualifications for wielding power over the rest of us but that’s what makes democracy such a winner: By the People; For the People.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Published The Advocate March 11, 2006
I HAVE a mate Bill, who is 79, and he has a mate Harry, who is 80. Bill is an author and Harry is an ex-teacher. I know Bill personally and have a sense of Harry through Bill’s anecdotes about him. Boyhood friends, Bill migrated to Australia 38 years ago – he describes himself now as a 'Possie' (Pom-Aussie) – while Harry remained in England. Though apart for all those years, Bill says their lives have run in parallel. In countless coincidences, starting with their mothers sharing the same birth date, the same kinds of events and mishaps have occurred to them through the years. I will not bother listing all the overlaps but the parallels include the deaths of their wives in the same year and developing similar health ailments. Both have failing eyesight, for example. In other respects they have their differences. Bill is an old socialist and Harry is a Liberal Democrat. Bill talks at 1000km/minute in a language that is long-winded and old-fashioned. When his eyes went on him and he lost his driver’s licence, Bill spoke of 'adopting a bicycle as my primary means of locomotion'. His everyday language is peppered with such roundabouts. Harry deliberately mispronounces certain words. For ‘schedule’ he says ‘schoodle’, so Bill tells me. Harry apparently uses so many of these invented words that he speaks in an idiosyncratic language of his own. Together the old pals recently spent a month walking through France and Italy, following in the steps of Hilaire Belloc, as you do when you are elderly and have poor eyesight. Belloc walked the route in the 1890s musing on the meaning of life and produced a book of the trip; and Bill wanted to do the same. Bill being Bill, before they left, 'every possibility had to be taken into proper account to guard against untoward eventualities,' including the possibility that he and Harry might not get on after spending so long apart. They reached a pact: Should one do or say anything that irritated the other, rather than leave it to fester and spoil the trip, he should make the complaint known. This possibly is also the secret of a long marriage. Or not. After a couple of days on the road, Bill noticed Harry was unusually quiet and he asked if anything was wrong. Harry said he was offended by Bill’s casual use of the F-word. Bill, a former merchant navy seaman and journo, agreed not to utter the effing word for the rest of the trip. At the end of a hot and tiring day, they were struggling to reach an Italian village atop a steep cliff. Exhausted and exasperated at not finding their hotel around each new corner and the one after that – in the fading light with not a good eye between them – they began to worry if they were in the wrong village. Onwards and upwards they struggled and after climbing 452 steps – yes, Bill counted them – Harry turned to him. 'Bill.' 'Harry?' 'Permission granted.'
I HAVE a mate Bill, who is 79, and he has a mate Harry, who is 80. Bill is an author and Harry is an ex-teacher. I know Bill personally and have a sense of Harry through Bill’s anecdotes about him. Boyhood friends, Bill migrated to Australia 38 years ago – he describes himself now as a 'Possie' (Pom-Aussie) – while Harry remained in England. Though apart for all those years, Bill says their lives have run in parallel. In countless coincidences, starting with their mothers sharing the same birth date, the same kinds of events and mishaps have occurred to them through the years. I will not bother listing all the overlaps but the parallels include the deaths of their wives in the same year and developing similar health ailments. Both have failing eyesight, for example. In other respects they have their differences. Bill is an old socialist and Harry is a Liberal Democrat. Bill talks at 1000km/minute in a language that is long-winded and old-fashioned. When his eyes went on him and he lost his driver’s licence, Bill spoke of 'adopting a bicycle as my primary means of locomotion'. His everyday language is peppered with such roundabouts. Harry deliberately mispronounces certain words. For ‘schedule’ he says ‘schoodle’, so Bill tells me. Harry apparently uses so many of these invented words that he speaks in an idiosyncratic language of his own. Together the old pals recently spent a month walking through France and Italy, following in the steps of Hilaire Belloc, as you do when you are elderly and have poor eyesight. Belloc walked the route in the 1890s musing on the meaning of life and produced a book of the trip; and Bill wanted to do the same. Bill being Bill, before they left, 'every possibility had to be taken into proper account to guard against untoward eventualities,' including the possibility that he and Harry might not get on after spending so long apart. They reached a pact: Should one do or say anything that irritated the other, rather than leave it to fester and spoil the trip, he should make the complaint known. This possibly is also the secret of a long marriage. Or not. After a couple of days on the road, Bill noticed Harry was unusually quiet and he asked if anything was wrong. Harry said he was offended by Bill’s casual use of the F-word. Bill, a former merchant navy seaman and journo, agreed not to utter the effing word for the rest of the trip. At the end of a hot and tiring day, they were struggling to reach an Italian village atop a steep cliff. Exhausted and exasperated at not finding their hotel around each new corner and the one after that – in the fading light with not a good eye between them – they began to worry if they were in the wrong village. Onwards and upwards they struggled and after climbing 452 steps – yes, Bill counted them – Harry turned to him. 'Bill.' 'Harry?' 'Permission granted.'
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Published The Advocate, March 4, 2006
AT BURNIE Airport, I was watching two mature women, wearing hiking boots and parkas, reading The Advocate, bless them, while their husbands put their baggage through the check-in. Out of the blue, one of the hubbies called out: 'Sick of walking; sick of ferns!' There you go – the whole Tasmanian trekking experience summarised in one throwaway line. What did he expect? There is no pleasing some people. At my mother’s place in Geelong later the same day, I was reading a story in her local paper about the owner of a photo shop who was put in a 12 month good behaviour bond for assaulting an elderly customer. The customer had complained that his photos had been printed out of focus. Since film processing now is automatic, we can safely assume if the photos were out of focus, the fault was in the hands of the photographer, not the processor. The owner said as much. The grumpy old man said he wasn’t paying. The owner cracked. He flicked the photos across the floor and when the customer bent over to pick them up, the owner whacked him over the head. And then whacked him again for good measure. The owner, in his early 50s, had no prior convictions. His lawyer said he realised now he could not cope with difficult customers and had sold the photo shop. There really is no excuse for whacking anyone but, boy, you can easily sympathise with the owner’s frustration. Basil Fawlty would understand anyway. I read out the story to my mother while she was cooking tea, expecting her to agree the shop owner had a reasonable defence on the grounds of provocation. She thought no such thing. She said service standards nowadays were appalling everywhere and, not for the first time that evening, harped on about her little Peugeot. The car had a rattle. She took it to the garage where she always took it, expecting immediate service and the usual cup of tea. The garage had since changed hands. There was no cup of tea and mum was told to make a service booking, like everyone else. Also, the computer had crashed and her service record had disappeared. She was ropeable. The previous owner had sold the business because he was dying of cancer but she still intended to ring his home and give him a piece of her mind. Sigh. Yet, on the same day as the car tizz, a computer glitch at her doctor’s surgery meant she could not obtain a prescription for blood pressure tablets, which she needs. That was different, she said. Before I left Geelong, I was walking past a café and on a chalkboard out front was the message: 'Do not let yesterday use up too much of today.' I liked that and had a coffee there instead of in the café next door. I have returned to work with an idea that my job is a rare treat, which attracts only goodwill and understanding. Try not to spoil it.
AT BURNIE Airport, I was watching two mature women, wearing hiking boots and parkas, reading The Advocate, bless them, while their husbands put their baggage through the check-in. Out of the blue, one of the hubbies called out: 'Sick of walking; sick of ferns!' There you go – the whole Tasmanian trekking experience summarised in one throwaway line. What did he expect? There is no pleasing some people. At my mother’s place in Geelong later the same day, I was reading a story in her local paper about the owner of a photo shop who was put in a 12 month good behaviour bond for assaulting an elderly customer. The customer had complained that his photos had been printed out of focus. Since film processing now is automatic, we can safely assume if the photos were out of focus, the fault was in the hands of the photographer, not the processor. The owner said as much. The grumpy old man said he wasn’t paying. The owner cracked. He flicked the photos across the floor and when the customer bent over to pick them up, the owner whacked him over the head. And then whacked him again for good measure. The owner, in his early 50s, had no prior convictions. His lawyer said he realised now he could not cope with difficult customers and had sold the photo shop. There really is no excuse for whacking anyone but, boy, you can easily sympathise with the owner’s frustration. Basil Fawlty would understand anyway. I read out the story to my mother while she was cooking tea, expecting her to agree the shop owner had a reasonable defence on the grounds of provocation. She thought no such thing. She said service standards nowadays were appalling everywhere and, not for the first time that evening, harped on about her little Peugeot. The car had a rattle. She took it to the garage where she always took it, expecting immediate service and the usual cup of tea. The garage had since changed hands. There was no cup of tea and mum was told to make a service booking, like everyone else. Also, the computer had crashed and her service record had disappeared. She was ropeable. The previous owner had sold the business because he was dying of cancer but she still intended to ring his home and give him a piece of her mind. Sigh. Yet, on the same day as the car tizz, a computer glitch at her doctor’s surgery meant she could not obtain a prescription for blood pressure tablets, which she needs. That was different, she said. Before I left Geelong, I was walking past a café and on a chalkboard out front was the message: 'Do not let yesterday use up too much of today.' I liked that and had a coffee there instead of in the café next door. I have returned to work with an idea that my job is a rare treat, which attracts only goodwill and understanding. Try not to spoil it.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Published The Advocate, February 25, 2006
PART of the experience of shopping with my mother was the dressing up as if you were going to church – genuflecting at the holy altar of retail hallelujah. It was never pleasant. Part of it was the ‘Sunday best’ effort but mostly it was the tension of going out in public with your mum, and vice versa. She would smear her spittle on my unruly hair as if my appearance was a conspiracy against her sense of style and decorum, and would issue warnings not to shame the family name or she would disown me. My mother is nearly 80 now and I thought the trauma had passed. Recently I went with her while she bought a pair of shoes. After an hour of trying on different pairs, she departed without buying any. And it all came flooding back. Aaaargh. For my dad, a hardware store was seventh heaven. He would spend hours wandering the aisles to see what’s what, and often came away with a new dooverwacky or a light globe. Our pantry had a special shelf for light globes. The only memory I have of him buying clothes was the day he came home with two white Viscostatic shirts, which he said were wash’n’wear to save mum the ironing. The shirts quickly yellowed with sun and underarm sweat although we lived in Geelong, not noted for its sub-tropical heat. Dad was never again allowed to buy shirts by himself. Tipster Donkey Dan – 'the pensioner’s friend' – loves shopping. He knows the comparative prices of Bismark potatoes across the Coast; he actually reads the can labels to find the country of origin; and he promises to find the best price on any item, guaranteed, even if it costs him $5 in petrol to get there. But even DD draws the line at buying clothes for his wife. He once bought her tennis shoes, which had to be returned because they were the wrong size, wrong colour, wrong pattern – tick the box – and he learned from it. For their recent wedding anniversary, he bought her a lingerie voucher and was smothered in love and kisses. Hmm, tennis shoes and lingerie – does that sound like a fetish to you? Anyway, no man in his right mind would dare buy clothes for a woman. Why put yourself at physical risk in knowing she is now a size 16, no longer a 10, which apparently was declared a state secret some years ago; or exposing the lie that size 16 is not the same in all brands; or choosing a colour that does not match her mood at a given moment? Yet women insist on buying clothes for their menfolk. Shirts the colour of toilet disinfectant, with sleeves too long, and pink ties – pink! – that you are expected to wear in public. Why do they do it? It must be a gender thing. I have a photo of an elderly Aboriginal woman in the Outback, wearing a T-shirt printed with: I Shop Therefore I Am.
PART of the experience of shopping with my mother was the dressing up as if you were going to church – genuflecting at the holy altar of retail hallelujah. It was never pleasant. Part of it was the ‘Sunday best’ effort but mostly it was the tension of going out in public with your mum, and vice versa. She would smear her spittle on my unruly hair as if my appearance was a conspiracy against her sense of style and decorum, and would issue warnings not to shame the family name or she would disown me. My mother is nearly 80 now and I thought the trauma had passed. Recently I went with her while she bought a pair of shoes. After an hour of trying on different pairs, she departed without buying any. And it all came flooding back. Aaaargh. For my dad, a hardware store was seventh heaven. He would spend hours wandering the aisles to see what’s what, and often came away with a new dooverwacky or a light globe. Our pantry had a special shelf for light globes. The only memory I have of him buying clothes was the day he came home with two white Viscostatic shirts, which he said were wash’n’wear to save mum the ironing. The shirts quickly yellowed with sun and underarm sweat although we lived in Geelong, not noted for its sub-tropical heat. Dad was never again allowed to buy shirts by himself. Tipster Donkey Dan – 'the pensioner’s friend' – loves shopping. He knows the comparative prices of Bismark potatoes across the Coast; he actually reads the can labels to find the country of origin; and he promises to find the best price on any item, guaranteed, even if it costs him $5 in petrol to get there. But even DD draws the line at buying clothes for his wife. He once bought her tennis shoes, which had to be returned because they were the wrong size, wrong colour, wrong pattern – tick the box – and he learned from it. For their recent wedding anniversary, he bought her a lingerie voucher and was smothered in love and kisses. Hmm, tennis shoes and lingerie – does that sound like a fetish to you? Anyway, no man in his right mind would dare buy clothes for a woman. Why put yourself at physical risk in knowing she is now a size 16, no longer a 10, which apparently was declared a state secret some years ago; or exposing the lie that size 16 is not the same in all brands; or choosing a colour that does not match her mood at a given moment? Yet women insist on buying clothes for their menfolk. Shirts the colour of toilet disinfectant, with sleeves too long, and pink ties – pink! – that you are expected to wear in public. Why do they do it? It must be a gender thing. I have a photo of an elderly Aboriginal woman in the Outback, wearing a T-shirt printed with: I Shop Therefore I Am.
Friday, February 10, 2006
Published The Advocate, February 18, 2006
SO MANY farmers’ markets pop up each weekend it makes me wonder if anyone is left behind to look after the farm. Some markets offer not much beyond a couple of trestle tables loaded with potted shrubs and tubs of honey, along with the obligatory tea urn. It doesn’t matter; the social outing is what counts. At the other extreme is Hobart’s Salamanca Market. You’d be hard-put to find a dinky-di farmer at Salamanca. More likely, you will be knocked down by the crush of people driving 4WDs with National Parks passes stuck on the windscreens. First up, I fell into step behind a couple of muffin-top teenagers heading roly-poly in the direction of the food van. Forget the macrobiotic salad, they bought hotdogs and I had a bag of chips. It soon started to rain but was too crowded to raise an umbrella – except for the mum holding one over her tiny-tot daughter while she busked with a violin. Cute as a button and, of course, I had forgotten the camera. Any tourist suffering a bout of affluenza headed straight for the Huon pine stalls. So many bread boards and chopping blocks, is there any Huon pine left in the wilderness? A CD was playing music evoking a forest breathing or the tinkling of glacial ice. Further along came the sound of a didgeridoo and bongo combo. I kept my distance. I also avoided the stalls selling magical crystals, bottles of life essences and smelly soap. Get too close and you run the risk of being entranced by the aura and later discover you have bought something completely useless. Also, those stalls tend to attract a certain ‘type’ wearing tangled love beads and matted hair: so earnest, so indignant, so suffragette. So scary. Flowing between the two rows of stalls there was an endless daisy chain of mums with baby strollers the size of RAV4 vehicles. Just one had to stop to checkout a stall and the whole market went into gridlock. Imagine this happening a hundred times an hour, shuffling along and going almost nowhere, and you can understand why I made a break for it and slipped sideways behind the stalls. And bumped into a trio of Goths wearing Dracula capes, in their horror makeup and lank black hair. Their boyfriends had so much metalwork in their faces they looked like hood ornaments. They had taken a great deal of care to appear ‘alternative’, to declare their individuality. Yet they all looked the same. Like bats, Goths could not survive alone. Off to one side a mime in frosted bronze paint was pretending to be a statue. Whenever someone threw money into his plastic bucket, he moved in a slow, mechanical sort of way. The best part of the day was the boy, gawping and not watching where he was going, who tripped over the mime’s bucket and coins spilled everywhere. I have never seen a frozen mime move so fast. You wouldn’t be dead for quids.
SO MANY farmers’ markets pop up each weekend it makes me wonder if anyone is left behind to look after the farm. Some markets offer not much beyond a couple of trestle tables loaded with potted shrubs and tubs of honey, along with the obligatory tea urn. It doesn’t matter; the social outing is what counts. At the other extreme is Hobart’s Salamanca Market. You’d be hard-put to find a dinky-di farmer at Salamanca. More likely, you will be knocked down by the crush of people driving 4WDs with National Parks passes stuck on the windscreens. First up, I fell into step behind a couple of muffin-top teenagers heading roly-poly in the direction of the food van. Forget the macrobiotic salad, they bought hotdogs and I had a bag of chips. It soon started to rain but was too crowded to raise an umbrella – except for the mum holding one over her tiny-tot daughter while she busked with a violin. Cute as a button and, of course, I had forgotten the camera. Any tourist suffering a bout of affluenza headed straight for the Huon pine stalls. So many bread boards and chopping blocks, is there any Huon pine left in the wilderness? A CD was playing music evoking a forest breathing or the tinkling of glacial ice. Further along came the sound of a didgeridoo and bongo combo. I kept my distance. I also avoided the stalls selling magical crystals, bottles of life essences and smelly soap. Get too close and you run the risk of being entranced by the aura and later discover you have bought something completely useless. Also, those stalls tend to attract a certain ‘type’ wearing tangled love beads and matted hair: so earnest, so indignant, so suffragette. So scary. Flowing between the two rows of stalls there was an endless daisy chain of mums with baby strollers the size of RAV4 vehicles. Just one had to stop to checkout a stall and the whole market went into gridlock. Imagine this happening a hundred times an hour, shuffling along and going almost nowhere, and you can understand why I made a break for it and slipped sideways behind the stalls. And bumped into a trio of Goths wearing Dracula capes, in their horror makeup and lank black hair. Their boyfriends had so much metalwork in their faces they looked like hood ornaments. They had taken a great deal of care to appear ‘alternative’, to declare their individuality. Yet they all looked the same. Like bats, Goths could not survive alone. Off to one side a mime in frosted bronze paint was pretending to be a statue. Whenever someone threw money into his plastic bucket, he moved in a slow, mechanical sort of way. The best part of the day was the boy, gawping and not watching where he was going, who tripped over the mime’s bucket and coins spilled everywhere. I have never seen a frozen mime move so fast. You wouldn’t be dead for quids.
Published The Advocate, February 11, 2006
IN A week when it was confirmed the food on our plates was becoming expensive also came news of a retired English civil servant Arthur Boyt, who was compiling a book of roadkill recipes. Starting with a pheasant when he was 13, Mr Boyt had since scraped all manner of creatures from the bitumen and eaten them: otter, porcupine, weasel, rat, cat and bat, which he said tasted like grey squirrel, and a Labrador that reminded him of lamb. His all-time favourite, though, was a badger sandwich. By now the warm and fuzzy animal lovers among us will be passing out, as will the Hygiene Nazis, and I admit to feeling a little queasy myself. But Mr Boyt insists any roadkill, even an animal that has been dead for a while and gone green, can be eaten if properly cooked – free, tasty and nutritious. Yum. He should pay Tasmania a visit. Spoiled for choice, we are, when it comes to roadkill. He would find enough dead possum per kilometre to open a BYO restaurant; he could also feast nightly on Tassie devil; and have a few mates around at the weekend for barbecued plover. The squeamish need to ask themselves what’s their problem: the thought of eating roadkill or the type of creature? Both, in all likelihood, but it depends what you grew up eating. Many people would baulk at eating a Labrador, but not in Asia; the French eat horse meat; and cute guinea pigs are roasted in South America. On the Coast, we like our tucker to be as fresh as possible and we’re not too picky about its origins. If it runs, flies or swims, it’s all fair game – legal or not. Old-timers can remember the days when large garfish used to be trapped in certain rock pools off West Park when the tide went out. All you needed was a stick to flick them out of the water, so I am told, although I don’t believe it. The fishing holes disappeared under landfill and tears well in my eyes. I have eaten plenty of native fauna such as kangaroo, emu and pie floater – none of them as roadkill although the floater’s green pea soup and lashings of vinegar, tomato sauce and black pepper looked like a fatality. Last week, getting among the Coastal fauna, I ate my first mutton bird after screwing up my nose for a long time at the thought of eating what people had told me was an oily rag that tasted like fish. It had been barbecued by a mate so there was hardly any oil left and, yes, it did taste of anchovies, only milder. It went down a treat with a beer, especially after an entrée of whitebait patties. I had reservations about the whitebait having possibly been poached outside the legal netting season until my supplier guaranteed it was roadkill he had chanced on, so that was alright then. Roadkill whitebait and barbecued mutton bird – what could be more Coastal than that?
IN A week when it was confirmed the food on our plates was becoming expensive also came news of a retired English civil servant Arthur Boyt, who was compiling a book of roadkill recipes. Starting with a pheasant when he was 13, Mr Boyt had since scraped all manner of creatures from the bitumen and eaten them: otter, porcupine, weasel, rat, cat and bat, which he said tasted like grey squirrel, and a Labrador that reminded him of lamb. His all-time favourite, though, was a badger sandwich. By now the warm and fuzzy animal lovers among us will be passing out, as will the Hygiene Nazis, and I admit to feeling a little queasy myself. But Mr Boyt insists any roadkill, even an animal that has been dead for a while and gone green, can be eaten if properly cooked – free, tasty and nutritious. Yum. He should pay Tasmania a visit. Spoiled for choice, we are, when it comes to roadkill. He would find enough dead possum per kilometre to open a BYO restaurant; he could also feast nightly on Tassie devil; and have a few mates around at the weekend for barbecued plover. The squeamish need to ask themselves what’s their problem: the thought of eating roadkill or the type of creature? Both, in all likelihood, but it depends what you grew up eating. Many people would baulk at eating a Labrador, but not in Asia; the French eat horse meat; and cute guinea pigs are roasted in South America. On the Coast, we like our tucker to be as fresh as possible and we’re not too picky about its origins. If it runs, flies or swims, it’s all fair game – legal or not. Old-timers can remember the days when large garfish used to be trapped in certain rock pools off West Park when the tide went out. All you needed was a stick to flick them out of the water, so I am told, although I don’t believe it. The fishing holes disappeared under landfill and tears well in my eyes. I have eaten plenty of native fauna such as kangaroo, emu and pie floater – none of them as roadkill although the floater’s green pea soup and lashings of vinegar, tomato sauce and black pepper looked like a fatality. Last week, getting among the Coastal fauna, I ate my first mutton bird after screwing up my nose for a long time at the thought of eating what people had told me was an oily rag that tasted like fish. It had been barbecued by a mate so there was hardly any oil left and, yes, it did taste of anchovies, only milder. It went down a treat with a beer, especially after an entrée of whitebait patties. I had reservations about the whitebait having possibly been poached outside the legal netting season until my supplier guaranteed it was roadkill he had chanced on, so that was alright then. Roadkill whitebait and barbecued mutton bird – what could be more Coastal than that?
Friday, February 03, 2006
Published The Advocate, February 4, 2006
A FRIEND rang specially to say it was bucketing rain in Adelaide; I might have told her rain was not uncommon in Tasmania but it would have spoiled her day. Adelaide had just endured three consecutive 40-plus degree days, so the rain was welcome. The city is like a furnace when the hot wind blasts in from the desert, and between the Melbourne Cup and Anzac Day you can count on one hand the number of rainy days there. Coasters can only imagine what it’s like. It reached 27 degrees on the Coast a couple of Sundays ago and people were carrying on as if it were the End Time. Everyone assured me 27 here was like 37 in Adelaide. Actually it’s not, it’s just like 27 – here or in Adelaide. They quickly changed tack and waffled on about the effect of humidity here but I was no longer listening. I have grown used to the Coastal weather after moving from Adelaide. The wind drove me crazy for months and then one day I realised there was no wind, and it began to rain. But summer here is special – real Goldilocks weather. An aside: 170 years ago tomorrow, February 5, 1836, the English naturalist Charles Darwin sailed into Hobart Town aboard the Beagle on his five year voyage around the world. He made several inland trips to study the geology and departed 12 days later to eventually write The Origin of Species, which divided 19th century society for and against the theory of evolution. And on it goes. There is a Mt Darwin south of Queenstown. Such were the evolutionary passions of Darwin’s time that the mountains around Macquarie Harbour were named after his contemporaries, both pro and con. Those against evolution were given the taller mountain names while the smaller ones were named after Darwin’s supporters. Very Tasmanian, that. But Darwin loved the Tasmanian summer and said were he to live anywhere other than in England, it would be Tasmania. Had he visited Hobart in mid-August when it’s cold enough at night to crystallise the wax in your ears, he might have thought differently. Tourism Tasmania could do a lot worse than to quote Darwin to promote Tassie as a summer escape for hot mainlanders. It is currently doing a lot worse: the ridiculous 'Rejuvenation through Inspiration' advertising campaign aimed at luring tourists from Melbourne and Sydney. For mainlanders who spend a large part of summer locked inside with the blinds drawn and the air conditioner on full-blast, it’s not rejuvenation they desire, it’s a cool change. When it’s 35 degrees in Melbourne, the Coast’s 25 degrees is mighty appealing. I know this by the phone calls from mainland friends and family who watch the Tasmanian weather map with envy. Why not adopt 'Tassie – a Cool Change' as a summer marketing slogan? Or 'Come for a Change'; or 'Breath of Fresh Air'; or 'Refresh your senses'; or simply 'Chill Out'. Anything but the insipid 'Rejuvenation through Inspiration'.
A FRIEND rang specially to say it was bucketing rain in Adelaide; I might have told her rain was not uncommon in Tasmania but it would have spoiled her day. Adelaide had just endured three consecutive 40-plus degree days, so the rain was welcome. The city is like a furnace when the hot wind blasts in from the desert, and between the Melbourne Cup and Anzac Day you can count on one hand the number of rainy days there. Coasters can only imagine what it’s like. It reached 27 degrees on the Coast a couple of Sundays ago and people were carrying on as if it were the End Time. Everyone assured me 27 here was like 37 in Adelaide. Actually it’s not, it’s just like 27 – here or in Adelaide. They quickly changed tack and waffled on about the effect of humidity here but I was no longer listening. I have grown used to the Coastal weather after moving from Adelaide. The wind drove me crazy for months and then one day I realised there was no wind, and it began to rain. But summer here is special – real Goldilocks weather. An aside: 170 years ago tomorrow, February 5, 1836, the English naturalist Charles Darwin sailed into Hobart Town aboard the Beagle on his five year voyage around the world. He made several inland trips to study the geology and departed 12 days later to eventually write The Origin of Species, which divided 19th century society for and against the theory of evolution. And on it goes. There is a Mt Darwin south of Queenstown. Such were the evolutionary passions of Darwin’s time that the mountains around Macquarie Harbour were named after his contemporaries, both pro and con. Those against evolution were given the taller mountain names while the smaller ones were named after Darwin’s supporters. Very Tasmanian, that. But Darwin loved the Tasmanian summer and said were he to live anywhere other than in England, it would be Tasmania. Had he visited Hobart in mid-August when it’s cold enough at night to crystallise the wax in your ears, he might have thought differently. Tourism Tasmania could do a lot worse than to quote Darwin to promote Tassie as a summer escape for hot mainlanders. It is currently doing a lot worse: the ridiculous 'Rejuvenation through Inspiration' advertising campaign aimed at luring tourists from Melbourne and Sydney. For mainlanders who spend a large part of summer locked inside with the blinds drawn and the air conditioner on full-blast, it’s not rejuvenation they desire, it’s a cool change. When it’s 35 degrees in Melbourne, the Coast’s 25 degrees is mighty appealing. I know this by the phone calls from mainland friends and family who watch the Tasmanian weather map with envy. Why not adopt 'Tassie – a Cool Change' as a summer marketing slogan? Or 'Come for a Change'; or 'Breath of Fresh Air'; or 'Refresh your senses'; or simply 'Chill Out'. Anything but the insipid 'Rejuvenation through Inspiration'.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Published The Advocate, January 28, 2006
Gerry Humphreys died late last year and the memories of my youth came tumbling back. It hardly mattered that no-one else on the Coast had heard of Humphreys or knew he was the lead singer of the 1960s’ Melbourne band, the Loved Ones. It’s my nostalgia. Music has a remarkable power, possibly matched by the sense of smell, to bring rushing back in time and place the age when a particular song filled our lives. The soundtrack of my youth - the Loved Ones and The Kinks - were the first albums I bought on vinyl. As if yesterday, I can remember Humphreys’ screaming Everlovin’ Man on the Top 40. His death prompted me to buy the Loved Ones’ Magic Box album on CD to replace the badly scratched original. And then Santa brought me an iPod. For those over 60, an iPod is a brand of MP3 device for storing and playing your favourite music. I emailed 55 people to ask if anyone knew what the characters M-P-3 meant and five responded: all bar one was under 25 including one female. The older exception was a man in his 30s whose kids keep him abreast of digital technology. They told me MP3 was shorthand for the Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer-3. You didn’t need to know that. Instead, think of how Gillette keeps adding layers of blades to its razors without increasing the size. MP3 technology manages to squeeze 120 songs onto my iPod, which fits snugly inside a clenched fist. It is unlike me to be so up to date with technology. I would have been buying shares in piano rolls just as gramophones were invented, or hoarding bottles of Tipp-Ex correction fluid when computers appeared on the market. I uploaded the best songs from Magic Box onto the iPod and have since accumulated about 40 other tracks from my CD collection, or about two and a half hours’ worth so far. As I grow older I am increasingly affected by songs in a minor key, not to the sobbing stage, but for example the sad and beautiful Irish music sung by Enya always brings me down. So there is no Enya on my iPod but there are lots of bouncy marching songs such as Pleasure and Pain by the Divinyls and, with a copy deadline looming, I am sitting here listening to Friday on my Mind, by The Easybeats, and tapping my foot. Some MP3s can store 20,000 songs and replay them in any order although the pint is beyond me since you cannot possibly live long enough to hear them all. I intend to take the iPod to the grave playing in my ears. It has already come in handy for compiling the music I would like at my funeral rather than risk people who think they know me choosing My Way. There are three songs and the finale is a Van Morrison song that contains the cheery refrain: My momma told me there’d be days like this.
Gerry Humphreys died late last year and the memories of my youth came tumbling back. It hardly mattered that no-one else on the Coast had heard of Humphreys or knew he was the lead singer of the 1960s’ Melbourne band, the Loved Ones. It’s my nostalgia. Music has a remarkable power, possibly matched by the sense of smell, to bring rushing back in time and place the age when a particular song filled our lives. The soundtrack of my youth - the Loved Ones and The Kinks - were the first albums I bought on vinyl. As if yesterday, I can remember Humphreys’ screaming Everlovin’ Man on the Top 40. His death prompted me to buy the Loved Ones’ Magic Box album on CD to replace the badly scratched original. And then Santa brought me an iPod. For those over 60, an iPod is a brand of MP3 device for storing and playing your favourite music. I emailed 55 people to ask if anyone knew what the characters M-P-3 meant and five responded: all bar one was under 25 including one female. The older exception was a man in his 30s whose kids keep him abreast of digital technology. They told me MP3 was shorthand for the Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer-3. You didn’t need to know that. Instead, think of how Gillette keeps adding layers of blades to its razors without increasing the size. MP3 technology manages to squeeze 120 songs onto my iPod, which fits snugly inside a clenched fist. It is unlike me to be so up to date with technology. I would have been buying shares in piano rolls just as gramophones were invented, or hoarding bottles of Tipp-Ex correction fluid when computers appeared on the market. I uploaded the best songs from Magic Box onto the iPod and have since accumulated about 40 other tracks from my CD collection, or about two and a half hours’ worth so far. As I grow older I am increasingly affected by songs in a minor key, not to the sobbing stage, but for example the sad and beautiful Irish music sung by Enya always brings me down. So there is no Enya on my iPod but there are lots of bouncy marching songs such as Pleasure and Pain by the Divinyls and, with a copy deadline looming, I am sitting here listening to Friday on my Mind, by The Easybeats, and tapping my foot. Some MP3s can store 20,000 songs and replay them in any order although the pint is beyond me since you cannot possibly live long enough to hear them all. I intend to take the iPod to the grave playing in my ears. It has already come in handy for compiling the music I would like at my funeral rather than risk people who think they know me choosing My Way. There are three songs and the finale is a Van Morrison song that contains the cheery refrain: My momma told me there’d be days like this.
Friday, January 20, 2006
Published The Advocate, January 21, 2006
ONE of my tasks as an editor, I like to think, is to make journos feel angry about injustice; to shake them out of their professional indifference and comfy middle class existence. Leisha Petrys and I connected when she was a cadet journalist at the start of her career. A shy girl of good parents, she first appeared in a black cocktail dress as someone who liked the idea of journalism rather than being a journalist, with the hard, confronting knocks. Her turning point came with a story about a property developer who had told lies to prospective homebuyers, including a whopper about the nearby prison being relocated as part of a beautification plan. Leisha had to go back repeatedly to seek comment from the developer. Each time, his level of personal abuse and legal threats escalated. She shook with nerves and felt sick but she stuck at it. Such courage, which requires forethought and consideration of the risks involved, is to be admired above physical bravery. If anything, the lies seemed to energize her. It made her more determined and thanks to Leisha the developer was exposed and Consumer Affairs intervened. She blossomed as a journalist from there - ``rocket fuel’’, as they say, to become one of the young anointed. A quick aside: Petrys is a contraction of a much, much longer Russian family name. Her Russian bloodlines blessed her with certain physical advantages such as high cheekbones, flawless skin and a beguiling bosom. Leisha claims she has used her cleavage only once in her job by wearing a plunging neckline to interview Eddie Maguire, of TV and Collingwood fame, in the hope of catching his eye. For what purpose, she remains coy. Not that it did her any good, she said. There must be something wrong with Eddie. Anyway, Leisha fell in love with Greg, an architect, who had a better eye for necklines. She was talking to Greg on the mobile phone, on her way back from covering the Eyre Peninsula bushfires a year ago, when she and another reporter driving the car were hit head-on by a car. Leisha was critically injured. Trapped in the wreck, slipping in an out of consciousness, she lost so much blood she ought to be dead. Afterwards, she recalled how her colleague, who miraculously was uninjured, kept yelling at her: "Don’t you die on me, Petrys!" What is he going on about? she wondered. She had a shattered leg, deep gashes, and chest and abdominal trauma. Her flawless face was left unscathed. After the first emergency operation to save her life, when she regained consciousness the first items she demanded were a pen and notebook to record what was happening. Leisha Petrys. Journalist. She has since endured many operations and had to learn to walk again. She set herself a goal to walk unaided down the aisle on her wedding day to Greg. I went to the wedding last month and Leisha walked straight and true, as I knew she would.
ONE of my tasks as an editor, I like to think, is to make journos feel angry about injustice; to shake them out of their professional indifference and comfy middle class existence. Leisha Petrys and I connected when she was a cadet journalist at the start of her career. A shy girl of good parents, she first appeared in a black cocktail dress as someone who liked the idea of journalism rather than being a journalist, with the hard, confronting knocks. Her turning point came with a story about a property developer who had told lies to prospective homebuyers, including a whopper about the nearby prison being relocated as part of a beautification plan. Leisha had to go back repeatedly to seek comment from the developer. Each time, his level of personal abuse and legal threats escalated. She shook with nerves and felt sick but she stuck at it. Such courage, which requires forethought and consideration of the risks involved, is to be admired above physical bravery. If anything, the lies seemed to energize her. It made her more determined and thanks to Leisha the developer was exposed and Consumer Affairs intervened. She blossomed as a journalist from there - ``rocket fuel’’, as they say, to become one of the young anointed. A quick aside: Petrys is a contraction of a much, much longer Russian family name. Her Russian bloodlines blessed her with certain physical advantages such as high cheekbones, flawless skin and a beguiling bosom. Leisha claims she has used her cleavage only once in her job by wearing a plunging neckline to interview Eddie Maguire, of TV and Collingwood fame, in the hope of catching his eye. For what purpose, she remains coy. Not that it did her any good, she said. There must be something wrong with Eddie. Anyway, Leisha fell in love with Greg, an architect, who had a better eye for necklines. She was talking to Greg on the mobile phone, on her way back from covering the Eyre Peninsula bushfires a year ago, when she and another reporter driving the car were hit head-on by a car. Leisha was critically injured. Trapped in the wreck, slipping in an out of consciousness, she lost so much blood she ought to be dead. Afterwards, she recalled how her colleague, who miraculously was uninjured, kept yelling at her: "Don’t you die on me, Petrys!" What is he going on about? she wondered. She had a shattered leg, deep gashes, and chest and abdominal trauma. Her flawless face was left unscathed. After the first emergency operation to save her life, when she regained consciousness the first items she demanded were a pen and notebook to record what was happening. Leisha Petrys. Journalist. She has since endured many operations and had to learn to walk again. She set herself a goal to walk unaided down the aisle on her wedding day to Greg. I went to the wedding last month and Leisha walked straight and true, as I knew she would.
Friday, January 13, 2006
Published The Advocate, January 14, 2006
HERE I was, anticipating another year of friends’ funerals, and my daughter Melissa announces she is giving me a first grandchild. I immediately demanded to know why, why, why, and if she really thought I was old enough to be a grandfather? "You’re old enough but probably lacking in maturity," she said. Daughters can be such a challenge. The thought of grandfatherhood will take some getting used to. Eliza of Lindisfarne wrote me an email: "Congratulations on becoming a grandfather – you will have to invest in some Grosby slippers!!!" Barleys. It’s not like I work in IT. I attended Melissa’s birth, which occurred as Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips were being married in London in 1973. In between contractions the nurses kept ducking out to check the progress of the royal wedding on TV. A great occasion – the birth, not the wedding – and I was still yelling "Encore! Encore!" while being escorted from the delivery suite. Jo and Cath – the wives of colleagues – recently gave birth to daughters. Jo has the good sense to avoid my radar but I met Cath the other day in the street struggling under the weight of disposable nappies. The last time I saw Cath she was heavily pregnant and had a healthy, happy glow. Now she looked frazzled. Pregnancy really suits some women. Jenny, an old friend who also happens to be a midwife, is best kept barefoot and pregnant. Late in one of her many pregnancies, I went around to her house one morning and she was in the backyard weeding the veggie patch. I popped around again after lunch and there was the newborn in her husband’s arms. And Jenny was back weeding the garden, as if nothing unusual had occurred in the meantime. Which brings me to Aaron and Janice. I have known Aaron for 18 months and in that time he has produced an assembly line of kids. The fourth was born late last year. And now Janice is expecting the fifth. It seems every time Aaron hangs his trousers over the end of the bed Janice falls pregnant. She is obviously fecund – prolifically fertile – although Aaron obviously must shoulder some of the blame. He told me they had not planned to have a large family but what could you do? I waved a Stanley knife in his direction and offered to do a cut-rate vasectomy on the spot. He looked sheepish. As a matter of fact, Aaron said, he had been waiting in line for an appointment at the family planning clinic when the news of Janice’s latest pregnancy came through. It’s all a matter of time and place. At dinner recently I sat next to a woman who said she was the youngest of 16 children, the eldest of whom was 73. Family gatherings must be quite a memory test, I said. Not really, she said. She remembered her brothers and sisters by where they were born: Fred in Smithton, Alice in Stanley, and so on. Their father was a railway fettler.
HERE I was, anticipating another year of friends’ funerals, and my daughter Melissa announces she is giving me a first grandchild. I immediately demanded to know why, why, why, and if she really thought I was old enough to be a grandfather? "You’re old enough but probably lacking in maturity," she said. Daughters can be such a challenge. The thought of grandfatherhood will take some getting used to. Eliza of Lindisfarne wrote me an email: "Congratulations on becoming a grandfather – you will have to invest in some Grosby slippers!!!" Barleys. It’s not like I work in IT. I attended Melissa’s birth, which occurred as Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips were being married in London in 1973. In between contractions the nurses kept ducking out to check the progress of the royal wedding on TV. A great occasion – the birth, not the wedding – and I was still yelling "Encore! Encore!" while being escorted from the delivery suite. Jo and Cath – the wives of colleagues – recently gave birth to daughters. Jo has the good sense to avoid my radar but I met Cath the other day in the street struggling under the weight of disposable nappies. The last time I saw Cath she was heavily pregnant and had a healthy, happy glow. Now she looked frazzled. Pregnancy really suits some women. Jenny, an old friend who also happens to be a midwife, is best kept barefoot and pregnant. Late in one of her many pregnancies, I went around to her house one morning and she was in the backyard weeding the veggie patch. I popped around again after lunch and there was the newborn in her husband’s arms. And Jenny was back weeding the garden, as if nothing unusual had occurred in the meantime. Which brings me to Aaron and Janice. I have known Aaron for 18 months and in that time he has produced an assembly line of kids. The fourth was born late last year. And now Janice is expecting the fifth. It seems every time Aaron hangs his trousers over the end of the bed Janice falls pregnant. She is obviously fecund – prolifically fertile – although Aaron obviously must shoulder some of the blame. He told me they had not planned to have a large family but what could you do? I waved a Stanley knife in his direction and offered to do a cut-rate vasectomy on the spot. He looked sheepish. As a matter of fact, Aaron said, he had been waiting in line for an appointment at the family planning clinic when the news of Janice’s latest pregnancy came through. It’s all a matter of time and place. At dinner recently I sat next to a woman who said she was the youngest of 16 children, the eldest of whom was 73. Family gatherings must be quite a memory test, I said. Not really, she said. She remembered her brothers and sisters by where they were born: Fred in Smithton, Alice in Stanley, and so on. Their father was a railway fettler.
Friday, January 06, 2006
Published The Advocate, January 7, 2006
THE super-maxi Wild Oats XI completed the latest Sydney-Hobart race in less than two days – a tad under 43 hours – and yachtsmen are talking of a 35-hour win before long. The Wild Oats crew said it was like clinging to a rocket, going faster and faster, the only limit being imminent destruction. Another maxi AAPT saw its carbon fibre boom crack under the pressure. Wild Oats has a canting keel that swings from side to side to make the boat move more efficiently through the water. The keel is driven by onboard hydraulics. The maxi yachts have to keep their engines constantly running to power all the hydraulics, electronics and computers. It’s a far cry from my days as a teenage sailor on Corio Bay. Our dinghy’s keel was moved up and down by hand. The only power source was the wind. Dinghy sailing meant you either were wet and miserable or dry and bored, and there were always cleaning and maintenance chores to be done. I had better things to do with my life and did them. Even so, I also did a coastal navigation course with no intention of ever owning a boat. Coastal navigation is done using marine charts, a compass and a ruler. It is fairly straightforward provided the coastline is kept in sight. Which brings me alongside Quetzalcoatl, a Tassie entrant in the recent Melbourne-Hobart race, which mysteriously lost its electronic navigation system on the way across Bass Strait to the start line. The crew had to go "back to basics". I took this to mean they had to use a sextant or navigated by the stars. But, no, they completed the crossing using a hand-held Global Positioning System unit. Matthew Flinders, who explored Bass Strait in a leaky sloop without GPS, must be rolling in his grave. Australia’s most famous keel, the winged one, helped to give Australia II victory in the 1983 America’s Cup. Toyota even named a car after the designer, Ben Lexcen. There was no canting. Wild Oats is not a graceful thing at rest. The bow resembles a brutal log splitter. This year’s race toll included several giant sunfish and a large shark that was sliced in half. I went for a look at Wild Oats in Hobart last weekend and frankly it looked boring tied to the dock. Instead of laying waste to ocean creatures, it had become a floating billboard for its sponsors. The crew was fashionably dressed in crisp Henri Lloyd shirts and caps, wore flash HDX sunnies and each received a Rolex winner’s watch from the race sponsor. Cruising the world and being paid to race in rich men’s yachts is obviously not a bad gig. But it’s sailing in name only. The slowest Sydney-Hobart finisher this year was Gillawa, which took over seven days. I doubt Gillawa killed any fish or moved its keel but I bet the crew toasted their last placing by raising a glass to the true romance of sail.
THE super-maxi Wild Oats XI completed the latest Sydney-Hobart race in less than two days – a tad under 43 hours – and yachtsmen are talking of a 35-hour win before long. The Wild Oats crew said it was like clinging to a rocket, going faster and faster, the only limit being imminent destruction. Another maxi AAPT saw its carbon fibre boom crack under the pressure. Wild Oats has a canting keel that swings from side to side to make the boat move more efficiently through the water. The keel is driven by onboard hydraulics. The maxi yachts have to keep their engines constantly running to power all the hydraulics, electronics and computers. It’s a far cry from my days as a teenage sailor on Corio Bay. Our dinghy’s keel was moved up and down by hand. The only power source was the wind. Dinghy sailing meant you either were wet and miserable or dry and bored, and there were always cleaning and maintenance chores to be done. I had better things to do with my life and did them. Even so, I also did a coastal navigation course with no intention of ever owning a boat. Coastal navigation is done using marine charts, a compass and a ruler. It is fairly straightforward provided the coastline is kept in sight. Which brings me alongside Quetzalcoatl, a Tassie entrant in the recent Melbourne-Hobart race, which mysteriously lost its electronic navigation system on the way across Bass Strait to the start line. The crew had to go "back to basics". I took this to mean they had to use a sextant or navigated by the stars. But, no, they completed the crossing using a hand-held Global Positioning System unit. Matthew Flinders, who explored Bass Strait in a leaky sloop without GPS, must be rolling in his grave. Australia’s most famous keel, the winged one, helped to give Australia II victory in the 1983 America’s Cup. Toyota even named a car after the designer, Ben Lexcen. There was no canting. Wild Oats is not a graceful thing at rest. The bow resembles a brutal log splitter. This year’s race toll included several giant sunfish and a large shark that was sliced in half. I went for a look at Wild Oats in Hobart last weekend and frankly it looked boring tied to the dock. Instead of laying waste to ocean creatures, it had become a floating billboard for its sponsors. The crew was fashionably dressed in crisp Henri Lloyd shirts and caps, wore flash HDX sunnies and each received a Rolex winner’s watch from the race sponsor. Cruising the world and being paid to race in rich men’s yachts is obviously not a bad gig. But it’s sailing in name only. The slowest Sydney-Hobart finisher this year was Gillawa, which took over seven days. I doubt Gillawa killed any fish or moved its keel but I bet the crew toasted their last placing by raising a glass to the true romance of sail.