Published Indaily, October 2010
WHEN it comes to choosing friendships, we generally look for people who are similar to ourselves, who see life broadly the same way, and who know something of what it is to be like us.
We tend not to mix with people who don’t want to know us, or don’t care what happens to us.
It can take just one factor to bring us together.
Membership of a footy club will do it, enough for people to claim a bond even if they have nothing much else in common.
I sure smiled, for example, when I first heard the line about Port Power members coming in two types, those who drive Mercedes and those who steal them.
There you go, a shared love of Port and Mercedes.
Personally, I am not a clubby person.
My own preference is for low-intensity acquaintanceships, just chummy enough to get the social juices flowing, but not so much that personal closeness becomes too intrusive and demanding.
Which is one of the reasons why I like pubs.
People in front bars are not usually looking for anything apart from a drink and the company of whoever happens to be there, a sense of casual bon homie with no expectations.
A bar is also a place you can leave, with no obligations, when you’ve had your fill of either the people or the drink.
Not long ago, I was in the Railway Hotel, Port Melbourne, when into the bar blew an ancient barfly who everyone called Oodles, a thirsty mouth of missing teeth.
The barmaid winked: ``Quick. Better get you a drink, Oodles. Don’t ever want to be giving you mouth to mouth.’’
Grins all around. Oodles was among mates.
Most friendships, though, arise through the workplace. Certainly the people I still count as friends I met through work, and we bonded later over a drink in the pub.
The workplace bonds are especially evident whenever a business closes for good.
When Mitsubishi fell over at Lonsdale and Tonsley Park, the workers expressed their grief, not just for the lost jobs but much more for the lost friendships.
Exactly the same reaction occurred when Bridgestone closed its Salisbury tyre factory last April and 600 workers were given notice.
They gathered afterwards at the Brahma Lodge and Old Spot hotels for an emotional farewell.
For many, after years of working together, it would be the last time they saw each other. They were not drowning their sorrows at the loss of jobs, so much as celebrating their friendships one final time together.
Whatever differences they had were forgotten. They were simply a bunch of workers in the same situation, suffering the same fate and united in facing an uncertain future.
It’s said that you are what you do as a job. True, until you don’t have a job, and then you are better defined by the friends who remain.
A shame it takes the closure of a workplace before we realise that a common bond exists in our shared humanity.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Published Indaily, September 2010
Mystery of The Treasures Wall
THE State Library is somewhere I visit even if I have nothing to research. It’s a great place to kill an hour or so, especially when the rain is pelting down outside.
I head directly up the stairs past the portrait of suffragette Catherine Helen Spence, to The Treasures Wall, which is always a revelation.
An array of 20 display cases, The Treasures Wall offers a glimpse of the library’s rare collection of manuscripts, artefacts, photographs and maps.
A while back there was an exhibition of the South Australian experience of World War I, which complemented an Australian War Memorial travelling exhibition of the Anzac Victoria Crosses won at Gallipoli.
Another exhibition included material on Goyder’s Line, surveyed in 1865 by the SA Surveyor-General George Goyder. By tracking the saltbush margin across SA, he determined that north of the line the rainfall was too unreliable for permanent agriculture, which still holds true.
The display said Goyder was born in 1826 in Liverpool, England, and migrated to Australia when he was 22.
Therefore he probably had the same Scouse accent as The Beatles. It pleases me to think that Goyder, a dour disciplinarian with a sextant, had an adenoidal voice like Ringo’s.
Scattered around in front of the exhibition were 20 or so uni-type students, mostly Asians. They were using low, wooden stools that doubled as seats or as tables if you sat on the carpet, as most preferred.
All had open laptop computers. Totally focused on the screen, very little conversation occurred, an exchanged word from time to time but overwhelmingly there was an atmosphere of studious intent.
I wondered why they were out here on the floor when they could be inside the main study area at a comfortable desk?
A mystery, and I sat on a bench to think about it.
Nearby, a young woman in a musk-pink jumper was sitting on the floor and talking into a mobile phone, her dark hair pulled tightly back in a ponytail.
She was speaking super rapidly, so fast that it was hard to keep up. The sacred silence of libraries is not what it used to be.
What had happened, as best I could tell, was the power had been cut off at her West Beach flat and she was trying to get it restored.
The cause of the outage was a puzzle. A flatmate was mentioned, a possible culprit.
From her laptop the girl read out an account number, and she had to repeat it more slowly. She was made to hold the line.
I took my chance. ``Excuse me, why is everyone sitting out here and not inside?’’
``Because the Wi-Fi’s best here,’’ she replied curtly.
Ah. Wireless internet.
The webolution: The State Library, in crossing the cyber line, has become a Wi-Fi hotspot within its own portals.
Chances are, some of these kids were researching The Treasures Wall online when the real thing was there just in front of them.
Think how much easier Goyder would have found it to drawn his Line with Google Maps.
Mystery of The Treasures Wall
THE State Library is somewhere I visit even if I have nothing to research. It’s a great place to kill an hour or so, especially when the rain is pelting down outside.
I head directly up the stairs past the portrait of suffragette Catherine Helen Spence, to The Treasures Wall, which is always a revelation.
An array of 20 display cases, The Treasures Wall offers a glimpse of the library’s rare collection of manuscripts, artefacts, photographs and maps.
A while back there was an exhibition of the South Australian experience of World War I, which complemented an Australian War Memorial travelling exhibition of the Anzac Victoria Crosses won at Gallipoli.
Another exhibition included material on Goyder’s Line, surveyed in 1865 by the SA Surveyor-General George Goyder. By tracking the saltbush margin across SA, he determined that north of the line the rainfall was too unreliable for permanent agriculture, which still holds true.
The display said Goyder was born in 1826 in Liverpool, England, and migrated to Australia when he was 22.
Therefore he probably had the same Scouse accent as The Beatles. It pleases me to think that Goyder, a dour disciplinarian with a sextant, had an adenoidal voice like Ringo’s.
Scattered around in front of the exhibition were 20 or so uni-type students, mostly Asians. They were using low, wooden stools that doubled as seats or as tables if you sat on the carpet, as most preferred.
All had open laptop computers. Totally focused on the screen, very little conversation occurred, an exchanged word from time to time but overwhelmingly there was an atmosphere of studious intent.
I wondered why they were out here on the floor when they could be inside the main study area at a comfortable desk?
A mystery, and I sat on a bench to think about it.
Nearby, a young woman in a musk-pink jumper was sitting on the floor and talking into a mobile phone, her dark hair pulled tightly back in a ponytail.
She was speaking super rapidly, so fast that it was hard to keep up. The sacred silence of libraries is not what it used to be.
What had happened, as best I could tell, was the power had been cut off at her West Beach flat and she was trying to get it restored.
The cause of the outage was a puzzle. A flatmate was mentioned, a possible culprit.
From her laptop the girl read out an account number, and she had to repeat it more slowly. She was made to hold the line.
I took my chance. ``Excuse me, why is everyone sitting out here and not inside?’’
``Because the Wi-Fi’s best here,’’ she replied curtly.
Ah. Wireless internet.
The webolution: The State Library, in crossing the cyber line, has become a Wi-Fi hotspot within its own portals.
Chances are, some of these kids were researching The Treasures Wall online when the real thing was there just in front of them.
Think how much easier Goyder would have found it to drawn his Line with Google Maps.
Published Indaily, September 2010
SOME Sundays, when the season is soft and airy as it is now, I walk into Chinatown for a relaxed Asian lunch.
It’s always a pleasant hive of activity, a slightly chaotic spectacle of Asian symbols and faces, where the restaurants compete for space with the hair salons and mobile phone sellers.
In the afternoon light, mellow and soothing, the afternoon just drifts along. Social vitality, as often as not, comes from people being concentrated into a restricted area and immersing them in cooking aromas.
One of the best aspects is the Chinese have yet to figure out how to charge for alcohol, for which I am grateful.
The booze mark-up generally is nothing like the usual rip-off at other restaurants, suggesting that the Chinese place a priority on the food more than the drink.
The downside, however, is you can sit there for ages after ordering a Tsingtao beer before it is actually brought to you, as though the idea of drinking ahead of the food’s arrival is incomprehensible to the Chinese mind.
Warning: Only drink beer direct from the stubbie in a Chinatown restaurant and never from a glass. Because the beer goes flat almost as soon as it is poured into a glass, which suggests the glassware is not washed separately in clean water but in the same greasy dishwater that was used for the chicken stir-fry bowls.
Chinatown restaurants serve the food I cannot cook, or cannot be bothered attempting.
They are also home of the so-called ``cheap and cheerful’’ meal, the places where you don’t need an expense account unless the person doing the ordering thinks she is feeding not just the two of you but the entire 7th regiment. Then it’s not cheap.
I generally allow others to order and really appreciate it, since the menus are too long for me to be bothered with. The ritual of choosing seems like too much work when you are only going to be hungry again in half an hour.
There is a set routine: First, those who order always give the menu a thorough going over, which could take half an hour; they fret that the specials board written in Chinese characters must contain secret treasures known only to the Chinese; get antsy about the slow or inept service by the young students-cum-waiters; mercilessly critique the food when it’s served, while fuming that the diners at nearby tables have definitely ordered better dishes; and spend the final half-hour forensically examining the bill in case they have been diddled.
I more or less accept the fuss in my stride as part of the yin-yang theatrics of dining out in Chinatown.
But there are quite a few places there where you would not bother going if a great coffee and hygienic toilets are what you are after.
I am an expert at eating in Chinese restaurants but know nothing about running one. The Chinese are expert at running restaurants, but care little about keeping clean toilets.
SOME Sundays, when the season is soft and airy as it is now, I walk into Chinatown for a relaxed Asian lunch.
It’s always a pleasant hive of activity, a slightly chaotic spectacle of Asian symbols and faces, where the restaurants compete for space with the hair salons and mobile phone sellers.
In the afternoon light, mellow and soothing, the afternoon just drifts along. Social vitality, as often as not, comes from people being concentrated into a restricted area and immersing them in cooking aromas.
One of the best aspects is the Chinese have yet to figure out how to charge for alcohol, for which I am grateful.
The booze mark-up generally is nothing like the usual rip-off at other restaurants, suggesting that the Chinese place a priority on the food more than the drink.
The downside, however, is you can sit there for ages after ordering a Tsingtao beer before it is actually brought to you, as though the idea of drinking ahead of the food’s arrival is incomprehensible to the Chinese mind.
Warning: Only drink beer direct from the stubbie in a Chinatown restaurant and never from a glass. Because the beer goes flat almost as soon as it is poured into a glass, which suggests the glassware is not washed separately in clean water but in the same greasy dishwater that was used for the chicken stir-fry bowls.
Chinatown restaurants serve the food I cannot cook, or cannot be bothered attempting.
They are also home of the so-called ``cheap and cheerful’’ meal, the places where you don’t need an expense account unless the person doing the ordering thinks she is feeding not just the two of you but the entire 7th regiment. Then it’s not cheap.
I generally allow others to order and really appreciate it, since the menus are too long for me to be bothered with. The ritual of choosing seems like too much work when you are only going to be hungry again in half an hour.
There is a set routine: First, those who order always give the menu a thorough going over, which could take half an hour; they fret that the specials board written in Chinese characters must contain secret treasures known only to the Chinese; get antsy about the slow or inept service by the young students-cum-waiters; mercilessly critique the food when it’s served, while fuming that the diners at nearby tables have definitely ordered better dishes; and spend the final half-hour forensically examining the bill in case they have been diddled.
I more or less accept the fuss in my stride as part of the yin-yang theatrics of dining out in Chinatown.
But there are quite a few places there where you would not bother going if a great coffee and hygienic toilets are what you are after.
I am an expert at eating in Chinese restaurants but know nothing about running one. The Chinese are expert at running restaurants, but care little about keeping clean toilets.
Published Sunday Mail, Adelaide, September 12, 2010.
YEARS ago, the wine writer Phillip White and I lunched at a restaurant that had butcher’s paper for tablecloths.
We had a discussion about the different Adelaide networks – arts, legal, political, criminal and so on – and over the next few minutes we quickly had covered the paper with name after name after name.
Certain people were underlined or identified by different asterisks, then connected by circles and arrows to link the groups they came from.
Joining the dots, soon we had produced an arty effect in a Bruce Petty cartoonish way.
We had to ask the restaurant owner for another sheet of paper. She gave us one of those looks, as if paper grew on trees.
On and on we went, until two sheets were completely covered and the owner refused to provide a third.
I cannot say there was much scientific method involved.
Didn’t such-and-such have an affair with so-and-so? Yep, and with him and him and her as well ... and we’d be off on another tangent.
Phillip and I came to no specific conclusion apart from compiling a list of the people we both knew and agreeing we knew a lot of the same people.
What we also found was that simply making connections did not necessarily lead to anywhere at all, and indeed could be fairly misleading.
For instance, it can be shown that Phillip White is connected to the sacking of the Whitlam government, something he denies.
Starting with Phillip, I can quickly run through the wine fraternity to the venerable palate of Brian Barry, whose horse Century Miss won the Golden Slipper in 1979; Century Miss was trained at Glenelg by Bart Cummings, who also trained Gold and Black to win the 1977 Melbourne Cup, which was presented by an hilariously drunk Governor-General Sir John Kerr, who sacked the Whitlam government.
There you go.
At work here, is the principle of Six Degrees of Separation, the idea that if you are one step away from each person you know and extend through all connections as well, then it can be shown that everyone on earth is linked by no more than six steps.
Given there are 6.8 billion people on the planet, and that I am admittedly bad at remembering names, I find six degrees to be a stretch.
In Adelaide, though, it is more believable. Three degrees even.
What was the point of our lunchtime scrawls? None that I can recall. Except I think we invented Facebook.
People occasionally invite me to be their Facebook ``friend’’ and generally I accept, including with the people I barely know or didn’t even know I knew.
They are neither welcome nor unwelcome, since I almost never check Facebook.
No offence, but having never had more friends at the one time than I could count on one hand, I am finding it difficult to get my head around the idea of so many new, invisible friends now entering my life.
You have to draw the line somewhere.
YEARS ago, the wine writer Phillip White and I lunched at a restaurant that had butcher’s paper for tablecloths.
We had a discussion about the different Adelaide networks – arts, legal, political, criminal and so on – and over the next few minutes we quickly had covered the paper with name after name after name.
Certain people were underlined or identified by different asterisks, then connected by circles and arrows to link the groups they came from.
Joining the dots, soon we had produced an arty effect in a Bruce Petty cartoonish way.
We had to ask the restaurant owner for another sheet of paper. She gave us one of those looks, as if paper grew on trees.
On and on we went, until two sheets were completely covered and the owner refused to provide a third.
I cannot say there was much scientific method involved.
Didn’t such-and-such have an affair with so-and-so? Yep, and with him and him and her as well ... and we’d be off on another tangent.
Phillip and I came to no specific conclusion apart from compiling a list of the people we both knew and agreeing we knew a lot of the same people.
What we also found was that simply making connections did not necessarily lead to anywhere at all, and indeed could be fairly misleading.
For instance, it can be shown that Phillip White is connected to the sacking of the Whitlam government, something he denies.
Starting with Phillip, I can quickly run through the wine fraternity to the venerable palate of Brian Barry, whose horse Century Miss won the Golden Slipper in 1979; Century Miss was trained at Glenelg by Bart Cummings, who also trained Gold and Black to win the 1977 Melbourne Cup, which was presented by an hilariously drunk Governor-General Sir John Kerr, who sacked the Whitlam government.
There you go.
At work here, is the principle of Six Degrees of Separation, the idea that if you are one step away from each person you know and extend through all connections as well, then it can be shown that everyone on earth is linked by no more than six steps.
Given there are 6.8 billion people on the planet, and that I am admittedly bad at remembering names, I find six degrees to be a stretch.
In Adelaide, though, it is more believable. Three degrees even.
What was the point of our lunchtime scrawls? None that I can recall. Except I think we invented Facebook.
People occasionally invite me to be their Facebook ``friend’’ and generally I accept, including with the people I barely know or didn’t even know I knew.
They are neither welcome nor unwelcome, since I almost never check Facebook.
No offence, but having never had more friends at the one time than I could count on one hand, I am finding it difficult to get my head around the idea of so many new, invisible friends now entering my life.
You have to draw the line somewhere.
Published Sunday Mail, Adelaide, August 29, 2010
THE street where I live at Wayville is used by cheapskates who park there for free and walk the five minutes around the corner to attend the different events at the Adelaide Showground.
From my front window, I can usually tell from the look of the passersby, their ages and how they are dressed, what event is on.
Some are easy to pick.
The Caravan and Camping Show sees the greybeards with Swiss Army knives holstered to their straining girths; the Bridal Ideas Expo gets the Sex and The City desperados; anything to do with cars and extreme horsepower draws in the mulletheads and their lookalike boys; the Garden Expo pulls the ABC types; and of course Glendi attracts the Greeks.
The Body, Mind and Psychic Expo sucks in mostly women who have a need to get in touch with their inner selves. Whatever their other problems, apparently a couple of hours of astrology and tarot can lift their spirits.
The Pregnancy, Baby & Children's Expo is the scariest. You can’t move around Wayville for the bulging bellies.
I find it unsettling to see so many heavily impregnated women walking the streets at the same time, resembling a scene from a sci-fi movie, all heading towards a mass incubator in the Goyder Pavilion.
Speaking of which, Sexpo was staged at the Showground a while back. Touted as the ``world’s largest adult lifestyle show’’, I spent the week leading up to it in a high state of anticipation.
But if you were expecting to see trashy blondes and the plastic raincoat brigade roaming the streets, you’d be disappointed. They looked like the same DIY mob who attend the Sunday Mail Home Living Expo.
The Royal Adelaide Show is the big one starting next Friday (September 3). For a whole week, Wayville is besieged as tens of thousands of people head to the Showground.
The excitement on the kids’ faces is alone worth the price of admission.
Then, at day’s end, everyone returns loaded down by showbags, the kids are armed with plastic swords and replica military weapons, and the littlies are weepy from exhaustion or throwing a tanty.
Mum and dad are at the end of their tethers, too, footsore and in such filthy moods that you can read in their faces what they are thinking: Never, ever again!
It gets worse. Back at the car, they find a council parking ticket stuck under the wiper – $21 for exceeding the two hour limit or $34 for parking in a Residential Permit Zone – and are beside themselves with white-knuckled rage.
They go off their nuts, scream at the kids and screech the tyres as they roar off. Better, if you ask me, than sideshow alley.
Not just the odd offender, either, but scores are caught each day, as if the parking signs located on every other stobie pole somehow do not apply to them. Such dills.
So, on behalf of all Unley ratepayers, thanks for the fine donations and enjoy the Show.
THE street where I live at Wayville is used by cheapskates who park there for free and walk the five minutes around the corner to attend the different events at the Adelaide Showground.
From my front window, I can usually tell from the look of the passersby, their ages and how they are dressed, what event is on.
Some are easy to pick.
The Caravan and Camping Show sees the greybeards with Swiss Army knives holstered to their straining girths; the Bridal Ideas Expo gets the Sex and The City desperados; anything to do with cars and extreme horsepower draws in the mulletheads and their lookalike boys; the Garden Expo pulls the ABC types; and of course Glendi attracts the Greeks.
The Body, Mind and Psychic Expo sucks in mostly women who have a need to get in touch with their inner selves. Whatever their other problems, apparently a couple of hours of astrology and tarot can lift their spirits.
The Pregnancy, Baby & Children's Expo is the scariest. You can’t move around Wayville for the bulging bellies.
I find it unsettling to see so many heavily impregnated women walking the streets at the same time, resembling a scene from a sci-fi movie, all heading towards a mass incubator in the Goyder Pavilion.
Speaking of which, Sexpo was staged at the Showground a while back. Touted as the ``world’s largest adult lifestyle show’’, I spent the week leading up to it in a high state of anticipation.
But if you were expecting to see trashy blondes and the plastic raincoat brigade roaming the streets, you’d be disappointed. They looked like the same DIY mob who attend the Sunday Mail Home Living Expo.
The Royal Adelaide Show is the big one starting next Friday (September 3). For a whole week, Wayville is besieged as tens of thousands of people head to the Showground.
The excitement on the kids’ faces is alone worth the price of admission.
Then, at day’s end, everyone returns loaded down by showbags, the kids are armed with plastic swords and replica military weapons, and the littlies are weepy from exhaustion or throwing a tanty.
Mum and dad are at the end of their tethers, too, footsore and in such filthy moods that you can read in their faces what they are thinking: Never, ever again!
It gets worse. Back at the car, they find a council parking ticket stuck under the wiper – $21 for exceeding the two hour limit or $34 for parking in a Residential Permit Zone – and are beside themselves with white-knuckled rage.
They go off their nuts, scream at the kids and screech the tyres as they roar off. Better, if you ask me, than sideshow alley.
Not just the odd offender, either, but scores are caught each day, as if the parking signs located on every other stobie pole somehow do not apply to them. Such dills.
So, on behalf of all Unley ratepayers, thanks for the fine donations and enjoy the Show.
Sunday Mail, Adelaide, August 15, 2010
SOME days, I feel as though I have been embedded in life as a stranger, that I am here purely as a confused observer not as an active participant, and at some point I should call it quits and resume my normal life.
I always feel this way during election campaigns.
Certain stages of my professional life have been spent at close quarters with the political process and not once have I come away feeling uplifted.
Sure, there are plenty of people in politics who are decent and honest, but quite a few who are not.
Trouble is, even the best of them are consumed by the political game. The with-us or against-us, the hunter or the hunted.
Immersed in politics in the raw, the dirty tricks, the back-stabbing, the attention seeking, MPs become obsessed with themselves. They just do.
The sense of an egotistical slugfest is reinforced by the media. Fair enough, too, since that is how the game is played.
So it comes down to Julia Gillard versus Tony Abbott, a contest depicted by and large as a clash of two personalities, rather than as a face-off between Labor and Liberal policies.
Of course there are differences between them. She has a pointy nose; he has wingnut ears. But scratch the surface and I don’t see much difference campaign-wise.
Each is trying to occupy the same middle ground, yet not enough space is available for both of them.
Is gender an issue in this campaign? You bet it is.
At Probus clubs across the nation, women are tut-tutting at Julia’s changeable hair tincture and thinking she really ought to find a new hairdresser.
Moving forward, Julia and Tony appear to genuinely like one another personally, an unsettling sense that he is her kind of guy.
He says he likes strong women. She is that, but what does she see in him? A lot of people are asking the same question and, no, I don’t know the answer either.
The electorate is always looking for something worth voting for. What this might be depends on who is doing the voting, but policies are often a secondary consideration, I think.
The parties are not uniform in their policy leanings anyway. The gulf between the internal factions can be wider at times than the differences between the parties. Take the asylum seeker issue. And the Kevin Rudd coup de grace.
Democracy places a touching faith in the electorate, en masse, to get it right. This may be grossly over-estimating the potential of the electorate.
But the defining principle of democracy is that voters, when they become sufficiently fed up, can toss out the government.
Then, perversely, we end up with a new government that almost half the population voted against.
Still, everyone accepts the result. Even the losers recognise the right to govern of those they did not elect. In the aftermath there is no screaming mob, no bloodshed or teargas in the streets.
Why the hell not? I am only asking.
SOME days, I feel as though I have been embedded in life as a stranger, that I am here purely as a confused observer not as an active participant, and at some point I should call it quits and resume my normal life.
I always feel this way during election campaigns.
Certain stages of my professional life have been spent at close quarters with the political process and not once have I come away feeling uplifted.
Sure, there are plenty of people in politics who are decent and honest, but quite a few who are not.
Trouble is, even the best of them are consumed by the political game. The with-us or against-us, the hunter or the hunted.
Immersed in politics in the raw, the dirty tricks, the back-stabbing, the attention seeking, MPs become obsessed with themselves. They just do.
The sense of an egotistical slugfest is reinforced by the media. Fair enough, too, since that is how the game is played.
So it comes down to Julia Gillard versus Tony Abbott, a contest depicted by and large as a clash of two personalities, rather than as a face-off between Labor and Liberal policies.
Of course there are differences between them. She has a pointy nose; he has wingnut ears. But scratch the surface and I don’t see much difference campaign-wise.
Each is trying to occupy the same middle ground, yet not enough space is available for both of them.
Is gender an issue in this campaign? You bet it is.
At Probus clubs across the nation, women are tut-tutting at Julia’s changeable hair tincture and thinking she really ought to find a new hairdresser.
Moving forward, Julia and Tony appear to genuinely like one another personally, an unsettling sense that he is her kind of guy.
He says he likes strong women. She is that, but what does she see in him? A lot of people are asking the same question and, no, I don’t know the answer either.
The electorate is always looking for something worth voting for. What this might be depends on who is doing the voting, but policies are often a secondary consideration, I think.
The parties are not uniform in their policy leanings anyway. The gulf between the internal factions can be wider at times than the differences between the parties. Take the asylum seeker issue. And the Kevin Rudd coup de grace.
Democracy places a touching faith in the electorate, en masse, to get it right. This may be grossly over-estimating the potential of the electorate.
But the defining principle of democracy is that voters, when they become sufficiently fed up, can toss out the government.
Then, perversely, we end up with a new government that almost half the population voted against.
Still, everyone accepts the result. Even the losers recognise the right to govern of those they did not elect. In the aftermath there is no screaming mob, no bloodshed or teargas in the streets.
Why the hell not? I am only asking.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Sunday Mail, Adelaide, August 1, 2010
A POLITICAL speech is supposed to be a work of persuasion to rally uncertain voters to the cause. Tone and content. Hearts and minds.
Some speechmakers are more persuasive than others. Kevin Rudd, the ominous gut’s ache behind this election campaign, was next to hopeless.
On federal election night ‘07, I was in a roomful of young journos who were relaxing with a drink after covering their very first election day.
Gathered around the TV, the anticipation was high. There was relief at not having John Howard as Prime Minister. Rarely has a new PM had a more captive audience.
Yet, Rudd quickly lost them. Long-winded and bland, his victory speech was a really enormous let down.
A speech of such mind numbing, eye glazing banality that within minutes those who were not in a catatonic stupor were heading for the beer fridge, going to the toilet or finding an excuse to leave.
There was a kind of anaesthetic effect from the way he talked. Whether this was Rudd’s fault or his speech writer’s, I cannot say, but in terms of striking the right note he was a miserable disappointment.
It set the tone for many other boring speeches to follow, with the possible exceptions of his ``Sorry’’ speeches to the Stolen Generations and to the Forgotten Australians in state care.
I heard my first live Rudd speech at a newspaper conference in Cairns in 2005.
At the time he was Opposition spokesman for foreign affairs. He told a mildly amusing anecdote about how he had become fluent in Mandarin and educated in contemporary Chinese history, only to then be sent as young diplomat to Stockholm.
Maybe Foreign Affairs’ first instinct was right, given Rudd’s reported remarks later as PM that ``those Chinese f***ers are trying to rat-f*** us" at the Copenhagen Climate Summit.
He plainly made an undiplomatic error of judgement, not in how he expressed himself, but in venting in front of a bunch of journalists.
Had we seen more of the seething, abusive and potty-mouthed bastardry that, by some accounts, is his underlying true persona – instead of the air-chopping Ruddbot lecturer – then he might still be PM.
US president Barack Obama once described Rudd as ``smart but humble’’, a person with whom he shared the same world view. Right, setting aside how to handle the Chinese.
Problem was, unlike Obama’s gift for cadence, Rudd did not have the verbal ability to cut through with the public. No, not until the very end when he had lost the Prime Ministership and, in his word, ``blubbed’’.
Some regard the Rudd coup de grace as a terrible thing, in terms of it being a shameful political murder.
Spare me. The voters were going to toss aside Labor under Rudd, of that I am pretty sure.
Obviously he did not foresee any problem in himself but, the fact was, the electorate wasn’t listening to him any longer.
People had switched off. Rudd was too boring, and moving forward he had to go.
A POLITICAL speech is supposed to be a work of persuasion to rally uncertain voters to the cause. Tone and content. Hearts and minds.
Some speechmakers are more persuasive than others. Kevin Rudd, the ominous gut’s ache behind this election campaign, was next to hopeless.
On federal election night ‘07, I was in a roomful of young journos who were relaxing with a drink after covering their very first election day.
Gathered around the TV, the anticipation was high. There was relief at not having John Howard as Prime Minister. Rarely has a new PM had a more captive audience.
Yet, Rudd quickly lost them. Long-winded and bland, his victory speech was a really enormous let down.
A speech of such mind numbing, eye glazing banality that within minutes those who were not in a catatonic stupor were heading for the beer fridge, going to the toilet or finding an excuse to leave.
There was a kind of anaesthetic effect from the way he talked. Whether this was Rudd’s fault or his speech writer’s, I cannot say, but in terms of striking the right note he was a miserable disappointment.
It set the tone for many other boring speeches to follow, with the possible exceptions of his ``Sorry’’ speeches to the Stolen Generations and to the Forgotten Australians in state care.
I heard my first live Rudd speech at a newspaper conference in Cairns in 2005.
At the time he was Opposition spokesman for foreign affairs. He told a mildly amusing anecdote about how he had become fluent in Mandarin and educated in contemporary Chinese history, only to then be sent as young diplomat to Stockholm.
Maybe Foreign Affairs’ first instinct was right, given Rudd’s reported remarks later as PM that ``those Chinese f***ers are trying to rat-f*** us" at the Copenhagen Climate Summit.
He plainly made an undiplomatic error of judgement, not in how he expressed himself, but in venting in front of a bunch of journalists.
Had we seen more of the seething, abusive and potty-mouthed bastardry that, by some accounts, is his underlying true persona – instead of the air-chopping Ruddbot lecturer – then he might still be PM.
US president Barack Obama once described Rudd as ``smart but humble’’, a person with whom he shared the same world view. Right, setting aside how to handle the Chinese.
Problem was, unlike Obama’s gift for cadence, Rudd did not have the verbal ability to cut through with the public. No, not until the very end when he had lost the Prime Ministership and, in his word, ``blubbed’’.
Some regard the Rudd coup de grace as a terrible thing, in terms of it being a shameful political murder.
Spare me. The voters were going to toss aside Labor under Rudd, of that I am pretty sure.
Obviously he did not foresee any problem in himself but, the fact was, the electorate wasn’t listening to him any longer.
People had switched off. Rudd was too boring, and moving forward he had to go.
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
Messenger, March 2010
WHAT'S to be done with Burnside Council when all is said and done?
Former Auditor-General Ken MacPherson is finally due to report on his long-running investigation into claims of open conflict, improper use of council information by members and undue outside influence on council activities.
For all that, it's hard to see what grounds exist for sacking Burnside, in the absence of clear evidence of corruption or some lesser illegality.
Not is it clear that any good purpose would be served by sacking the council.
Despite the problems, ratepayer services have continued to be delivered. The bureaucratic processes have not collapsed, though CEO Neil Jacobs did resign (again) midway through MacPherson's investigation.
In rare cases where a council has had to be sacked, notably at Victor Harbor in the 1980s, the council was so factionalised that service delivery had broken down.
The Burnside situation is not nearly so dire.
So where does that leave matters?
Among the council membership are some vocal agitators, Jim Jacobsen and Rob Gilbert in particular, who create plenty of headlines and are seen in some quarters as serial pests.
Both have outed themselves as central characters in the MacPherson investigation.
Both, however, maintain their motives are pure. They presumably are genuine in serving the community's best interests as they see them.
They like to give the impression that something untoward has been occurring in the way the council is run.
Jacobsen has muttered darkly about external influences over the development assessment process, for which he is now facing several defamation writs. Hopefully MacPherson will shine a light in this direction.
Jacobsen and Gilbert certainly devote a lot of time and energy to the council's affairs, to the regret of some other members.
The pair has a talent for making the others exasperated and angry, though there's not necessarily anything wrong with that.
Jacobsen, a former mayor, has always been prone to attention-seeking rants in his public life. It's just him. He is irrepressible by nature.
He probably is also the bane of Mayor Wendy Greiner. She is ideally suited to be the mayor of a decent, charming place like Burnside and it would be easier all-round if Jacobsen behaved himself with more Burnside-style decorum.
Not him though. Jim Jacobsen is not going to change or disappear, irrespective of MacPherson's findings, and nor should he.
In a democracy, it is desirable that every council has at least one annoying gadfly, the member who cannot be silenced, who is at his most cheerful when stirring up a hornet's nest.
It's always a bit of a media lark, one headline-grabbing Jacobsen quote followed by another from Gilbert, all spiced up with an entertaining dose of conflict in the chamber.
Yet, in the absence of any evidence from MacPherson of malfeasance, these two should not be punished for their exuberance and Burnside should not be sacked.
The council is not dysfunctional. The problem is more a case of the dozen members simply not having enough real work to do during their monthly meetings.
The council should be meeting quarterly; or the council numbers should be reduced to eight or even six; or Burnside should forcibly be shoe-horned into an amalgamation with Unley Council, a missed opportunity from years ago.
It's time for Burnside to bite those unpalatable bullets, and then everyone can move on.
WHAT'S to be done with Burnside Council when all is said and done?
Former Auditor-General Ken MacPherson is finally due to report on his long-running investigation into claims of open conflict, improper use of council information by members and undue outside influence on council activities.
For all that, it's hard to see what grounds exist for sacking Burnside, in the absence of clear evidence of corruption or some lesser illegality.
Not is it clear that any good purpose would be served by sacking the council.
Despite the problems, ratepayer services have continued to be delivered. The bureaucratic processes have not collapsed, though CEO Neil Jacobs did resign (again) midway through MacPherson's investigation.
In rare cases where a council has had to be sacked, notably at Victor Harbor in the 1980s, the council was so factionalised that service delivery had broken down.
The Burnside situation is not nearly so dire.
So where does that leave matters?
Among the council membership are some vocal agitators, Jim Jacobsen and Rob Gilbert in particular, who create plenty of headlines and are seen in some quarters as serial pests.
Both have outed themselves as central characters in the MacPherson investigation.
Both, however, maintain their motives are pure. They presumably are genuine in serving the community's best interests as they see them.
They like to give the impression that something untoward has been occurring in the way the council is run.
Jacobsen has muttered darkly about external influences over the development assessment process, for which he is now facing several defamation writs. Hopefully MacPherson will shine a light in this direction.
Jacobsen and Gilbert certainly devote a lot of time and energy to the council's affairs, to the regret of some other members.
The pair has a talent for making the others exasperated and angry, though there's not necessarily anything wrong with that.
Jacobsen, a former mayor, has always been prone to attention-seeking rants in his public life. It's just him. He is irrepressible by nature.
He probably is also the bane of Mayor Wendy Greiner. She is ideally suited to be the mayor of a decent, charming place like Burnside and it would be easier all-round if Jacobsen behaved himself with more Burnside-style decorum.
Not him though. Jim Jacobsen is not going to change or disappear, irrespective of MacPherson's findings, and nor should he.
In a democracy, it is desirable that every council has at least one annoying gadfly, the member who cannot be silenced, who is at his most cheerful when stirring up a hornet's nest.
It's always a bit of a media lark, one headline-grabbing Jacobsen quote followed by another from Gilbert, all spiced up with an entertaining dose of conflict in the chamber.
Yet, in the absence of any evidence from MacPherson of malfeasance, these two should not be punished for their exuberance and Burnside should not be sacked.
The council is not dysfunctional. The problem is more a case of the dozen members simply not having enough real work to do during their monthly meetings.
The council should be meeting quarterly; or the council numbers should be reduced to eight or even six; or Burnside should forcibly be shoe-horned into an amalgamation with Unley Council, a missed opportunity from years ago.
It's time for Burnside to bite those unpalatable bullets, and then everyone can move on.
Sunday Mail, March 2010
MIKE Rann has presided over the SA Labor Party with dominant authority since 1994, and as Premier since 2002, to such an extent that no one seems seriously interested in replacing him.
Labor has needed and wants Rann to lead them. It suits him too.
Next Saturday his government puts its credentials, and credibility, on the line again in a State Election that many once thought was going to be a lopsided Labor shoo-in.
However, the arrival of Isobel Redmond as Opposition leader has changed the political dynamic. The electoral mood has changed. She has made it a contest.
Redmond’s plainspoken, no nonsense manner has cut through with voters grown weary of the endless spin of Rann and his PR flunkies. There is a sense that the electorate finally has begun to see through him.
All the same, in realistic terms, the 10 seats that Redmond needs to win government are probably 10 seats too far this time around.
The measures that broadly matter the most – the economy, the provision of services and future job prospects – count in Labor’s favour.
Among the positives are the Defence sector’s consolidation in South Australia, the impending Outback mining boom and public works expenditure, particularly on transport infrastructure, which have provided a strong down payment for future State growth.
Redmond has held her own against Rann on water, health, hospitals, sports stadiums and the other major issues of the campaign. The Premier has not been able to totally control the agenda, and at times he has come of second best and looking the worse for wear.
Then there is the Michelle Chantelois unpleasantness, the tit-for-tat allegations and denials of an affair between her and the Premier.
Whatever went on between them, the electorate adopted an early attitude of live and let live, until the impression took hold that Rann was not conducting himself in a completely open manner.
His trust level plummeted, especially among women. He may never fully regain his former status in the public mind, now deemed an unreliable witness, even if he is re-elected.
Curiously, missing from the campaign has been any anticipation of Rann’s retirement.
Should Labor win, in all likelihood he would remain the Premier even until the next election in 2014, when he will be only 61 – slightly older than Redmond.
He probably has nothing better to do than be Premier. He may not even know how to do anything else, following a working life that has known nothing but an all-consuming appetite for politics.
Should Labor lose, however, he inevitably would depart the scene. In time, as many former MPs have done, he could prosper as a paid lobbyist.
For Redmond, win or lose, she will remain the Liberal leader for some time to come. She has put in a striking performance since being chosen as a compromise candidate to replace Martin Hamilton-Smith last July.
It is worth remembering she holds the position only because the factions could not stop squabbling among themselves long enough to cut a deal.
The impression given is that while Redmond is Ready, as the campaign slogan promises, the others in her party are not.
She unfortunately has a second-rate front bench, through no fault of her own.
The same tired faces, the same surly mob, who do not convey an image of the Liberals enthusiastically roaring back into government ready and able to do the job.
The problem is, not enough time has passed to repair the Liberal brand, which has been so badly trashed over the years that the party has trouble raising campaign donations and attracting quality candidates.
The Sunday Mail believes Labor has done enough to be returned for a third term, despite our misgivings about the culture of arrogance and lack of accountability that has taken hold under Rann.
We will continue to campaign for an SA Independent Commission Against Corruption to be created as a reminder than power has its limits.
MIKE Rann has presided over the SA Labor Party with dominant authority since 1994, and as Premier since 2002, to such an extent that no one seems seriously interested in replacing him.
Labor has needed and wants Rann to lead them. It suits him too.
Next Saturday his government puts its credentials, and credibility, on the line again in a State Election that many once thought was going to be a lopsided Labor shoo-in.
However, the arrival of Isobel Redmond as Opposition leader has changed the political dynamic. The electoral mood has changed. She has made it a contest.
Redmond’s plainspoken, no nonsense manner has cut through with voters grown weary of the endless spin of Rann and his PR flunkies. There is a sense that the electorate finally has begun to see through him.
All the same, in realistic terms, the 10 seats that Redmond needs to win government are probably 10 seats too far this time around.
The measures that broadly matter the most – the economy, the provision of services and future job prospects – count in Labor’s favour.
Among the positives are the Defence sector’s consolidation in South Australia, the impending Outback mining boom and public works expenditure, particularly on transport infrastructure, which have provided a strong down payment for future State growth.
Redmond has held her own against Rann on water, health, hospitals, sports stadiums and the other major issues of the campaign. The Premier has not been able to totally control the agenda, and at times he has come of second best and looking the worse for wear.
Then there is the Michelle Chantelois unpleasantness, the tit-for-tat allegations and denials of an affair between her and the Premier.
Whatever went on between them, the electorate adopted an early attitude of live and let live, until the impression took hold that Rann was not conducting himself in a completely open manner.
His trust level plummeted, especially among women. He may never fully regain his former status in the public mind, now deemed an unreliable witness, even if he is re-elected.
Curiously, missing from the campaign has been any anticipation of Rann’s retirement.
Should Labor win, in all likelihood he would remain the Premier even until the next election in 2014, when he will be only 61 – slightly older than Redmond.
He probably has nothing better to do than be Premier. He may not even know how to do anything else, following a working life that has known nothing but an all-consuming appetite for politics.
Should Labor lose, however, he inevitably would depart the scene. In time, as many former MPs have done, he could prosper as a paid lobbyist.
For Redmond, win or lose, she will remain the Liberal leader for some time to come. She has put in a striking performance since being chosen as a compromise candidate to replace Martin Hamilton-Smith last July.
It is worth remembering she holds the position only because the factions could not stop squabbling among themselves long enough to cut a deal.
The impression given is that while Redmond is Ready, as the campaign slogan promises, the others in her party are not.
She unfortunately has a second-rate front bench, through no fault of her own.
The same tired faces, the same surly mob, who do not convey an image of the Liberals enthusiastically roaring back into government ready and able to do the job.
The problem is, not enough time has passed to repair the Liberal brand, which has been so badly trashed over the years that the party has trouble raising campaign donations and attracting quality candidates.
The Sunday Mail believes Labor has done enough to be returned for a third term, despite our misgivings about the culture of arrogance and lack of accountability that has taken hold under Rann.
We will continue to campaign for an SA Independent Commission Against Corruption to be created as a reminder than power has its limits.
Sunday Mail, January 2010
THE clever achievement of booze has been to establish itself as a ``cultural product’’ worldwide.
Pick almost any country and the chances are that a particular type of alcohol will somehow represent a certain national pride: whisky for Scotland, vodka for Russia, rum for Jamaica, champagne for France, bourbon for Kentucky, Guinness for Ireland, and so on.
These are not forms of alcohol, as such, they are the distilled essence of a regional identity.
The symbolism used by the alcohol companies to advertise their brands often is an idealised expression of the perceived national attributes.
Or they could easily be mistaken for tourism commercials: a pristine wilderness flowing with crystal clear waters; a verdant vista of rolling, vine-trellised hills; a proud village tradition going back generations.
I have a friend, a seasoned world-traveller and an even more seasoned drinker until medical advice suggested he was drinking himself to death.
At which point he stopped, and has since been taking sober note of the way Australians consume alcohol compared to other countries.
He tells me that in France recently he saw a man in a bar with a glass of wine.
He continues, ‘I went up to him and said, sorry to interrupt but you’re Australian, aren’t you? He said he was and asked how I knew? Because you gulp your wine. The French sip; Australians gulp.’
My friend worries that gulping is a national indicator of inborn alcohol abuse, whereas I rather think it reflects a precautionary drought mentality.
In Australia, the national drink is beer, which is easy to gulp.
Beer also presents itself as offering a value that we prize highly in this country: mateship.
The mass beer message is that after the fires, the drought and flooding rains, our first instinct should be to head to the local pub for a cold one, to rejoice, to commiserate, to cheer ourselves up, to forget or just to get plain drunk with our mates.
The breweries are not selling beer, they are selling mateship in a bottle.
The advertising tells us that having a drink in our hand makes us more easygoing and popular. More Australian.
Suffering from low self-esteem? Here, drink this beer and we promise you will be confident and successful.
What the ads do not explain is that booze also makes people lurching drunk. Belligerently, blood spatteringly drunk in some cases.
On Australia Day this week, squadrons of extra police were assigned around the country to keep a lid on alcohol-fuelled violence and anti-social behaviour. Scores of people were arrested in Sydney.
In Adelaide there were no reported arrests. It was almost un-Australian.
We are reared in this country on a boozy culture, as inescapable as sport on TV. Indeed, without the sponsorship and advertising of beer brands, it’s hard to imagine how elite sport would continue profitably.
So it comes as no surprise when some sports jocks, notably footballers, show an over-fondness for their sponsor’s product.
With the footy season not far away, inevitably some high-profile player or another will be caught vomiting, urinating, defecating, flashing or fighting in public. Take your pick.
An assault charge might even be laid, possibly involving a drunken whack for a hapless girlfriend, model, waitress or pole dancer. Again, take your pick.
The drama unfolds according to a choreographed predictability.
Firstly, the player’s club releases a statement expressing disappointment about the disgraceful behaviour and warning that his playing future is now in jeopardy unless ``certain off-field issues are addressed’’.
The player is perhaps briefly suspended and fined, and thereafter is dubbed ``troubled’’ by the media.
There is a shame-faced apology – a standard form of words crafted by some backroom PR hack – in which the player humbly accepts full responsibility for his actions and makes a commitment to be better behaved in future.
Often this commitment involves an ``action plan’’ of club support and counselling to help the player ``make the right choices’’ in his personal life.
Well, golly gosh.
The prisons are full of people who have issues with alcohol, drugs, anger and violence, and who made the wrong choices.
If only they had the talent to kick a footy and the good luck to have a club show them special consideration to turn their lives around. Instead of which they sit in their cells.
There is talk of raising the drinking age to 21 as a way of reducing the road toll and binge drinking among the young.
It is not the answer. Booze-addled idiocy has no age limit.
I actually don’t know the answer. All I can say is there are far too many deaths caused by alcohol abuse and the cemeteries are crammed with the coffins of its victims.
In hell, the drunks’ bar is standing room only and there is no service.
ON THE OTHER HAND...
WE ARE seeing a rising tide of urban protests that target specific concerns.
Among them are campaigns against the sale of Cheltenham racecourse for housing; the St Clair Reserve land swap; offloading Glenside hospital land; and the Chelsea Cinema sale.
All involve the disposal of ``community land’’ to enable private developers to make a profit.
The protest campaigns are tapping into a deep well of cynicism about whether such transactions are always in the public interest.
It also reflects a widespread lack of trust in large institutions, especially government and big business.
Protests occur when people sense they are not being told the whole truth and feel they have lost control over their neighbourhoods.
Yes, they are looking for someone to blame. But they are also looking for reassurance and accountability.
It’s something to be kept in mind with the state election coming up on March 20.
THE clever achievement of booze has been to establish itself as a ``cultural product’’ worldwide.
Pick almost any country and the chances are that a particular type of alcohol will somehow represent a certain national pride: whisky for Scotland, vodka for Russia, rum for Jamaica, champagne for France, bourbon for Kentucky, Guinness for Ireland, and so on.
These are not forms of alcohol, as such, they are the distilled essence of a regional identity.
The symbolism used by the alcohol companies to advertise their brands often is an idealised expression of the perceived national attributes.
Or they could easily be mistaken for tourism commercials: a pristine wilderness flowing with crystal clear waters; a verdant vista of rolling, vine-trellised hills; a proud village tradition going back generations.
I have a friend, a seasoned world-traveller and an even more seasoned drinker until medical advice suggested he was drinking himself to death.
At which point he stopped, and has since been taking sober note of the way Australians consume alcohol compared to other countries.
He tells me that in France recently he saw a man in a bar with a glass of wine.
He continues, ‘I went up to him and said, sorry to interrupt but you’re Australian, aren’t you? He said he was and asked how I knew? Because you gulp your wine. The French sip; Australians gulp.’
My friend worries that gulping is a national indicator of inborn alcohol abuse, whereas I rather think it reflects a precautionary drought mentality.
In Australia, the national drink is beer, which is easy to gulp.
Beer also presents itself as offering a value that we prize highly in this country: mateship.
The mass beer message is that after the fires, the drought and flooding rains, our first instinct should be to head to the local pub for a cold one, to rejoice, to commiserate, to cheer ourselves up, to forget or just to get plain drunk with our mates.
The breweries are not selling beer, they are selling mateship in a bottle.
The advertising tells us that having a drink in our hand makes us more easygoing and popular. More Australian.
Suffering from low self-esteem? Here, drink this beer and we promise you will be confident and successful.
What the ads do not explain is that booze also makes people lurching drunk. Belligerently, blood spatteringly drunk in some cases.
On Australia Day this week, squadrons of extra police were assigned around the country to keep a lid on alcohol-fuelled violence and anti-social behaviour. Scores of people were arrested in Sydney.
In Adelaide there were no reported arrests. It was almost un-Australian.
We are reared in this country on a boozy culture, as inescapable as sport on TV. Indeed, without the sponsorship and advertising of beer brands, it’s hard to imagine how elite sport would continue profitably.
So it comes as no surprise when some sports jocks, notably footballers, show an over-fondness for their sponsor’s product.
With the footy season not far away, inevitably some high-profile player or another will be caught vomiting, urinating, defecating, flashing or fighting in public. Take your pick.
An assault charge might even be laid, possibly involving a drunken whack for a hapless girlfriend, model, waitress or pole dancer. Again, take your pick.
The drama unfolds according to a choreographed predictability.
Firstly, the player’s club releases a statement expressing disappointment about the disgraceful behaviour and warning that his playing future is now in jeopardy unless ``certain off-field issues are addressed’’.
The player is perhaps briefly suspended and fined, and thereafter is dubbed ``troubled’’ by the media.
There is a shame-faced apology – a standard form of words crafted by some backroom PR hack – in which the player humbly accepts full responsibility for his actions and makes a commitment to be better behaved in future.
Often this commitment involves an ``action plan’’ of club support and counselling to help the player ``make the right choices’’ in his personal life.
Well, golly gosh.
The prisons are full of people who have issues with alcohol, drugs, anger and violence, and who made the wrong choices.
If only they had the talent to kick a footy and the good luck to have a club show them special consideration to turn their lives around. Instead of which they sit in their cells.
There is talk of raising the drinking age to 21 as a way of reducing the road toll and binge drinking among the young.
It is not the answer. Booze-addled idiocy has no age limit.
I actually don’t know the answer. All I can say is there are far too many deaths caused by alcohol abuse and the cemeteries are crammed with the coffins of its victims.
In hell, the drunks’ bar is standing room only and there is no service.
ON THE OTHER HAND...
WE ARE seeing a rising tide of urban protests that target specific concerns.
Among them are campaigns against the sale of Cheltenham racecourse for housing; the St Clair Reserve land swap; offloading Glenside hospital land; and the Chelsea Cinema sale.
All involve the disposal of ``community land’’ to enable private developers to make a profit.
The protest campaigns are tapping into a deep well of cynicism about whether such transactions are always in the public interest.
It also reflects a widespread lack of trust in large institutions, especially government and big business.
Protests occur when people sense they are not being told the whole truth and feel they have lost control over their neighbourhoods.
Yes, they are looking for someone to blame. But they are also looking for reassurance and accountability.
It’s something to be kept in mind with the state election coming up on March 20.
Sunday Mail, January 2010
ON THE final stage of the Tour Down Under today, the niggling question keeps going round and round in my mind.
How much money has US cycling legend Lance Armstrong been paid by the SA government to compete, a fee rumoured to range between $1 million and $2 million?
Why cannot we be told?
In the newspaper the other day, Tourism Minister Jane Lomax-Smith was quoted as saying: ``There are many people who'd like to steal our major events and our sports and arts activities. We don't want to help those people who we know are sniffing around by giving them an idea of how they're managed.''
Did she really say that? Did she really mean it?
We are not as stupid as we are being treated.
I mean, ``those people’’, whoever they are, only need to get on the phone to the International Cycling Union (UCI), ask what it would cost to snatch away the TDU and make a better offer.
It happens. The dreaded Victorians ``stole’’ our F1 Grand Prix and they could do so again if they really wanted the TDU.
It’s unlikely that the Vics, in particular, are desperate to know our secrets on how to run a major event. They seem to manage okay with the Grand Prix, the Melbourne Cup, the AFL Grand Final, the Australian Open tennis or the Australian Masters golf.
At the Masters in Melbourne last November, Tiger Woods was paid an appearance fee of about $3 million, almost half of which was contributed by the Victorian government.
How do we know the figure? Because Premier John Brumby publicly and proudly said so. (The probability that most of the money now will go to Tiger’s serially cuckolded wife is beside the point.)
It exposes as a nonsense the notion that keeping secret Lance Armstrong’s fee is somehow crucial to retaining the whole TDU in South Australia. It is more a measure of an inferiority complex. It also conveniently ignores the fact that the name Tour Down Under is already owned by the South Australian government.
I don’t begrudge Armstrong the payment, whatever it is. Sports celebrities require to be paid appearance money. That’s the reality of modern sports management. No dough, no show.
Yet the government refuses to make a full and frank disclosure, to take us into its confidence, as if we are incapable of accepting that a sizeable payment is necessary.
We get it all right. We just don’t understand why the amount has to be kept secret.
Most things Premier Mike Rann does in the public arena are thought out beforehand, coldly calculated to the last tin tack, then executed to ensure the most glowing media message is conveyed to the public.
And why not? What’s the point of having all those taxpayer funds at his disposal if people are left in the dark about what a generous bloke he is with our taxes?
Trouble is, whenever money changes hands, something else goes along with it.
Armstrong was here last year for the TDU saying nice things about his mate ``Ranny’’. He’s done it again this year, a mutual admiration society, appearing side by side at the same media events.
Good for them, though I cannot help feeling that paying Armstrong to turn up is a bit like paying someone to be your special friend on Twitter.
Still, the seven-time winner of the Tour de France is the genuine article and it is tremendous to have him cycling around our streets.
The difference this time is a state election is almost upon us. Has Armstrong been paid even more this time than year? Is he being paid to also bolster Mike’s re-election bid? Whose interests are being served?
Call me cynical but such conjecture naturally arises when people are treated like mushrooms.
I hate it whenever governments decide their financial deals are none of my business. It always makes me wonder what they have to hide.
What else are we not being told? Are other riders being paid too? What fee have we paid to the UCI for its global endorsement?
The money belongs to us, as taxpayers. It’s not like the government has another pot of gold that is not ours.
The TDU is ours as well. It will remain a great Adelaide event long after Armstrong retires for the final time, and even after Mike Rann has departed the podium.
The TDU has a feel-good factor that matches Adelaide’s self-image of a relaxed, welcoming city. We love having the world’s best cyclists here. They are fine physical specimens who set a healthy example for the rest of us. And the TV coverage draws tourism attention to South Australia.
All good.
But does the government truly believe that disclosing the Armstrong fee would place the TDU in jeopardy? I don’t.
Or would Lance retaliate by dropping Mike off Twitter? It’s a risk I’d be prepared to take.
ON THE OTHER HAND...
``Tiger just used me as his sex toy. I thought I meant something to him but all he cared about was lust. He is a selfish, heartless man.’’
The quote comes from Pancake House waitress Mindy Lawton, one of Tiger Wood’s 14 claimed mistresses to date.
I have run her complaint through my head several times and have come to the conclusion that it reveals as much about Mindy’s character as it does about Tiger’s.
She can hardly claim not to know Tiger is a married man. She was a willing participant in their trysts – obviously with an eye to breaking-up the marriage – so I think it’s a big rough to blame Tiger totally in the terms she’s used.
But Mindy is blonde – I think all of his lovers are – and apparently she is exhibiting the vengeful trait of her hair colour.
According to a new study by the University of California, blondes are more aggressive and determined to get their own way, more willing to ``go to war’’ in their own interests, and more inclined to use anger and retribution to reach their goals.
Tiger’s wife is blonde too. Uh-oh.
ON THE final stage of the Tour Down Under today, the niggling question keeps going round and round in my mind.
How much money has US cycling legend Lance Armstrong been paid by the SA government to compete, a fee rumoured to range between $1 million and $2 million?
Why cannot we be told?
In the newspaper the other day, Tourism Minister Jane Lomax-Smith was quoted as saying: ``There are many people who'd like to steal our major events and our sports and arts activities. We don't want to help those people who we know are sniffing around by giving them an idea of how they're managed.''
Did she really say that? Did she really mean it?
We are not as stupid as we are being treated.
I mean, ``those people’’, whoever they are, only need to get on the phone to the International Cycling Union (UCI), ask what it would cost to snatch away the TDU and make a better offer.
It happens. The dreaded Victorians ``stole’’ our F1 Grand Prix and they could do so again if they really wanted the TDU.
It’s unlikely that the Vics, in particular, are desperate to know our secrets on how to run a major event. They seem to manage okay with the Grand Prix, the Melbourne Cup, the AFL Grand Final, the Australian Open tennis or the Australian Masters golf.
At the Masters in Melbourne last November, Tiger Woods was paid an appearance fee of about $3 million, almost half of which was contributed by the Victorian government.
How do we know the figure? Because Premier John Brumby publicly and proudly said so. (The probability that most of the money now will go to Tiger’s serially cuckolded wife is beside the point.)
It exposes as a nonsense the notion that keeping secret Lance Armstrong’s fee is somehow crucial to retaining the whole TDU in South Australia. It is more a measure of an inferiority complex. It also conveniently ignores the fact that the name Tour Down Under is already owned by the South Australian government.
I don’t begrudge Armstrong the payment, whatever it is. Sports celebrities require to be paid appearance money. That’s the reality of modern sports management. No dough, no show.
Yet the government refuses to make a full and frank disclosure, to take us into its confidence, as if we are incapable of accepting that a sizeable payment is necessary.
We get it all right. We just don’t understand why the amount has to be kept secret.
Most things Premier Mike Rann does in the public arena are thought out beforehand, coldly calculated to the last tin tack, then executed to ensure the most glowing media message is conveyed to the public.
And why not? What’s the point of having all those taxpayer funds at his disposal if people are left in the dark about what a generous bloke he is with our taxes?
Trouble is, whenever money changes hands, something else goes along with it.
Armstrong was here last year for the TDU saying nice things about his mate ``Ranny’’. He’s done it again this year, a mutual admiration society, appearing side by side at the same media events.
Good for them, though I cannot help feeling that paying Armstrong to turn up is a bit like paying someone to be your special friend on Twitter.
Still, the seven-time winner of the Tour de France is the genuine article and it is tremendous to have him cycling around our streets.
The difference this time is a state election is almost upon us. Has Armstrong been paid even more this time than year? Is he being paid to also bolster Mike’s re-election bid? Whose interests are being served?
Call me cynical but such conjecture naturally arises when people are treated like mushrooms.
I hate it whenever governments decide their financial deals are none of my business. It always makes me wonder what they have to hide.
What else are we not being told? Are other riders being paid too? What fee have we paid to the UCI for its global endorsement?
The money belongs to us, as taxpayers. It’s not like the government has another pot of gold that is not ours.
The TDU is ours as well. It will remain a great Adelaide event long after Armstrong retires for the final time, and even after Mike Rann has departed the podium.
The TDU has a feel-good factor that matches Adelaide’s self-image of a relaxed, welcoming city. We love having the world’s best cyclists here. They are fine physical specimens who set a healthy example for the rest of us. And the TV coverage draws tourism attention to South Australia.
All good.
But does the government truly believe that disclosing the Armstrong fee would place the TDU in jeopardy? I don’t.
Or would Lance retaliate by dropping Mike off Twitter? It’s a risk I’d be prepared to take.
ON THE OTHER HAND...
``Tiger just used me as his sex toy. I thought I meant something to him but all he cared about was lust. He is a selfish, heartless man.’’
The quote comes from Pancake House waitress Mindy Lawton, one of Tiger Wood’s 14 claimed mistresses to date.
I have run her complaint through my head several times and have come to the conclusion that it reveals as much about Mindy’s character as it does about Tiger’s.
She can hardly claim not to know Tiger is a married man. She was a willing participant in their trysts – obviously with an eye to breaking-up the marriage – so I think it’s a big rough to blame Tiger totally in the terms she’s used.
But Mindy is blonde – I think all of his lovers are – and apparently she is exhibiting the vengeful trait of her hair colour.
According to a new study by the University of California, blondes are more aggressive and determined to get their own way, more willing to ``go to war’’ in their own interests, and more inclined to use anger and retribution to reach their goals.
Tiger’s wife is blonde too. Uh-oh.
Sunday Mail, January 2010
ADELAIDE is at its best lit up at night.
Especially seen from Mount Lofty or from Windy Point, where on a clear night, laid out below, the city is a sparkling fairyland sprawling to the dark rim of Gulf St Vincent in the west.
It’s always a delight to see such a panorama, like a tray of jewels on black velvet. The streaming car lights at your feet add their own dazzling brilliance. The old quarry scars and the knuckle-dragging street violence are hidden.
Adelaide returns to normal once the sun comes up. The metropolis loses its sparkle, reverts to the dull grid of suburbia, almost flat as a tack, surrounding a cluster of office towers in the city centre.
To see Adelaide at its best during the daytime, I am told, you really need to be floating in a tinny on the Gulf watching the sunrise with the Hills as a backdrop. All I can say is that unless you are going fishing, it’s a helluva lot of trouble for small return
Tourist postcards frequently carry depictions of the city skyline, as seen from Light’s Vision, across Adelaide Oval, the Torrens and the Festival Centre to the CBD beyond.
The same scene is often used as a TV backdrop for news presenters. A bland sheet of wallpaper, the kind you might find in a doctor’s waiting room. There is not much else of interest to choose from.
Nothing about this city vista makes me think that foreigners would be startled into saying, awright, what an amazing place Adelaide must be, let’s go there immediately.
No. What we badly lack is a standout piece of architecture, a landmark so remarkable, so unforgettable, that it becomes the city’s international brand. A Sydney Harbour Bridge or the Opera House.
Among the memorable cities of the world, each has at least one world class piece of architecture that provides immediate global recognition. Think San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge; Paris, the Eiffel Tower; London, Big Ben; New York, the Chrysler Building; and so on.
Adelaide, Victoria Square? Were it up to me, as an aside, I would erect a giant wind turbine in Vic Square to catch the constant, cyclonic blast up Grote St, strong enough to power the entire CBD.
Whatever attractions Adelaide might offer, globally famous architecture isn’t one of them.
I do have a few personal favourites, however, among them the Optus building on the corner of King William St and South Tce, with its cracked egg yolk effect; and also the Federal Court Building on Angas St, with its quirky blue bucket strapped to the side.
Other people tell me they like the National Wine Centre at Hackney, or the MFS fire station on Wakefield St, and I suppose we could go monotonously on and on.
But none of them makes the cut as an example of extraordinary architecture that would make the world sit up and take notice of Adelaide.
But it can be done. Think Bilbao in Spain.
Bilbao was a neglected, rust-belt port until the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art opened there in 1997, with its now famous, undulating walls of titanium.
The shimmering metal surface has produced an economic ripple effect, turning the gritty port into a tourism magnet. It’s said that 80 per cent of tourists visit Bilbao explicitly to see the Guggenheim, even if they never step inside to see the art.
The Bilbao Guggenheim cost about $110 million. It paid for itself within a year. Tourism has since contributed hundreds of millions to the local economy and Bilbao, a third the size of Adelaide, is now regarded as a world city.
The Bilbao Effect has entered the language, the idea that one building can transform the fortunes of an entire city.
The museum’s Canadian-US architect Frank Gehry insists there also needs to be a broader cocktail of infrastructure works and a real civic commitment, beyond pie-in-the-sky intentions, to embrace a radical idea.
In which case we would have a problem here.
Adelaide fancies itself as a cultural oasis. Maybe it still is. What’s for certain is our desire to have other people, outsiders, take us seriously.
Well, here’s an opportunity. I understand the Guggenheim people are still keen to establish their first gallery in the Southern Hemisphere, having made a false start at Geelong a few years back. I know someone who knows Guggenheim people.
It’s a chance for Adelaide to produce a ``wow factor’’ piece of unique architecture that transforms the city into a must-see destination.
There are plenty of suitable public areas that could benefit from being Guggenheimered. Mount Lofty or Windy Point are among them.
Personally, though, I’d plonk it in Victoria Park.
ON THE OTHER HAND
With the state election nine weeks away, where would we be without the stunts?
Opposition Leader Isobel Redmond has taken a 50,000 volt Taser jolt on the bum to prove she is tough on crime.
The shooting occurred in private but we are assured that not a yelp or a groan was heard to pass her lips. If nothing else, it proves she has a tough hide.
Premier Mike Rann, better known for being thin skinned, is more comfortable cosying-up to every sports legend who passes through town.
Tennis great John McEnroe last week called the Premier ``Randy’’, a common enough name in the US. Who knows, McEnroe may even have thought his real name was Randy Premier?
Are we having fun yet? You bet we are.
ADELAIDE is at its best lit up at night.
Especially seen from Mount Lofty or from Windy Point, where on a clear night, laid out below, the city is a sparkling fairyland sprawling to the dark rim of Gulf St Vincent in the west.
It’s always a delight to see such a panorama, like a tray of jewels on black velvet. The streaming car lights at your feet add their own dazzling brilliance. The old quarry scars and the knuckle-dragging street violence are hidden.
Adelaide returns to normal once the sun comes up. The metropolis loses its sparkle, reverts to the dull grid of suburbia, almost flat as a tack, surrounding a cluster of office towers in the city centre.
To see Adelaide at its best during the daytime, I am told, you really need to be floating in a tinny on the Gulf watching the sunrise with the Hills as a backdrop. All I can say is that unless you are going fishing, it’s a helluva lot of trouble for small return
Tourist postcards frequently carry depictions of the city skyline, as seen from Light’s Vision, across Adelaide Oval, the Torrens and the Festival Centre to the CBD beyond.
The same scene is often used as a TV backdrop for news presenters. A bland sheet of wallpaper, the kind you might find in a doctor’s waiting room. There is not much else of interest to choose from.
Nothing about this city vista makes me think that foreigners would be startled into saying, awright, what an amazing place Adelaide must be, let’s go there immediately.
No. What we badly lack is a standout piece of architecture, a landmark so remarkable, so unforgettable, that it becomes the city’s international brand. A Sydney Harbour Bridge or the Opera House.
Among the memorable cities of the world, each has at least one world class piece of architecture that provides immediate global recognition. Think San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge; Paris, the Eiffel Tower; London, Big Ben; New York, the Chrysler Building; and so on.
Adelaide, Victoria Square? Were it up to me, as an aside, I would erect a giant wind turbine in Vic Square to catch the constant, cyclonic blast up Grote St, strong enough to power the entire CBD.
Whatever attractions Adelaide might offer, globally famous architecture isn’t one of them.
I do have a few personal favourites, however, among them the Optus building on the corner of King William St and South Tce, with its cracked egg yolk effect; and also the Federal Court Building on Angas St, with its quirky blue bucket strapped to the side.
Other people tell me they like the National Wine Centre at Hackney, or the MFS fire station on Wakefield St, and I suppose we could go monotonously on and on.
But none of them makes the cut as an example of extraordinary architecture that would make the world sit up and take notice of Adelaide.
But it can be done. Think Bilbao in Spain.
Bilbao was a neglected, rust-belt port until the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art opened there in 1997, with its now famous, undulating walls of titanium.
The shimmering metal surface has produced an economic ripple effect, turning the gritty port into a tourism magnet. It’s said that 80 per cent of tourists visit Bilbao explicitly to see the Guggenheim, even if they never step inside to see the art.
The Bilbao Guggenheim cost about $110 million. It paid for itself within a year. Tourism has since contributed hundreds of millions to the local economy and Bilbao, a third the size of Adelaide, is now regarded as a world city.
The Bilbao Effect has entered the language, the idea that one building can transform the fortunes of an entire city.
The museum’s Canadian-US architect Frank Gehry insists there also needs to be a broader cocktail of infrastructure works and a real civic commitment, beyond pie-in-the-sky intentions, to embrace a radical idea.
In which case we would have a problem here.
Adelaide fancies itself as a cultural oasis. Maybe it still is. What’s for certain is our desire to have other people, outsiders, take us seriously.
Well, here’s an opportunity. I understand the Guggenheim people are still keen to establish their first gallery in the Southern Hemisphere, having made a false start at Geelong a few years back. I know someone who knows Guggenheim people.
It’s a chance for Adelaide to produce a ``wow factor’’ piece of unique architecture that transforms the city into a must-see destination.
There are plenty of suitable public areas that could benefit from being Guggenheimered. Mount Lofty or Windy Point are among them.
Personally, though, I’d plonk it in Victoria Park.
ON THE OTHER HAND
With the state election nine weeks away, where would we be without the stunts?
Opposition Leader Isobel Redmond has taken a 50,000 volt Taser jolt on the bum to prove she is tough on crime.
The shooting occurred in private but we are assured that not a yelp or a groan was heard to pass her lips. If nothing else, it proves she has a tough hide.
Premier Mike Rann, better known for being thin skinned, is more comfortable cosying-up to every sports legend who passes through town.
Tennis great John McEnroe last week called the Premier ``Randy’’, a common enough name in the US. Who knows, McEnroe may even have thought his real name was Randy Premier?
Are we having fun yet? You bet we are.
Sunday Mail, January 2010
A FRIEND who lives in the Adelaide Hills held off all winter doing a slow burn through the undergrowth on his property, waiting for the go-ahead from the local fire authorities when conditions were right.
Repeatedly he was told it was too wet. So he waited and waited until November came, when that early heatwave struck, only to be told it was too dry and dangerous.
Still scratching his head, my pal wonders what the bureaucrats consider to be an ideal set of conditions for a burn-off between the too-wet and the too-dry?
This interval, he reckons, lasted for about 17 minutes shortly after 10am on October 31.
Since the burn-off season has passed until next winter, he now is pondering how soon to make the call on whether to flee if a bushfire erupts in the gully below and races up through the broom, blackberries and eucalypt tinder towards his house.
No wonder the tough old orchardists in the Hills prefer to do their own cool burns. They continued their age-old ways as normal through last winter while the CFS crews sat back out of the rain.
Some orchardists have some fairly tough things to say about the CFS. A clueless Dad’s Army is one description I’ve heard.
It is only a mild exaggeration to say these blokes, after generations of experience, could light a fire under water. It need only smoulder to be effective, the slower the burn the better.
They know the Hills like the backs of their weathered hands, can read the wind across the land contours, and are way too smart to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with a fire.
Everything is thought out beforehand. Above all else, they know better than anyone that removing the fuel load offers the best chance of preventing a catastrophe when the weather conditions turn truly nasty.
The reported fuel load in the Hills is greater now than it has been for years, a grim prospect made worse by the winter rains that kept the CFS indoors.
It only needs a run of blast-furnace days, accompanied by the searing north winds that are typical at this time of year, and the Hills will be in desperate strife if a fire gets away.
Ember storms will also become a fearsome threat. Should there be a fire near Summertown, say, cinders could come raining down on Hawthorndene, 10km away.
Falling embers far head of the fire front were partly to blame for the Black Saturday calamity that engulfed Marysville and other communities in Victoria, in which 173 people died.
Since Black Saturday, the South Australian government has introduced a new scale of bushfire warnings and the authorities are still honing a system of escape routes, school closures and emergency shelters.
Maybe it will all click neatly into place when the time comes.
Fingers crossed, we place our trust in government authorities to collate the best available information and to provide advice on how we should respond when threatened by a bushfire.
Someone has to join the dots, as the Hills orchardists know. But it’s one thing to collect the information and it’s something else to pull it together to form a cohesive plan.
Problem is, we are generally useless at preventing nature at its most ferocious and chaotic.
What we are good at, after the event, is finding fault and blaming others.
The immediate response in the aftermath of a massive, life-taking bushfire like Ash Wednesday or Black Saturday is to hold a formal commission of inquiry, which in every case finds there was a breakdown in communications.
Either the emergency radio and phone systems become overloaded and unreliable; or there is a confusion of hierarchies among the police, fire crews and government departments.
Information is shared around beforehand, it seems, but how much of it is readily available and useful when the crunch comes? Not enough of it on Black Saturday.
We are better at hand wringing regret, promising to deal with the situation better next time, than we are at confronting the fire currently bearing down on us.
There are warnings aplenty for fire-prone areas. People should clear their properties of long grass, clean out their gutters, have a bushfire action plan and so on.
Many will comply, a few won’t. You cannot save some people from themselves through complacency or pig-headedness.
Certain Adelaide suburbs are even classified as indefensible, in the sense that fire crews will not enter those areas at the risk of their own lives during a major conflagration.
Sections of Belair, Blackwood, Upper Sturt and Crafers West will be left to go up in smoke.
Then watch the blame game really begin. Should the finger be pointed at a lack of prescribed burns, for the authorities there will be no place to hide and no forgiveness.
ON THE OTHER HAND...
AT least half the people reading this have already failed to stick to their New Year’s resolutions.
They should have set realistic goals: drink more alcohol, smoke an extra pack a day and eat pure animal fat by the truckloads.
Doing so avoids the sense of hopelessness that comes from repeated failure, having promised yourself to be better this year, only to have already let yourself down again.
To forego over-indulgence requires discipline and it’s a sad fact that most people are too weak to break bad habits.
My way, you come out a winner for a change, instead of being a sad embarrassment.
And if these resolutions still prove too difficult, look on the bright side: you won’t live to regret it for long.
A FRIEND who lives in the Adelaide Hills held off all winter doing a slow burn through the undergrowth on his property, waiting for the go-ahead from the local fire authorities when conditions were right.
Repeatedly he was told it was too wet. So he waited and waited until November came, when that early heatwave struck, only to be told it was too dry and dangerous.
Still scratching his head, my pal wonders what the bureaucrats consider to be an ideal set of conditions for a burn-off between the too-wet and the too-dry?
This interval, he reckons, lasted for about 17 minutes shortly after 10am on October 31.
Since the burn-off season has passed until next winter, he now is pondering how soon to make the call on whether to flee if a bushfire erupts in the gully below and races up through the broom, blackberries and eucalypt tinder towards his house.
No wonder the tough old orchardists in the Hills prefer to do their own cool burns. They continued their age-old ways as normal through last winter while the CFS crews sat back out of the rain.
Some orchardists have some fairly tough things to say about the CFS. A clueless Dad’s Army is one description I’ve heard.
It is only a mild exaggeration to say these blokes, after generations of experience, could light a fire under water. It need only smoulder to be effective, the slower the burn the better.
They know the Hills like the backs of their weathered hands, can read the wind across the land contours, and are way too smart to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with a fire.
Everything is thought out beforehand. Above all else, they know better than anyone that removing the fuel load offers the best chance of preventing a catastrophe when the weather conditions turn truly nasty.
The reported fuel load in the Hills is greater now than it has been for years, a grim prospect made worse by the winter rains that kept the CFS indoors.
It only needs a run of blast-furnace days, accompanied by the searing north winds that are typical at this time of year, and the Hills will be in desperate strife if a fire gets away.
Ember storms will also become a fearsome threat. Should there be a fire near Summertown, say, cinders could come raining down on Hawthorndene, 10km away.
Falling embers far head of the fire front were partly to blame for the Black Saturday calamity that engulfed Marysville and other communities in Victoria, in which 173 people died.
Since Black Saturday, the South Australian government has introduced a new scale of bushfire warnings and the authorities are still honing a system of escape routes, school closures and emergency shelters.
Maybe it will all click neatly into place when the time comes.
Fingers crossed, we place our trust in government authorities to collate the best available information and to provide advice on how we should respond when threatened by a bushfire.
Someone has to join the dots, as the Hills orchardists know. But it’s one thing to collect the information and it’s something else to pull it together to form a cohesive plan.
Problem is, we are generally useless at preventing nature at its most ferocious and chaotic.
What we are good at, after the event, is finding fault and blaming others.
The immediate response in the aftermath of a massive, life-taking bushfire like Ash Wednesday or Black Saturday is to hold a formal commission of inquiry, which in every case finds there was a breakdown in communications.
Either the emergency radio and phone systems become overloaded and unreliable; or there is a confusion of hierarchies among the police, fire crews and government departments.
Information is shared around beforehand, it seems, but how much of it is readily available and useful when the crunch comes? Not enough of it on Black Saturday.
We are better at hand wringing regret, promising to deal with the situation better next time, than we are at confronting the fire currently bearing down on us.
There are warnings aplenty for fire-prone areas. People should clear their properties of long grass, clean out their gutters, have a bushfire action plan and so on.
Many will comply, a few won’t. You cannot save some people from themselves through complacency or pig-headedness.
Certain Adelaide suburbs are even classified as indefensible, in the sense that fire crews will not enter those areas at the risk of their own lives during a major conflagration.
Sections of Belair, Blackwood, Upper Sturt and Crafers West will be left to go up in smoke.
Then watch the blame game really begin. Should the finger be pointed at a lack of prescribed burns, for the authorities there will be no place to hide and no forgiveness.
ON THE OTHER HAND...
AT least half the people reading this have already failed to stick to their New Year’s resolutions.
They should have set realistic goals: drink more alcohol, smoke an extra pack a day and eat pure animal fat by the truckloads.
Doing so avoids the sense of hopelessness that comes from repeated failure, having promised yourself to be better this year, only to have already let yourself down again.
To forego over-indulgence requires discipline and it’s a sad fact that most people are too weak to break bad habits.
My way, you come out a winner for a change, instead of being a sad embarrassment.
And if these resolutions still prove too difficult, look on the bright side: you won’t live to regret it for long.
Sunday Mail, Dec-Jan 2009-10
P.J. PROBY sings beautifully, in a rich, warm baritone, better than Elvis Presley.
Yes. Better.
It was a correct statement when both were recording in the 1960s and it’s even truer now that Elvis is dead, since P.J. is still with us at the age of 71.
You can catch him in black and white TV footage on YouTube from more than 40 years ago, in his voluminous pirate’s shirt and mop-top black hair tied into a couple of short ponytails.
Born James Marcus Smith in Houston, Texas, P.J. Proby had it all: talent, good looks and, most appealing of all for my generation, he was notorious for having his skin-tight velvet pants constantly split apart on stage.
Oh, he was hot.
True, he did have strange eyebrows that shot up alarmingly on the high notes, resembling the flippers on an old-style pinball machine. These he wisely tried to hide behind the fringe.
He appeared in The Beatles TV special in the UK in 1964 – he really was that popular – and had top-20 hits such as Hold Me. Oddly, he was not as popular in his own country, his only US hit being Niki Hoeky in 1967.
The songs that stick in my mind are the ballads, however.
His Somewhere and Maria (both from the musical West Side Story) are the definitive versions and I won’t hear a word to the contrary.
The lush string orchestrations, brass flourishes and choral backing are way over the top but soaring above it all is Proby’s rousing voice.
From the musical Carousel, he also does great versions of If I loved you and of You’ll never walk alone, the latter better known as the crowd song of Liverpool Football Club.
I saw Proby sing You’ll never walk alone on TV when I was a teenager (I am really pushing all the nostalgia buttons now) and the same grainy clip is on YouTube.
Despite the poor sound quality it truly is the best version you will ever hear, bar none. It can make the hair stand up on the back of my neck, which is saying something.
Tragically, Proby appears not to have released If you walk alone as a record.
I have searched the internet high and low for a download, from iTunes all the way through to some dodgy Russian site, and can find nothing. So if anyone out there can help.
He toured Australia in the 1960s. His concerts at the Sydney Stadium caused pandemonium and front page news. For some reason his pants kept splitting and girls became hysterical.
Trouble was, the repeated wardrobe malfunction led to outrage among the clergy and moral fright among the oldies, especially the parents of teenage girls.
One final, catastrophic trouser split in 1967 led to his being banned by UK concert venues and by BBC TV, after which his career petered out.
Also on YouTube there are several interviews, starting with the affable, drawling Texan pop star, to the older man who is musing on how Elvis, while having some talent, largely owed his popularity to the marketing expertise of his manager Colonel Tom Parker.
The one thing Proby lacked was good management. He became embroiled in royalty disputes and at the peak of his career in the `60s he went bankrupt.
For a while he scratched out a living on the club and cabaret circuit in the UK and Europe but by 1990 he was an alcoholic wreck living on the streets of Bolton. In 1992 he had a heart attack in Florida.
Still, enough music industry people remembered how great he was and helped him to revive his career mainly through stage shows.
In an ironic twist, Proby for a time carved out a niche by imitating Presley in Elvis – The Musical. The fact that he also played Roy Orbison in a tribute show Only the Lonely, and even did Johnny Cash, underscores the astonishing breadth of the man’s vocal range.
In 2004 he toured the east coast of Australia in Sixties Gold, an act with Gerry and The Pacemakers, who wouldn’t surprise me if they all have real pacemakers by now.
Playing to audiences of middle-aged women and grey-haired men with two short ponytails, Proby received standing ovations night after night.
There were no reported mishaps with his pants, for which we can be grateful. Somehow the sight of a man in his mid-60s splitting the Fletcher Jones does not contain the same sex appeal as a man once had in his twenties.
In 2008 he sang Somewhere to celebrate his 70th birthday (also on YouTube) and he looked not too bad for a man with health problems, even after six wives.
And, yes, his voice soared, if a little chesty.
Check him out and see what I mean about Elvis being the poor relation for raw talent. My work here is done.
ON THE OTHER HAND
HAPPY New Year, the traditional trigger for tearing our hair and rending our garments in anticipation of the end of the world.
For some reason, forecasts for impending human doom are hardwired into our heads, an overwhelming need to see the world destroyed in one form or another, the more apocalyptic the better.
Disaster movies make millions, as if wholesale death and destruction is an entertaining prospect. Real disasters apparently are never disastrous enough.
The current Doomsday forecast is global warming.
I accept that those who believe in man-made climate change and the disbelievers are both genuine in their viewpoints, though one of them is wrong. We’ll see eventually.
Meantime, the end of the world keeps not happening. It’s frustrating.
Welcome to 2010.
P.J. PROBY sings beautifully, in a rich, warm baritone, better than Elvis Presley.
Yes. Better.
It was a correct statement when both were recording in the 1960s and it’s even truer now that Elvis is dead, since P.J. is still with us at the age of 71.
You can catch him in black and white TV footage on YouTube from more than 40 years ago, in his voluminous pirate’s shirt and mop-top black hair tied into a couple of short ponytails.
Born James Marcus Smith in Houston, Texas, P.J. Proby had it all: talent, good looks and, most appealing of all for my generation, he was notorious for having his skin-tight velvet pants constantly split apart on stage.
Oh, he was hot.
True, he did have strange eyebrows that shot up alarmingly on the high notes, resembling the flippers on an old-style pinball machine. These he wisely tried to hide behind the fringe.
He appeared in The Beatles TV special in the UK in 1964 – he really was that popular – and had top-20 hits such as Hold Me. Oddly, he was not as popular in his own country, his only US hit being Niki Hoeky in 1967.
The songs that stick in my mind are the ballads, however.
His Somewhere and Maria (both from the musical West Side Story) are the definitive versions and I won’t hear a word to the contrary.
The lush string orchestrations, brass flourishes and choral backing are way over the top but soaring above it all is Proby’s rousing voice.
From the musical Carousel, he also does great versions of If I loved you and of You’ll never walk alone, the latter better known as the crowd song of Liverpool Football Club.
I saw Proby sing You’ll never walk alone on TV when I was a teenager (I am really pushing all the nostalgia buttons now) and the same grainy clip is on YouTube.
Despite the poor sound quality it truly is the best version you will ever hear, bar none. It can make the hair stand up on the back of my neck, which is saying something.
Tragically, Proby appears not to have released If you walk alone as a record.
I have searched the internet high and low for a download, from iTunes all the way through to some dodgy Russian site, and can find nothing. So if anyone out there can help.
He toured Australia in the 1960s. His concerts at the Sydney Stadium caused pandemonium and front page news. For some reason his pants kept splitting and girls became hysterical.
Trouble was, the repeated wardrobe malfunction led to outrage among the clergy and moral fright among the oldies, especially the parents of teenage girls.
One final, catastrophic trouser split in 1967 led to his being banned by UK concert venues and by BBC TV, after which his career petered out.
Also on YouTube there are several interviews, starting with the affable, drawling Texan pop star, to the older man who is musing on how Elvis, while having some talent, largely owed his popularity to the marketing expertise of his manager Colonel Tom Parker.
The one thing Proby lacked was good management. He became embroiled in royalty disputes and at the peak of his career in the `60s he went bankrupt.
For a while he scratched out a living on the club and cabaret circuit in the UK and Europe but by 1990 he was an alcoholic wreck living on the streets of Bolton. In 1992 he had a heart attack in Florida.
Still, enough music industry people remembered how great he was and helped him to revive his career mainly through stage shows.
In an ironic twist, Proby for a time carved out a niche by imitating Presley in Elvis – The Musical. The fact that he also played Roy Orbison in a tribute show Only the Lonely, and even did Johnny Cash, underscores the astonishing breadth of the man’s vocal range.
In 2004 he toured the east coast of Australia in Sixties Gold, an act with Gerry and The Pacemakers, who wouldn’t surprise me if they all have real pacemakers by now.
Playing to audiences of middle-aged women and grey-haired men with two short ponytails, Proby received standing ovations night after night.
There were no reported mishaps with his pants, for which we can be grateful. Somehow the sight of a man in his mid-60s splitting the Fletcher Jones does not contain the same sex appeal as a man once had in his twenties.
In 2008 he sang Somewhere to celebrate his 70th birthday (also on YouTube) and he looked not too bad for a man with health problems, even after six wives.
And, yes, his voice soared, if a little chesty.
Check him out and see what I mean about Elvis being the poor relation for raw talent. My work here is done.
ON THE OTHER HAND
HAPPY New Year, the traditional trigger for tearing our hair and rending our garments in anticipation of the end of the world.
For some reason, forecasts for impending human doom are hardwired into our heads, an overwhelming need to see the world destroyed in one form or another, the more apocalyptic the better.
Disaster movies make millions, as if wholesale death and destruction is an entertaining prospect. Real disasters apparently are never disastrous enough.
The current Doomsday forecast is global warming.
I accept that those who believe in man-made climate change and the disbelievers are both genuine in their viewpoints, though one of them is wrong. We’ll see eventually.
Meantime, the end of the world keeps not happening. It’s frustrating.
Welcome to 2010.
Sunday Mail, Dec-Jan, 2009-10
THE kale is on its last legs, a single stalk in the back corner amid the remaining spinach and spring onions.
The kale was the first thing I planted last July. Until then, the back garden, thanks to the water restrictions, was a blighted wasteland of dead lawn overrun with bindii, wireweed and perennial rye grass.
Not much worth eating was out there: a sickly lemon tree and a remnant patch of spindly oregano.
The first idea I had was to clear an extra space for herbs, since obviously the oregano had defiantly refused to die and I figured there must be other similar species that would also survive on their own.
I selected a small patch and got stuck in. It took forever to dig out the couch grass, maybe a metre square at most. All I can say is one thing led to another.
After a while there was enough room to be thinking that perhaps in addition to a few herbs I could plant some vegetables. Hence the kale, or cavolo nero.
Next, came a sack of sugar cane mulch. I also obtained a compost bin. Then a second bin, so that one could be stewing in its own juices while the other was ready to use. I am thinking of getting a third.
Yes. I have come to enjoy gardening.
It was not always the case. Blame my mother, who had me grubbing out trees virtually before I could walk. Almost scarred for life, I was.
But like all late converts, once you start on the path of enlightenment it’s impossible to know where to stop. After the kale, came spinach, spring onions, parsley, sage, mint, thyme, coriander, beetroot, beans, eggplant, cucumbers, chillies and potatoes.
I am even experimenting with a camomile lawn.
I have bestowed on the lemon tree more damn TLC than I ordinarily display towards humans. It’s responding, slowly, fingers crossed.
Even so, the lemon’s a temperamental bugger, liable to attract every passing pest. Our ongoing relationship depends on a regular drench of Pest Oil.
I lay no claim to organic gardening. I have used Roundup on the weeds and Confidor gets my vote for all the leafy greens. The climbing beans lately seem to have contracted a stubborn bacterial infection at ground level, a yellowing of the leaves. They’ll get a spray too.
One day I may go completely organic. One day.
I am actually very undemanding of plants. My view is they have two chances – live or die, it’s up to them – and the less I am involved, probably the better their chance.
The basil was the first to die. Too much full sun too soon, I think. I shrugged off the loss and have since planted some more in a shaded pot and we’ll see what happens.
Let’s put it this way, I don’t feel the same about losing the basil as I would, say, about a bird dying.
During the November heatwave I left out a bowl of water for the birds, a white serving platter patterned with olives around the rim, which I placed on the ground in the shade of the lemon tree.
The birds loved it: honeyeaters, sparrows, blackbirds, magpies, doves, starlings, all taking turns according to their pecking order. I like to think several were saved from death by heatstroke.
I have since purchased a proper birdbath, a wide terracotta one atop a matching stand. Trouble is, the birds seem reluctant to go anywhere near it. Perhaps they are in a huff. We’ll see how they feel during the next extended hot spell.
Some kind of acacia along the fence came down in a wild rainstorm a while ago.
It could have taken out the fence and done considerable damage. But it didn’t. I got up next morning expecting the worst and found the tree had gently settled into the middle of the yard, missing everything.
I accept this as karma in exchange for being a gentle tiller of the soil.
Gardening Australia magazine says not to plant any vegies in Adelaide until next March owing to the heat. I will obey, since I really have no idea what I’m doing in the garden most of the time.
Meanwhile, I am sitting on the back veranda overlooking the vegie patch and assessing the cornucopia. The birds on the fence are eyeing off the birdbath.
Does gardening make people happier? In my hand is a very, very dry martini and two large cerignola olives on a toothpick, a personal blend that certainly makes your head snap to attention. Oh yes, very happy.
I could write a column about gardening. Actually, I just have.
On the other hand...
I LIKE to cook. I am no great shakes at it although there are a handful of passable dishes that I can knock-up without a recipe in front of me: lasagne, and a leek, mushroom and artichoke pie, to give a couple of examples.
For anything more complicated, I have to closely follow a recipe book held open with a spatula on the right page.
It’s always a case of grim concentration with me, spectacles jammed on the end of my nose, studying the instructions line by line, diligently chopping and slicing, all distractions blocked out.
Still, I enjoy the process, especially when the ingredients are picked straight from the garden.
So here’s Ryan’s Balsam, a homemade pick-me-up to go with salad greens (lettuce, snow peas, celery leaves, asparagus, spring onions, maybe a few toasted walnuts): Lime juice (2tbs), tequila (1tbs), wasabi (1tsp) and light oil whisked together to make a dressing.
Vegan friendly, too.
THE kale is on its last legs, a single stalk in the back corner amid the remaining spinach and spring onions.
The kale was the first thing I planted last July. Until then, the back garden, thanks to the water restrictions, was a blighted wasteland of dead lawn overrun with bindii, wireweed and perennial rye grass.
Not much worth eating was out there: a sickly lemon tree and a remnant patch of spindly oregano.
The first idea I had was to clear an extra space for herbs, since obviously the oregano had defiantly refused to die and I figured there must be other similar species that would also survive on their own.
I selected a small patch and got stuck in. It took forever to dig out the couch grass, maybe a metre square at most. All I can say is one thing led to another.
After a while there was enough room to be thinking that perhaps in addition to a few herbs I could plant some vegetables. Hence the kale, or cavolo nero.
Next, came a sack of sugar cane mulch. I also obtained a compost bin. Then a second bin, so that one could be stewing in its own juices while the other was ready to use. I am thinking of getting a third.
Yes. I have come to enjoy gardening.
It was not always the case. Blame my mother, who had me grubbing out trees virtually before I could walk. Almost scarred for life, I was.
But like all late converts, once you start on the path of enlightenment it’s impossible to know where to stop. After the kale, came spinach, spring onions, parsley, sage, mint, thyme, coriander, beetroot, beans, eggplant, cucumbers, chillies and potatoes.
I am even experimenting with a camomile lawn.
I have bestowed on the lemon tree more damn TLC than I ordinarily display towards humans. It’s responding, slowly, fingers crossed.
Even so, the lemon’s a temperamental bugger, liable to attract every passing pest. Our ongoing relationship depends on a regular drench of Pest Oil.
I lay no claim to organic gardening. I have used Roundup on the weeds and Confidor gets my vote for all the leafy greens. The climbing beans lately seem to have contracted a stubborn bacterial infection at ground level, a yellowing of the leaves. They’ll get a spray too.
One day I may go completely organic. One day.
I am actually very undemanding of plants. My view is they have two chances – live or die, it’s up to them – and the less I am involved, probably the better their chance.
The basil was the first to die. Too much full sun too soon, I think. I shrugged off the loss and have since planted some more in a shaded pot and we’ll see what happens.
Let’s put it this way, I don’t feel the same about losing the basil as I would, say, about a bird dying.
During the November heatwave I left out a bowl of water for the birds, a white serving platter patterned with olives around the rim, which I placed on the ground in the shade of the lemon tree.
The birds loved it: honeyeaters, sparrows, blackbirds, magpies, doves, starlings, all taking turns according to their pecking order. I like to think several were saved from death by heatstroke.
I have since purchased a proper birdbath, a wide terracotta one atop a matching stand. Trouble is, the birds seem reluctant to go anywhere near it. Perhaps they are in a huff. We’ll see how they feel during the next extended hot spell.
Some kind of acacia along the fence came down in a wild rainstorm a while ago.
It could have taken out the fence and done considerable damage. But it didn’t. I got up next morning expecting the worst and found the tree had gently settled into the middle of the yard, missing everything.
I accept this as karma in exchange for being a gentle tiller of the soil.
Gardening Australia magazine says not to plant any vegies in Adelaide until next March owing to the heat. I will obey, since I really have no idea what I’m doing in the garden most of the time.
Meanwhile, I am sitting on the back veranda overlooking the vegie patch and assessing the cornucopia. The birds on the fence are eyeing off the birdbath.
Does gardening make people happier? In my hand is a very, very dry martini and two large cerignola olives on a toothpick, a personal blend that certainly makes your head snap to attention. Oh yes, very happy.
I could write a column about gardening. Actually, I just have.
On the other hand...
I LIKE to cook. I am no great shakes at it although there are a handful of passable dishes that I can knock-up without a recipe in front of me: lasagne, and a leek, mushroom and artichoke pie, to give a couple of examples.
For anything more complicated, I have to closely follow a recipe book held open with a spatula on the right page.
It’s always a case of grim concentration with me, spectacles jammed on the end of my nose, studying the instructions line by line, diligently chopping and slicing, all distractions blocked out.
Still, I enjoy the process, especially when the ingredients are picked straight from the garden.
So here’s Ryan’s Balsam, a homemade pick-me-up to go with salad greens (lettuce, snow peas, celery leaves, asparagus, spring onions, maybe a few toasted walnuts): Lime juice (2tbs), tequila (1tbs), wasabi (1tsp) and light oil whisked together to make a dressing.
Vegan friendly, too.
Sunday Mail, Dec-Jan 2009-10
FROM this end of the time tunnel, a distance of 30 years or more, I can recall spending a lot of time in the company of cops, drug dealers and prostitutes. Those were the days.
It was the ‘70s and back then the place you frequented if you wanted to meet unsavoury types who had stories to tell was Hindley St.
As a newcomer to Adelaide, it was almost the first place I was taken to visit. Possibly a strip club. An added attraction was the takeaway food: The Grecian Barbecue for yiros; Quiet Waters for felafel; Ceylon Hut for vindaloo; and Marcellina’s for pizza.
Every city needs a Hindley St, a place that serves as ground zero for the seamy side of life after dark.
Bright lights, dim alcoves, bump-and-grind nightclubs, dense crowds and the smell of booze and hormones in seedy bars. It can overpower your commonsense, a state of mind more than a place.
In my day, Hindley St’s character contained a bluff, swaggering air of threat.
There were hookers, hustlers and creeps, a lot of them criminals for all I knew. Caricatures of Italian hoods streaming east-west-east in their rumbling cars, like a motorised artery. Prostitutes sauntering around in loose tops and only their pantihose. Old derros with nicotine-stained fingers who had lost their minds.
Yes, I met all sorts.
And drugs. Lots of drugs, mainly marijuana and heroin, in the era before methamphetamine and ecstasy. (Strictly a beer man, me.)
Where drugs go, corruption follows.
A certain high-ranking police officer was said by everyone to be the man you paid-off for a pistol licence, never mind about your criminal record. I also learned the name of a sergeant who was being paid by a prominent drug dealer, a fee-for-service to provide a heads-up of impending police raids.
For a young journalist, Hindley St was a cool place.
One night in a bar I was introduced to an attractive couple around my age. She was a classy head turner: almond-shaped, soft brown eyes and flowing auburn hair, an open-necked white blouse and black silk pants. The guy was taller than average, blond, and a chain smoker.
Afterwards, I was amazed to learn the girl was a prostitute. Of course I then assumed the bloke was her pimp, and was even more astonished to be told, no, he was her husband.
A different world. Hindley St helped to broaden my mind.
Another time I heard a woman admit to shooting her dim-witted husband. They’d been managing a licensed venue until the Sydney owner ordered that it had to be torched for insurance purposes.
Hubby was given the job. Trouble was, he couldn’t bear to think of all that booze going to waste, so he cleared the shelves first. As if the arson squad was not going to notice.
According to what the woman said, she knee-capped him for his stupidity and threw the pistol in the Torrens.
Truth be told, I enjoyed Hindley St back in the ‘70s. Respectable people, however, definitely did not feel safe going there. Which was exactly the point. Because that was the main attraction, the rough-edged ambience and the proximity of danger.
What’s become of Hindley St since then?
To judge from the media coverage, it’s gone completely downhill to the extent that it now represents some kind of drunken, violent, hell hole at night.
On YouTube there are any number of phone videos of Hindley St brawls. In one, a group is sprawled across the road amid the traffic, swinging wild punches, wrestling and dragging each other around by the hair and screaming eff and cee obscenities.
Look closer, and the brawlers are mostly teenage girls in short skirts, leaving little to the imagination, unlovely types who would stab you in the back with a stiletto heel for walking too close in front of them.
It’s frightening to watch, the vicious way they go at each other. On the sidelines, young blokes are leering and cheering. Welcome to Hindley St on Saturday night.
In another video, a mob of mowhawked young men is kicking the hell out of some poor sod lying in a foetal position on the pavement. Once again, the girls are joining in with their bitch slaps. This YouTube site includes a racist commentary against ``boongs’’ and Arabs.
I don’t remember Hindley St being like this. The old, edgy frisson has since become downright dangerous.
Respectable people hate Hindley St, fear it, after dark. It upsets them to know that such a place exists within walking distance of the Rundle Mall shops. They wring their hands and mutter. The cops want to halt 24-hour drinking at the local bars.
Sadly, you will understand if I don’t go there on a Saturday night again, not ever.
On the other hand...
IN THE hour before dawn and again at dusk, my neighbourhood is alive with sweet birdsong.
There is one bird in particular, in all weather, whose cascading choruses, inflections, chirrups and pauses convey an exuberant celebration of simply being alive.
It’s a melodious trilling, a term I cannot imagine using in any other context.
Once the sun is fully up, the invisible songster takes a breather for a few hours, only to return briefly over the course of the day, as if unable to restrain itself. At sunset, the full concert is back on song again.
The type of bird remained a mystery to me for a long time. Then one morning it flew into the backyard and put on a private little show.
A blackbird. A dusky black, common blackbird, with an orange beak.
I had honestly expected something more beautiful. It’s as if nature has compensated the blackbird for its plainness by giving it a glorious musical talent.
FROM this end of the time tunnel, a distance of 30 years or more, I can recall spending a lot of time in the company of cops, drug dealers and prostitutes. Those were the days.
It was the ‘70s and back then the place you frequented if you wanted to meet unsavoury types who had stories to tell was Hindley St.
As a newcomer to Adelaide, it was almost the first place I was taken to visit. Possibly a strip club. An added attraction was the takeaway food: The Grecian Barbecue for yiros; Quiet Waters for felafel; Ceylon Hut for vindaloo; and Marcellina’s for pizza.
Every city needs a Hindley St, a place that serves as ground zero for the seamy side of life after dark.
Bright lights, dim alcoves, bump-and-grind nightclubs, dense crowds and the smell of booze and hormones in seedy bars. It can overpower your commonsense, a state of mind more than a place.
In my day, Hindley St’s character contained a bluff, swaggering air of threat.
There were hookers, hustlers and creeps, a lot of them criminals for all I knew. Caricatures of Italian hoods streaming east-west-east in their rumbling cars, like a motorised artery. Prostitutes sauntering around in loose tops and only their pantihose. Old derros with nicotine-stained fingers who had lost their minds.
Yes, I met all sorts.
And drugs. Lots of drugs, mainly marijuana and heroin, in the era before methamphetamine and ecstasy. (Strictly a beer man, me.)
Where drugs go, corruption follows.
A certain high-ranking police officer was said by everyone to be the man you paid-off for a pistol licence, never mind about your criminal record. I also learned the name of a sergeant who was being paid by a prominent drug dealer, a fee-for-service to provide a heads-up of impending police raids.
For a young journalist, Hindley St was a cool place.
One night in a bar I was introduced to an attractive couple around my age. She was a classy head turner: almond-shaped, soft brown eyes and flowing auburn hair, an open-necked white blouse and black silk pants. The guy was taller than average, blond, and a chain smoker.
Afterwards, I was amazed to learn the girl was a prostitute. Of course I then assumed the bloke was her pimp, and was even more astonished to be told, no, he was her husband.
A different world. Hindley St helped to broaden my mind.
Another time I heard a woman admit to shooting her dim-witted husband. They’d been managing a licensed venue until the Sydney owner ordered that it had to be torched for insurance purposes.
Hubby was given the job. Trouble was, he couldn’t bear to think of all that booze going to waste, so he cleared the shelves first. As if the arson squad was not going to notice.
According to what the woman said, she knee-capped him for his stupidity and threw the pistol in the Torrens.
Truth be told, I enjoyed Hindley St back in the ‘70s. Respectable people, however, definitely did not feel safe going there. Which was exactly the point. Because that was the main attraction, the rough-edged ambience and the proximity of danger.
What’s become of Hindley St since then?
To judge from the media coverage, it’s gone completely downhill to the extent that it now represents some kind of drunken, violent, hell hole at night.
On YouTube there are any number of phone videos of Hindley St brawls. In one, a group is sprawled across the road amid the traffic, swinging wild punches, wrestling and dragging each other around by the hair and screaming eff and cee obscenities.
Look closer, and the brawlers are mostly teenage girls in short skirts, leaving little to the imagination, unlovely types who would stab you in the back with a stiletto heel for walking too close in front of them.
It’s frightening to watch, the vicious way they go at each other. On the sidelines, young blokes are leering and cheering. Welcome to Hindley St on Saturday night.
In another video, a mob of mowhawked young men is kicking the hell out of some poor sod lying in a foetal position on the pavement. Once again, the girls are joining in with their bitch slaps. This YouTube site includes a racist commentary against ``boongs’’ and Arabs.
I don’t remember Hindley St being like this. The old, edgy frisson has since become downright dangerous.
Respectable people hate Hindley St, fear it, after dark. It upsets them to know that such a place exists within walking distance of the Rundle Mall shops. They wring their hands and mutter. The cops want to halt 24-hour drinking at the local bars.
Sadly, you will understand if I don’t go there on a Saturday night again, not ever.
On the other hand...
IN THE hour before dawn and again at dusk, my neighbourhood is alive with sweet birdsong.
There is one bird in particular, in all weather, whose cascading choruses, inflections, chirrups and pauses convey an exuberant celebration of simply being alive.
It’s a melodious trilling, a term I cannot imagine using in any other context.
Once the sun is fully up, the invisible songster takes a breather for a few hours, only to return briefly over the course of the day, as if unable to restrain itself. At sunset, the full concert is back on song again.
The type of bird remained a mystery to me for a long time. Then one morning it flew into the backyard and put on a private little show.
A blackbird. A dusky black, common blackbird, with an orange beak.
I had honestly expected something more beautiful. It’s as if nature has compensated the blackbird for its plainness by giving it a glorious musical talent.
Sunday Mail, November 2009
NOT long after the Rann government was first elected in March 2002, the then Police Minister Patrick Conlon, beer in hand, was standing alongside me at a Youth Media Awards presentation at the Art Gallery of SA.
By way of small talk, I mentioned how surprised I was to see that Conlon, Mike Rann and the Attorney-General Michael Atkinson were already belting hell out of the ``tough on crime’’ drum.
Odd, I thought, since poor Laura Norder was usually dragged screaming onto the hustings much later in the electoral cycle, to scare people out from behind their security shutters in time to vote.
Conlon, a Labor Left hard nut, blinked in surprise as if I needed my head read. As he explained it, there were three reasons why Laura was already on brazen show.
First, a zero tolerance approach towards crims was a proven vote winner at any time.
Second, it was better to go hard early, to establish your anti-crime credentials almost as a political brand to ensure no breathing space on the issue was left for your political opponents.
Then he grinned and said, third, a tough line on crime cost almost nothing.
Conlon didn’t last long as Police Minister but Rann and Atkinson are still there, menacing looks in their eyes, constantly ratcheting up the community’s fear and loathing. Add Treasurer Kevin Foley’s ``rack ‘em, pack ‘em and stack ‘em’’ mentality towards cost-saving on prisons, and Conlon wasn’t joking.
Are we any safer? It feels no different. Lawlessness and disorder seem to have taken permanent hold of the jittery public mind.
Of course no one wants to be looking down the wrong end of a shotgun but the question is, are the thugs spreading fear or is it the government?
GO INTO almost any public place – the shops, a pub, the beach, the footy – and cameras everywhere are watching.
Some of them are innocent enough, to capture red light runners, shoplifters or street hooligans. We accept CCTV as a fact of life and mostly don’t mind because we are law-abiding citizens and if we have done nothing wrong, what is there to worry about?
Start worrying.
We have empowered governments, mainly through the police, to keep us under constant watch. This is usually done in the guise of them acting as our protectors.
The 24/7 scrutiny, once considered an unlikely Big Brother nightmare, has been made normal by worldwide terror outrages in which Australians have died, among them 9/11, the Bali bombings (October 2002), the Mumbai terror attacks (November 2008) and the Marriott Hotel bombings in Jakarta (July 2009).
Governments argue they can only do so much to protect us without the necessary surveillance powers. Trust us, they say, we are doing everything possible to protect the nation’s security interests.
The problem is those interests involve security people who speak to people exactly like themselves who reinforce each other’s view of the world.
Think I’m just being paranoid?
Take the case of Mohammed Haneef, an Indian doctor who was on a work visa at the Gold Coast Hospital until he was arrested at Brisbane Airport in July 2007, on his way home to India to see his newborn child.
He was the first person to be detained under the 2005 Australian Anti-Terrorism Act, on suspicion of aiding a group of terrorists who two days earlier had rammed an exploding Jeep into Glasgow International Airport.
He was a distant cousin of two of the attackers, one of whom allegedly had a mobile phone SIM card which Haneef had given him as a gift a year earlier. This was the only link, later found not to have happened anyway.
Haneef was held in custody for 12 days without being charged. Eventually it was alleged in court that he had intentionally provided support to a terrorist organisation (the SIM card), while being reckless about whether it was a terrorist organisation, or somesuch nonsense.
The Federal government cancelled his work visa ``on character grounds’’.
Slowly realising Haneef was innocent, the prosecution case finally fell apart, the doctor was released and he left Australia. His visa cancellation was later overturned by the Federal Court, not that the doctor is interested in ever coming back.
For mine, the case demonstrates what can happen when the security services share information among themselves, get it wrong, lose their objectivity, concoct a scenario based on unchecked evidence, pursue an innocent man through the courts and connive with a government that was keen to gain political advantage from the situation.
For sure, the terrorist threat has changed Australian society in the past decade, though not directly through bombs but by providing the circumstances under which governments can assert ever-closer watch over the populace.
Is the nation’s regulatory and judicial system robust enough to guard against abuses of power? I have my doubts.
As for whether the watchers are being properly watched as they should be, it’s anyone’s guess. That’s the problem.
TAKE your pick on David Hicks: Is he a foiled al-Qaeda terrorist or a fool of a man?
Both, I think, since a reckless moron with a gun is just as dangerous as a coldly-calculating ``martyr’’ for the terrorist cause.
I don’t imagine many fair-minded people have sympathy for Adelaide-born Hicks, who converted to Islam, joined the Taliban in Afghanistan, and trained with al-Qaeda to kill The Infidel – the rest of us – until he was eventually handed over to the US military in late 2001.
Yet, weirdly, he has become a poster boy of sorts for human rights.
Hick spent five years in detention at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp without being charged and brought to trial. Eventually he appeared before a legally dubious US Military Commission where, understandably desperate to be released, he pleaded guilty to a charge of ``providing material support for terrorism".
In April 2007, he was returned to Australia to serve the remaining nine months of a suspended seven-year sentence, and was released from Yatala Labour Prison in December 2007.
I’m no fan of David Hicks. It’s not as if he was shooting paint balls at that al-Qaeda training camp.
Yet his case has challenged our assumptions about human rights. We had come to believe as a fundamental right that every Australian citizen was entitled to a fair go. In Hick’s case, this assumption went unfulfilled.
At best, the Australian government was indifferent to his fate; at worst, it was involved in a conspiracy with the US government to deny him his human rights – for domestic political reasons, not security ones.
The suspicion remains that the US didn’t have enough evidence to convict Hicks of anything beyond gross idiocy. Suspicion, also, that what evidence did exist had been gathered under duress or torture, which therefore was inadmissible in a proper court.
We expect the Australian government to act in defence of our human and legal rights in all circumstances. No exceptions. Otherwise the belief in justice, the right to a fair trial, even democracy itself, becomes a pointless charade.
The government in Hick’s case was willing to abandon one of its citizens, which makes it now seem as though our human rights are an optional extra, not a guarantee.
This is a truly alarming change in the life of our nation.
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to the Stolen Generations on Wednesday, February 13, 2008. He stood in Federal Parliament and on behalf of the nation said three times: ``We say sorry’’.
Sorry was the word Australia had been waiting a long time to hear. On the morning of his speech it seemed as if the whole country was on mood lifters.
Your average Australian can spend an entire life without personally knowing or having anything to do with a single Aborigine, and yet here was Rudd saying to Black Australia, we wronged you, we believe in you and we respect you.
It likely will be the high-water mark of his Prime Ministership.
Though not much seems to have changed for the better. We still get the vivid media depictions of slum living conditions, neglectful parents, child sexual abuse, petrol sniffing, drugged and drunken violence, street crime, cross-generational welfare hopelessness, chronic diseases, missed schooling, and on and on it goes.
Yes, it’s distressing to watch. It cannot be very nice for them either.
The Aboriginal risk of early death is high. The average Aboriginal man will not see his 60th birthday. They do not expect to have a long life free from pain, illness or disability.
Their incarceration rate is shockingly high. They make up almost a quarter of the Australian prison population. Once they enter the justice system, there is a low likelihood of them escaping it. If they go behind bars, ``out of harm’s way’’, it probably will be the first of several occasions.
The events that lead up to their arrests almost always involve alcohol or drugs, yet it’s a short jump in narrow minds to decide that Aborigines are over-represented in the prisons because Aborigines are pre-disposed towards criminality – the Gang of 49, it’s their normal way, criminality is a characteristic like having a black face and a broad nose.
Quickly this can become a moral judgement about the capacity of each and every Aborigine to manage their lives in a law-abiding and fulfilling way. Next thing, The Intervention in the Northern Territory.
When average white people think about the Aboriginal plight, if they ever do, I’m sure they believe it is all very sad. They might even get frustrated and angry, given the wasted decades of government ineptitude in Aboriginal affairs
People say that something must be done to fix the situation. But to expect deeper, long-lasting change is against the evidence of history. The government will get away with doing as much, or as little, as it wants.
So, sorry, self-evidently the Aboriginal situation has not improved over the past decade.
THE world as we know it was supposed to crash around us on January 1, 2000.
Digital electronic systems were going to be struck by the Y2K Bug, bringing down every computer and blocking access to data storage.
The culprits were computer programmers who, to save time, had always abbreviated the date codes from a four-year digit to two digits. A disaster was said to be looming when the clock ticked over 97, 98, 99 to 00.
Corporations and governments went into a furious spin in anticipation of the crash, literally in some cases. People refused to be flying at midnight on December 31, 1999.
The SA Education Department issued handy hints for schools. For example, in the event of an automatic watering system running amok, the suggested action was to turn off the tap.
Y2K was overstated, to put it mildly.
No watering systems ran amok. Businesses that made little or no effort to counter Y2K had no greater problems than those that had spent time, effort and bucketfuls of money triple-checking their systems.
One consequence of Y2K was how it empowered IT geeks. Where previously they stayed in the background, suddenly they had a seat at the top management table where they have since remained. I have always suspected a sinister plot on their part.
THE globe is interconnected – two billion people on the internet, and counting – and there are said to be a billion transistors for each human being.
Sensors are everywhere, from microchipped cats to barcoded wine bottles to GPS navigation in family sedans. Smartphones can browse the web and download hundreds of ``apps’’ as well as make phone calls.
Our movements can be tracked from our mobile phone. Every time we buy a book on Amazon or a dress on ebay, our personal details are recorded on a database. We are susceptible to identity theft and electronic fraud.
People are understandably concerned about invasions of privacy. The worry is this: What’s known about me, how is that information being stored and for what purpose?
Frankly, why bother?
So many people have voluntarily given up everything there is to be known about themselves by placing the stuff on social networking sites like Facebook that to now object about prying eyes is ridiculous.
Speaking of prying eyes, what’s to be made of our obsession with ``celebrity’’? Once, a person would have to accomplish something really notable in the public eye to rate the tag of celebrity, though it also helped to be rich and good looking if you were an actor.
Somewhere along the line, however, the accomplishment has become less important than the looks and money. Along came Big Brother, the ``reality’’ TV show that made celebrities of a bunch of noodle-headed nobodies who might otherwise have been overlooked even in their own families.
Behave like a brat, be a bitch, engage in a bit of gratuitous sex and nudity, throw in a bout of ``turkey slapping’’ and, whacko, you’re a BB celebrity. Trouble is, no one can remember your name 15 minutes later.
The same celebrity fixation sees late-tweenies getting around in over-large sunnies and bleached white hair to make themselves look like Paris Hilton, who is famous for being famous even if she has done nothing more memorable than appear in a tacky porn clip.
Sporting celebrity is another thing and, yes, we do love our sports heroes. Except it’s the spray-tanned WAGS (wives and girlfriends) who have shoved their shapely bodies and plunging cleavages into the frame. Sporting accomplishment runs a poor second to nipple tape.
Meantime, our limelighting Premier frequently Twitters his latest thoughts to all his ``followers’’. Stuff like, ``Good meeting with Social Inclusion Board this morning. Their work getting recognised nationally and internationally. Now in Salisbury.’’
Are we any the wiser?
ARE we a more compassionate people? We have our moments. We are admirable when it comes to giving aid to victims of major natural disasters such as bushfires, tsunamis and earthquakes.
We are less supportive of boat people.
When a boatload of asylum seekers appears on the horizon the idea takes hold in the public imagination that we are about to be swamped by a large influx of aliens that we cannot absorb and we cannot send back.
The Howard government set up internment camps for these ``illegals’’, including at Woomera and then at Baxter outside Port Augusta. The internees were contained by razor wire and by an information blackout that prevented the public from learning about the suicide attempts, the traumatised kids and the people who literally went mad waiting to be processed for visas.
The government’s approach triggered so much racism, while pretending we’re not racist, that sometimes I despair at how hopeless we are.
Still, there is hope.
Ten years ago, the sight of an African walking Adelaide streets would make people gawk. Now it’s not unusual to see migrants from Somalia, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Sudan and Liberia.
They seem to be no more evil or threatening than the rest of us.
INEVITABLY in a decade-long review like this it comes down to making a list:
• With the decline in the manufacturing sector, notably Mitsubishi, a new state economy has been taking shape in the past decade based on high-tech defence projects. Credit where credit’s due, Mike Rann has personally driven the defence effort, lining up all the ducks to secure South Australia’s reputation as the Defence State.
• SA was fortunate to slip the noose of the dreaded GFC, thanks largely to billions of federal dollars in infrastructure spending on schools and transport. Over the next decade, major mining projects, notably the BHP expansion at Olympic Dam, will create an economic boom similar to the one that has underpinned Western Australia for the past decade or more.
• Water restrictions are here to stay as a permanent feature of life in Adelaide, irrespective of the desalination plant being built at Port Stanvac or how much it rains. Eventually SA Water will need to worry less about protecting its ``old water’’ revenue stream and start to embrace the wholesale recycling of stormwater.
• The US is growing less powerful. The power focus is turning to Asia.
• Pakistan is a mess, a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism and Taliban terrorism. There are well-founded doubts about whether Pakistan has the wherewithal to deal with the threat, or even if it will survive as a viable government in its current form.
• It used to be that when we travelled overseas, we took our chances. An Aussie tourist might request consular help once in a blue moon if he were in truly diabolical strife, and still be embarrassed about asking for it. Now, it seems, whenever we are caught up in anything untoward in another country, from plane crashes to heart attacks on the Kokoda Track, we expect the consular service to bail us out. What changed about us?
• Since joining the AFL in 1997 and winning the premiership in 2004, Port Adelaide Football Club looks to be going backwards, and could even go broke.
• And to show that some things never change even in a decade: The Le Cornu site at North Adelaide is still a wasteland.
WHICH brings me back to politics, as it always does in South Australia. For while we have little faith in politicians, the political process is still how change is legislated.
The decade started with John ``Privatisation’’ Olsen as Liberal Premier until he had to resign in October 2001 over the Motorola Affair, in which he was found to have misled parliament about his role in a government contract awarded to the communications giant.
He was replaced by the amiable Rob Kerin, who lost government in a tight election six months later after Mike Rann cut a deal with the oddball Independent (and former Liberal) Peter Lewis, whose payoff was to become Speaker of the House of Assembly.
In politics, as in business and sport, you only have to be better than what the competition serves up. Successive Opposition leaders Kerin, Iain Evans and Martin Hamilton-Smith have not had what it takes to match Rann.
Does Isobel Redmond have it? So far she’s keeping her cards close to her chest (which is about to be shot point-blank by a police Taser gun, at her own request. D’oh).
He’s come a long way, Mike Rann, from his working class origins in England, through to cutting his political teeth in New Zealand, to honing his skills at the hem of his mentor Don Dunstan.
It can never be said that Rann has exceeded his ambitions. Now he’s all politics, his destiny fulfilled.
Hamilton-Smith was once reported as saying he aimed to achieve a work-life balance between his job and his family, Cabinet ministers were heard to scoff. What voters wanted, one told me, was a fulltime Premier, which is what we get with Rann (when he’s not phone texting a certain Parliament House waitress).
Which is okay, I guess, until the political point-scoring and disparagement, the determination to chop any critic into little pieces, takes over completely, as it has.
Rann likes the media attention when it suits him. When it doesn’t suit, he expresses outrage and threatens to sue. Rann does outrage well, as Dunstan did, almost to the point of looking for any pretext to appear outraged.
The state election is on March 20. The healthy economic prospects, and the untested mettle of Isobel Redmond (should she survive a damn good Tasering), probably will be sufficient to get Labor across the line again.
The Rann Decade – now there’s a term that 10 years ago few people thought they’d be using.
NOT long after the Rann government was first elected in March 2002, the then Police Minister Patrick Conlon, beer in hand, was standing alongside me at a Youth Media Awards presentation at the Art Gallery of SA.
By way of small talk, I mentioned how surprised I was to see that Conlon, Mike Rann and the Attorney-General Michael Atkinson were already belting hell out of the ``tough on crime’’ drum.
Odd, I thought, since poor Laura Norder was usually dragged screaming onto the hustings much later in the electoral cycle, to scare people out from behind their security shutters in time to vote.
Conlon, a Labor Left hard nut, blinked in surprise as if I needed my head read. As he explained it, there were three reasons why Laura was already on brazen show.
First, a zero tolerance approach towards crims was a proven vote winner at any time.
Second, it was better to go hard early, to establish your anti-crime credentials almost as a political brand to ensure no breathing space on the issue was left for your political opponents.
Then he grinned and said, third, a tough line on crime cost almost nothing.
Conlon didn’t last long as Police Minister but Rann and Atkinson are still there, menacing looks in their eyes, constantly ratcheting up the community’s fear and loathing. Add Treasurer Kevin Foley’s ``rack ‘em, pack ‘em and stack ‘em’’ mentality towards cost-saving on prisons, and Conlon wasn’t joking.
Are we any safer? It feels no different. Lawlessness and disorder seem to have taken permanent hold of the jittery public mind.
Of course no one wants to be looking down the wrong end of a shotgun but the question is, are the thugs spreading fear or is it the government?
GO INTO almost any public place – the shops, a pub, the beach, the footy – and cameras everywhere are watching.
Some of them are innocent enough, to capture red light runners, shoplifters or street hooligans. We accept CCTV as a fact of life and mostly don’t mind because we are law-abiding citizens and if we have done nothing wrong, what is there to worry about?
Start worrying.
We have empowered governments, mainly through the police, to keep us under constant watch. This is usually done in the guise of them acting as our protectors.
The 24/7 scrutiny, once considered an unlikely Big Brother nightmare, has been made normal by worldwide terror outrages in which Australians have died, among them 9/11, the Bali bombings (October 2002), the Mumbai terror attacks (November 2008) and the Marriott Hotel bombings in Jakarta (July 2009).
Governments argue they can only do so much to protect us without the necessary surveillance powers. Trust us, they say, we are doing everything possible to protect the nation’s security interests.
The problem is those interests involve security people who speak to people exactly like themselves who reinforce each other’s view of the world.
Think I’m just being paranoid?
Take the case of Mohammed Haneef, an Indian doctor who was on a work visa at the Gold Coast Hospital until he was arrested at Brisbane Airport in July 2007, on his way home to India to see his newborn child.
He was the first person to be detained under the 2005 Australian Anti-Terrorism Act, on suspicion of aiding a group of terrorists who two days earlier had rammed an exploding Jeep into Glasgow International Airport.
He was a distant cousin of two of the attackers, one of whom allegedly had a mobile phone SIM card which Haneef had given him as a gift a year earlier. This was the only link, later found not to have happened anyway.
Haneef was held in custody for 12 days without being charged. Eventually it was alleged in court that he had intentionally provided support to a terrorist organisation (the SIM card), while being reckless about whether it was a terrorist organisation, or somesuch nonsense.
The Federal government cancelled his work visa ``on character grounds’’.
Slowly realising Haneef was innocent, the prosecution case finally fell apart, the doctor was released and he left Australia. His visa cancellation was later overturned by the Federal Court, not that the doctor is interested in ever coming back.
For mine, the case demonstrates what can happen when the security services share information among themselves, get it wrong, lose their objectivity, concoct a scenario based on unchecked evidence, pursue an innocent man through the courts and connive with a government that was keen to gain political advantage from the situation.
For sure, the terrorist threat has changed Australian society in the past decade, though not directly through bombs but by providing the circumstances under which governments can assert ever-closer watch over the populace.
Is the nation’s regulatory and judicial system robust enough to guard against abuses of power? I have my doubts.
As for whether the watchers are being properly watched as they should be, it’s anyone’s guess. That’s the problem.
TAKE your pick on David Hicks: Is he a foiled al-Qaeda terrorist or a fool of a man?
Both, I think, since a reckless moron with a gun is just as dangerous as a coldly-calculating ``martyr’’ for the terrorist cause.
I don’t imagine many fair-minded people have sympathy for Adelaide-born Hicks, who converted to Islam, joined the Taliban in Afghanistan, and trained with al-Qaeda to kill The Infidel – the rest of us – until he was eventually handed over to the US military in late 2001.
Yet, weirdly, he has become a poster boy of sorts for human rights.
Hick spent five years in detention at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp without being charged and brought to trial. Eventually he appeared before a legally dubious US Military Commission where, understandably desperate to be released, he pleaded guilty to a charge of ``providing material support for terrorism".
In April 2007, he was returned to Australia to serve the remaining nine months of a suspended seven-year sentence, and was released from Yatala Labour Prison in December 2007.
I’m no fan of David Hicks. It’s not as if he was shooting paint balls at that al-Qaeda training camp.
Yet his case has challenged our assumptions about human rights. We had come to believe as a fundamental right that every Australian citizen was entitled to a fair go. In Hick’s case, this assumption went unfulfilled.
At best, the Australian government was indifferent to his fate; at worst, it was involved in a conspiracy with the US government to deny him his human rights – for domestic political reasons, not security ones.
The suspicion remains that the US didn’t have enough evidence to convict Hicks of anything beyond gross idiocy. Suspicion, also, that what evidence did exist had been gathered under duress or torture, which therefore was inadmissible in a proper court.
We expect the Australian government to act in defence of our human and legal rights in all circumstances. No exceptions. Otherwise the belief in justice, the right to a fair trial, even democracy itself, becomes a pointless charade.
The government in Hick’s case was willing to abandon one of its citizens, which makes it now seem as though our human rights are an optional extra, not a guarantee.
This is a truly alarming change in the life of our nation.
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to the Stolen Generations on Wednesday, February 13, 2008. He stood in Federal Parliament and on behalf of the nation said three times: ``We say sorry’’.
Sorry was the word Australia had been waiting a long time to hear. On the morning of his speech it seemed as if the whole country was on mood lifters.
Your average Australian can spend an entire life without personally knowing or having anything to do with a single Aborigine, and yet here was Rudd saying to Black Australia, we wronged you, we believe in you and we respect you.
It likely will be the high-water mark of his Prime Ministership.
Though not much seems to have changed for the better. We still get the vivid media depictions of slum living conditions, neglectful parents, child sexual abuse, petrol sniffing, drugged and drunken violence, street crime, cross-generational welfare hopelessness, chronic diseases, missed schooling, and on and on it goes.
Yes, it’s distressing to watch. It cannot be very nice for them either.
The Aboriginal risk of early death is high. The average Aboriginal man will not see his 60th birthday. They do not expect to have a long life free from pain, illness or disability.
Their incarceration rate is shockingly high. They make up almost a quarter of the Australian prison population. Once they enter the justice system, there is a low likelihood of them escaping it. If they go behind bars, ``out of harm’s way’’, it probably will be the first of several occasions.
The events that lead up to their arrests almost always involve alcohol or drugs, yet it’s a short jump in narrow minds to decide that Aborigines are over-represented in the prisons because Aborigines are pre-disposed towards criminality – the Gang of 49, it’s their normal way, criminality is a characteristic like having a black face and a broad nose.
Quickly this can become a moral judgement about the capacity of each and every Aborigine to manage their lives in a law-abiding and fulfilling way. Next thing, The Intervention in the Northern Territory.
When average white people think about the Aboriginal plight, if they ever do, I’m sure they believe it is all very sad. They might even get frustrated and angry, given the wasted decades of government ineptitude in Aboriginal affairs
People say that something must be done to fix the situation. But to expect deeper, long-lasting change is against the evidence of history. The government will get away with doing as much, or as little, as it wants.
So, sorry, self-evidently the Aboriginal situation has not improved over the past decade.
THE world as we know it was supposed to crash around us on January 1, 2000.
Digital electronic systems were going to be struck by the Y2K Bug, bringing down every computer and blocking access to data storage.
The culprits were computer programmers who, to save time, had always abbreviated the date codes from a four-year digit to two digits. A disaster was said to be looming when the clock ticked over 97, 98, 99 to 00.
Corporations and governments went into a furious spin in anticipation of the crash, literally in some cases. People refused to be flying at midnight on December 31, 1999.
The SA Education Department issued handy hints for schools. For example, in the event of an automatic watering system running amok, the suggested action was to turn off the tap.
Y2K was overstated, to put it mildly.
No watering systems ran amok. Businesses that made little or no effort to counter Y2K had no greater problems than those that had spent time, effort and bucketfuls of money triple-checking their systems.
One consequence of Y2K was how it empowered IT geeks. Where previously they stayed in the background, suddenly they had a seat at the top management table where they have since remained. I have always suspected a sinister plot on their part.
THE globe is interconnected – two billion people on the internet, and counting – and there are said to be a billion transistors for each human being.
Sensors are everywhere, from microchipped cats to barcoded wine bottles to GPS navigation in family sedans. Smartphones can browse the web and download hundreds of ``apps’’ as well as make phone calls.
Our movements can be tracked from our mobile phone. Every time we buy a book on Amazon or a dress on ebay, our personal details are recorded on a database. We are susceptible to identity theft and electronic fraud.
People are understandably concerned about invasions of privacy. The worry is this: What’s known about me, how is that information being stored and for what purpose?
Frankly, why bother?
So many people have voluntarily given up everything there is to be known about themselves by placing the stuff on social networking sites like Facebook that to now object about prying eyes is ridiculous.
Speaking of prying eyes, what’s to be made of our obsession with ``celebrity’’? Once, a person would have to accomplish something really notable in the public eye to rate the tag of celebrity, though it also helped to be rich and good looking if you were an actor.
Somewhere along the line, however, the accomplishment has become less important than the looks and money. Along came Big Brother, the ``reality’’ TV show that made celebrities of a bunch of noodle-headed nobodies who might otherwise have been overlooked even in their own families.
Behave like a brat, be a bitch, engage in a bit of gratuitous sex and nudity, throw in a bout of ``turkey slapping’’ and, whacko, you’re a BB celebrity. Trouble is, no one can remember your name 15 minutes later.
The same celebrity fixation sees late-tweenies getting around in over-large sunnies and bleached white hair to make themselves look like Paris Hilton, who is famous for being famous even if she has done nothing more memorable than appear in a tacky porn clip.
Sporting celebrity is another thing and, yes, we do love our sports heroes. Except it’s the spray-tanned WAGS (wives and girlfriends) who have shoved their shapely bodies and plunging cleavages into the frame. Sporting accomplishment runs a poor second to nipple tape.
Meantime, our limelighting Premier frequently Twitters his latest thoughts to all his ``followers’’. Stuff like, ``Good meeting with Social Inclusion Board this morning. Their work getting recognised nationally and internationally. Now in Salisbury.’’
Are we any the wiser?
ARE we a more compassionate people? We have our moments. We are admirable when it comes to giving aid to victims of major natural disasters such as bushfires, tsunamis and earthquakes.
We are less supportive of boat people.
When a boatload of asylum seekers appears on the horizon the idea takes hold in the public imagination that we are about to be swamped by a large influx of aliens that we cannot absorb and we cannot send back.
The Howard government set up internment camps for these ``illegals’’, including at Woomera and then at Baxter outside Port Augusta. The internees were contained by razor wire and by an information blackout that prevented the public from learning about the suicide attempts, the traumatised kids and the people who literally went mad waiting to be processed for visas.
The government’s approach triggered so much racism, while pretending we’re not racist, that sometimes I despair at how hopeless we are.
Still, there is hope.
Ten years ago, the sight of an African walking Adelaide streets would make people gawk. Now it’s not unusual to see migrants from Somalia, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Sudan and Liberia.
They seem to be no more evil or threatening than the rest of us.
INEVITABLY in a decade-long review like this it comes down to making a list:
• With the decline in the manufacturing sector, notably Mitsubishi, a new state economy has been taking shape in the past decade based on high-tech defence projects. Credit where credit’s due, Mike Rann has personally driven the defence effort, lining up all the ducks to secure South Australia’s reputation as the Defence State.
• SA was fortunate to slip the noose of the dreaded GFC, thanks largely to billions of federal dollars in infrastructure spending on schools and transport. Over the next decade, major mining projects, notably the BHP expansion at Olympic Dam, will create an economic boom similar to the one that has underpinned Western Australia for the past decade or more.
• Water restrictions are here to stay as a permanent feature of life in Adelaide, irrespective of the desalination plant being built at Port Stanvac or how much it rains. Eventually SA Water will need to worry less about protecting its ``old water’’ revenue stream and start to embrace the wholesale recycling of stormwater.
• The US is growing less powerful. The power focus is turning to Asia.
• Pakistan is a mess, a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism and Taliban terrorism. There are well-founded doubts about whether Pakistan has the wherewithal to deal with the threat, or even if it will survive as a viable government in its current form.
• It used to be that when we travelled overseas, we took our chances. An Aussie tourist might request consular help once in a blue moon if he were in truly diabolical strife, and still be embarrassed about asking for it. Now, it seems, whenever we are caught up in anything untoward in another country, from plane crashes to heart attacks on the Kokoda Track, we expect the consular service to bail us out. What changed about us?
• Since joining the AFL in 1997 and winning the premiership in 2004, Port Adelaide Football Club looks to be going backwards, and could even go broke.
• And to show that some things never change even in a decade: The Le Cornu site at North Adelaide is still a wasteland.
WHICH brings me back to politics, as it always does in South Australia. For while we have little faith in politicians, the political process is still how change is legislated.
The decade started with John ``Privatisation’’ Olsen as Liberal Premier until he had to resign in October 2001 over the Motorola Affair, in which he was found to have misled parliament about his role in a government contract awarded to the communications giant.
He was replaced by the amiable Rob Kerin, who lost government in a tight election six months later after Mike Rann cut a deal with the oddball Independent (and former Liberal) Peter Lewis, whose payoff was to become Speaker of the House of Assembly.
In politics, as in business and sport, you only have to be better than what the competition serves up. Successive Opposition leaders Kerin, Iain Evans and Martin Hamilton-Smith have not had what it takes to match Rann.
Does Isobel Redmond have it? So far she’s keeping her cards close to her chest (which is about to be shot point-blank by a police Taser gun, at her own request. D’oh).
He’s come a long way, Mike Rann, from his working class origins in England, through to cutting his political teeth in New Zealand, to honing his skills at the hem of his mentor Don Dunstan.
It can never be said that Rann has exceeded his ambitions. Now he’s all politics, his destiny fulfilled.
Hamilton-Smith was once reported as saying he aimed to achieve a work-life balance between his job and his family, Cabinet ministers were heard to scoff. What voters wanted, one told me, was a fulltime Premier, which is what we get with Rann (when he’s not phone texting a certain Parliament House waitress).
Which is okay, I guess, until the political point-scoring and disparagement, the determination to chop any critic into little pieces, takes over completely, as it has.
Rann likes the media attention when it suits him. When it doesn’t suit, he expresses outrage and threatens to sue. Rann does outrage well, as Dunstan did, almost to the point of looking for any pretext to appear outraged.
The state election is on March 20. The healthy economic prospects, and the untested mettle of Isobel Redmond (should she survive a damn good Tasering), probably will be sufficient to get Labor across the line again.
The Rann Decade – now there’s a term that 10 years ago few people thought they’d be using.
Sunday Mail, July 2009
CHECK the internet, and a basic bottle of Jacob’s Creek shiraz from the Barossa Valley can be had for $US5.59 from a wine store at Troy, in upper New York state, and for £5.97 at any Tesco supermarket in the UK.
Depending on the variable exchange rates, the Australian conversion is around $7 and $11 respectively. The same brand was on sale for $6 at my local BWS the other day.
Almost two decades ago I remember Jacobs Creek shiraz being a standard-bearer of Australian wine exports. A cheap and cheerful vin ordinaire, it was marketed in the UK as an affordable drinking accompaniment to English roast beef, in the time before mad cow disease.
In 1991, I was invited for a steak and kidney pie at the Wig and Pen, the only restaurant to survive the 1666 Great Fire of London. The last I heard, it had since become a Thai restaurant. Sigh.
The host, thinking to impress me, ordered Jacobs Creek – the only Australian wine on the list as far as I recall. I didn’t like to tell him we made better reds.
Time passes, and Australian wines have since gone through a phenomenal export boom to the point where we are now the fourth largest wine exporter in the world behind France, Italy and Spain.
Back in ‘91, annual Australian wine exports were under 100 million litres. By 2006-07, a peak year, the figure was approaching 800 million litres worth almost $3 billion.
But. But. But.
The New York Times recently declared the Australian export wine industry to be in crisis, probably a fair call. Citing a depressing litany of woes ranging from lower-cost rivals to changing consumer tastes, the paper said ``many vintners are hanging by a thread’’.
Added to which is the Global Financial Crisis; slackening US demand; the rising Australian dollar; an over-supply of bulk grapes in Australia; seasonal effects such as drought and soaring irrigation costs; ridiculous discounting in the UK market; and cut-price competition from mass producers such as Chile and Argentina, as well as by home-grown brands such as Yellow Tail, from the Riverina ($US5.99 at Arlington Wine and Liquor store in Poughkeepsie, New York state).
Who’d be a vintner, hanging by a thread or otherwise?
Gone, it seems, are the halcyon days when influential American wine critic Robert Parker, on suddenly discovering the quality of South Australian shiraz, named the 1990 Penfold’s Grange the greatest red wine in the world.
The latest batch of export figures[released July 3] from the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation (AWBC) shows the volume of wine exports is holding steady but the dollar value has slumped dramatically – again.
Last financial year, according to the AWBC[released July 7], the volume of wine exports increased by 6 per cent to 750 million litres but the value fell 10 per cent to $2.43 billion. The average price fell another 15 per cent to $3.24 a litre (from a high of $4.76 in 2000-01).
Meantime, wine companies here in Australia are struggling with the wine glut and collapsing prices, which have seen wine retailer Dan Murphy’s selling cleanskins for $1.99 a bottle.
In the US, the Californian winemaker who created the ``Two Buck Chuck’’ wine is buying up cheap, bulk wine from Australia to bottle his own Down Under range, to be advertised as the ``Three Dolla[correct] Koala".
The situation is no better in the UK where the dominant supermarket chains Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s are flogging wine at three bottles for under £10, one of many cut-price specials.
Brian Smedley, chief executive of the South Australian Wine Industry Association, says the over-supply of Australian wine grapes has been a major factor in driving down the value of exports, as wineries offload their bulk wine at discount prices.
He says Australian producers should instead be building their product range and positioning themselves at a higher ``price point’’ if they are going to remain viable overseas.
``Otherwise we'll get into a position some of the people have found in the UK where it is increasingly becoming unprofitable to keep providing wine at the price point they are asking us to supply at,’’ Smedley says.
``It's really about stepping back, reassessing and then launching yourself into the market, whether it be a new marketing approach, whether it be your labels.
``We have had a sharp return in focus, to the fact that we have got to get out and sell it.’’
Tony Parkinson, co-founder of McLaren Vale winery Penny’s Hill whose first bottling was a 1995 shiraz, has been banging away at the US market since 1999, long enough to see the gloss come of Australian wines as a category.
``It's a bit serious when shiraz, for example, is losing some of its traction because that is our mainstay,’’ he says. ``So, interesting times.’’
He says the US sales of Penny’s Hill Woop Woop range, which retails for about $US10, are reasonable because it sits at an affordable price.
``On wines over 20 bucks, there is nothing happening for us at all. The sales numbers are quite frighteningly small. But around $US10 there is activity.’’
As an insight into the American psyche, Parkinson says it’s been a case of one damn thing after another since the World Trade Centre terrorist attack in September 2001.
``Immediately after 9/11 we had no orders for wine at any price point. It was a dead stop.
``We had at that stage been sending regular shipments of Penny’s Hill in reasonable numbers. So absolute dead stop and nothing was re-ordered for nine months.
``The global financial crisis, or whatever you want to call it, almost a similar result –except I guess 9/11 happened on a given day and Wall Street has been a process over time.
``But you can see similarities – wine over 20 bucks is pretty well stopped. Why? Don't know.’’
Vicki Arnold, general manager of Heartland Wines and Glaetzer Wines, says Americans generally are drinking cheaper wine because they have less money to spend as a result of the GFC.
``One of the cut-off points used to be $US30 and I would say that has well and truly moved down to $US20,’’ she says.
``That is still a very expensive wine in the US. We are talking about Two Buck Chuck who is selling wine at $2.99.
``In the US we are selling almost as much but it is the cheaper lines like Heartland Stickleback, not Heartland Coast & Creek. So we are selling more at $US10 that we used to sell at $US15.’’
A member of the SA Wine Industry Council, Arnold has been involved in the wine export trade for more than 20 years and she is torn by what is happening in the UK market.
``I would say that nobody is making full margin in the UK. Every time we get together everyone looks and says, anyone making money in the UK these days?
``But because we have invested so much over so many years in the UK, we are reluctant to turn our back on it, and that’s how I feel.’’
Steering clear of the UK supermarkets, she prefers to use small, independent wine merchants and restaurants.
According to Tony Parkinson, who has a background in grocery marketing in a previous life, the UK market is barely worth the effort.
He says the supermarkets are selling wine like a grocery line ``with a margin of practically none for the producers’’.
``It is getting very hard to do business in the UK unless you have got serious volume and you make a weeny bit of margin out of the end,’’ he says.
``So we are not particularly active in the UK at the moment. We sell Penny's Hill around the restaurants in London but that has dropped by a third because the restaurants have been hit the same way as everywhere else.’’
Parkinson says the Asian market, based purely on the population figures, cannot be ignored and Penny’s Hill currently is following up several leads.
``We would happily sell at any price point up there. It's a hell of a big place so there is room to grow substantially. You are talking telephone type numbers for growth in both wealth and consumption.’’
Vicki Arnold, while acknowledging the potential growth in Asia, cautions against being too optimistic.
``We have been hearing for 20 years the old, if every Chinese person just had one glass of ... you know, it would soak up the glut of Australia.
``It's more complicated than that. It is not a lifestyle decision for them yet.
``As an industry, every one of us needs to spend more time there. We have worked the traditional markets because they are easier and I think we have all just got to hold hands and jump into Asia and get more serious about it.’’
One man who has made the leap is David Jacobs, the former SA manager of Radio Rentals.
Known to the Chinese as ``Daiwei’’ Jacobs, he is chairman of AUSFN (China) Company, a wine agency which he launched in 2006 in the port city of Shenzhen[correct], just north of Hong Kong, in the province of Guangdong[correct] with its 100 million population.
The obvious attraction, Jacobs says, is an emerging, huge wine market, ``the size of America in just one province’’.
He distributes a line of Australian wines sourced from the Sunraysia district of Victoria –Commissioner’s Block, Calder Grove, Roberts Estate and Red Opal – which are targeted at the mass market. Red Opal is positioned at $A10-15 a bottle.
Jacobs says growth has been steady coming off a low base but China is a
difficult market to penetrate if you are not one of the recognised brands such as Penfold's, Wolf Blass or Jacobs Creek.
``One of the important things is to be liberal with your wine tastings so that people actually taste the wine,’’ he’s found.
``When they compare what they taste of the domestically available wines, and even some of those brand wines, they recognise that some of these new entrants are very good value.’’
Jacobs says the special challenges he has faced include the ``degree of fluidity’’ and the ``broader interpretive capacity’’ of Chinese officials who administer the legislation covering wine.
``It means that every same transaction can be treated differently. I am not suggesting that is an issue of bribery or anything of that nature, it's just the nature of the beast.’’
The problem, Jacobs says, is the Chinese regime of rules and regulations, from quarantine requirements to Customs duty, is not applied uniformly.
``For example, back labelling – you will get 10 different variations of what is required to convert the back label into Mandarin. It depends on the port of entry that you take your shipment into and the day of the week and the particular individual, to determine what it is they are going to require you to do.’’
One of the essential keys has been to find a Chinese partner who knows how the system works.
``Anybody who thinks they can enter the China market, in particular, without having some savvy, multilingual feet on the ground is kidding themselves.’’
Back in 1991, within easy walking distance of the Wig and Pen, was South Australia House – when SA still had stand-alone trade representation in London – whose basement contained a wine shop deeply stocked with Grange.
The exact price has gone out of my head but it was something like 30 per cent off what Grange sold for in Adelaide.
Why so cheap? A glut of Grange? Discount dumping?
No. A duty-free loophole, I was told: even a pallet of Grange was so miniscule in relation to the vast wine lake of Europe that it was treated as a ``sample’’ shipment, too small to incur EU import duties.
I bought my host a bottle, which should be perfect drinking right about now. Sadly, we’ve lost contact.
I checked recently and the 1990 Grange so beloved of Robert Parker could be picked up for between $750 and $800 in Australia; or $US300-400 in America; or £340-400 in the UK.
Not a discount in sight.
CHECK the internet, and a basic bottle of Jacob’s Creek shiraz from the Barossa Valley can be had for $US5.59 from a wine store at Troy, in upper New York state, and for £5.97 at any Tesco supermarket in the UK.
Depending on the variable exchange rates, the Australian conversion is around $7 and $11 respectively. The same brand was on sale for $6 at my local BWS the other day.
Almost two decades ago I remember Jacobs Creek shiraz being a standard-bearer of Australian wine exports. A cheap and cheerful vin ordinaire, it was marketed in the UK as an affordable drinking accompaniment to English roast beef, in the time before mad cow disease.
In 1991, I was invited for a steak and kidney pie at the Wig and Pen, the only restaurant to survive the 1666 Great Fire of London. The last I heard, it had since become a Thai restaurant. Sigh.
The host, thinking to impress me, ordered Jacobs Creek – the only Australian wine on the list as far as I recall. I didn’t like to tell him we made better reds.
Time passes, and Australian wines have since gone through a phenomenal export boom to the point where we are now the fourth largest wine exporter in the world behind France, Italy and Spain.
Back in ‘91, annual Australian wine exports were under 100 million litres. By 2006-07, a peak year, the figure was approaching 800 million litres worth almost $3 billion.
But. But. But.
The New York Times recently declared the Australian export wine industry to be in crisis, probably a fair call. Citing a depressing litany of woes ranging from lower-cost rivals to changing consumer tastes, the paper said ``many vintners are hanging by a thread’’.
Added to which is the Global Financial Crisis; slackening US demand; the rising Australian dollar; an over-supply of bulk grapes in Australia; seasonal effects such as drought and soaring irrigation costs; ridiculous discounting in the UK market; and cut-price competition from mass producers such as Chile and Argentina, as well as by home-grown brands such as Yellow Tail, from the Riverina ($US5.99 at Arlington Wine and Liquor store in Poughkeepsie, New York state).
Who’d be a vintner, hanging by a thread or otherwise?
Gone, it seems, are the halcyon days when influential American wine critic Robert Parker, on suddenly discovering the quality of South Australian shiraz, named the 1990 Penfold’s Grange the greatest red wine in the world.
The latest batch of export figures[released July 3] from the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation (AWBC) shows the volume of wine exports is holding steady but the dollar value has slumped dramatically – again.
Last financial year, according to the AWBC[released July 7], the volume of wine exports increased by 6 per cent to 750 million litres but the value fell 10 per cent to $2.43 billion. The average price fell another 15 per cent to $3.24 a litre (from a high of $4.76 in 2000-01).
Meantime, wine companies here in Australia are struggling with the wine glut and collapsing prices, which have seen wine retailer Dan Murphy’s selling cleanskins for $1.99 a bottle.
In the US, the Californian winemaker who created the ``Two Buck Chuck’’ wine is buying up cheap, bulk wine from Australia to bottle his own Down Under range, to be advertised as the ``Three Dolla[correct] Koala".
The situation is no better in the UK where the dominant supermarket chains Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s are flogging wine at three bottles for under £10, one of many cut-price specials.
Brian Smedley, chief executive of the South Australian Wine Industry Association, says the over-supply of Australian wine grapes has been a major factor in driving down the value of exports, as wineries offload their bulk wine at discount prices.
He says Australian producers should instead be building their product range and positioning themselves at a higher ``price point’’ if they are going to remain viable overseas.
``Otherwise we'll get into a position some of the people have found in the UK where it is increasingly becoming unprofitable to keep providing wine at the price point they are asking us to supply at,’’ Smedley says.
``It's really about stepping back, reassessing and then launching yourself into the market, whether it be a new marketing approach, whether it be your labels.
``We have had a sharp return in focus, to the fact that we have got to get out and sell it.’’
Tony Parkinson, co-founder of McLaren Vale winery Penny’s Hill whose first bottling was a 1995 shiraz, has been banging away at the US market since 1999, long enough to see the gloss come of Australian wines as a category.
``It's a bit serious when shiraz, for example, is losing some of its traction because that is our mainstay,’’ he says. ``So, interesting times.’’
He says the US sales of Penny’s Hill Woop Woop range, which retails for about $US10, are reasonable because it sits at an affordable price.
``On wines over 20 bucks, there is nothing happening for us at all. The sales numbers are quite frighteningly small. But around $US10 there is activity.’’
As an insight into the American psyche, Parkinson says it’s been a case of one damn thing after another since the World Trade Centre terrorist attack in September 2001.
``Immediately after 9/11 we had no orders for wine at any price point. It was a dead stop.
``We had at that stage been sending regular shipments of Penny’s Hill in reasonable numbers. So absolute dead stop and nothing was re-ordered for nine months.
``The global financial crisis, or whatever you want to call it, almost a similar result –except I guess 9/11 happened on a given day and Wall Street has been a process over time.
``But you can see similarities – wine over 20 bucks is pretty well stopped. Why? Don't know.’’
Vicki Arnold, general manager of Heartland Wines and Glaetzer Wines, says Americans generally are drinking cheaper wine because they have less money to spend as a result of the GFC.
``One of the cut-off points used to be $US30 and I would say that has well and truly moved down to $US20,’’ she says.
``That is still a very expensive wine in the US. We are talking about Two Buck Chuck who is selling wine at $2.99.
``In the US we are selling almost as much but it is the cheaper lines like Heartland Stickleback, not Heartland Coast & Creek. So we are selling more at $US10 that we used to sell at $US15.’’
A member of the SA Wine Industry Council, Arnold has been involved in the wine export trade for more than 20 years and she is torn by what is happening in the UK market.
``I would say that nobody is making full margin in the UK. Every time we get together everyone looks and says, anyone making money in the UK these days?
``But because we have invested so much over so many years in the UK, we are reluctant to turn our back on it, and that’s how I feel.’’
Steering clear of the UK supermarkets, she prefers to use small, independent wine merchants and restaurants.
According to Tony Parkinson, who has a background in grocery marketing in a previous life, the UK market is barely worth the effort.
He says the supermarkets are selling wine like a grocery line ``with a margin of practically none for the producers’’.
``It is getting very hard to do business in the UK unless you have got serious volume and you make a weeny bit of margin out of the end,’’ he says.
``So we are not particularly active in the UK at the moment. We sell Penny's Hill around the restaurants in London but that has dropped by a third because the restaurants have been hit the same way as everywhere else.’’
Parkinson says the Asian market, based purely on the population figures, cannot be ignored and Penny’s Hill currently is following up several leads.
``We would happily sell at any price point up there. It's a hell of a big place so there is room to grow substantially. You are talking telephone type numbers for growth in both wealth and consumption.’’
Vicki Arnold, while acknowledging the potential growth in Asia, cautions against being too optimistic.
``We have been hearing for 20 years the old, if every Chinese person just had one glass of ... you know, it would soak up the glut of Australia.
``It's more complicated than that. It is not a lifestyle decision for them yet.
``As an industry, every one of us needs to spend more time there. We have worked the traditional markets because they are easier and I think we have all just got to hold hands and jump into Asia and get more serious about it.’’
One man who has made the leap is David Jacobs, the former SA manager of Radio Rentals.
Known to the Chinese as ``Daiwei’’ Jacobs, he is chairman of AUSFN (China) Company, a wine agency which he launched in 2006 in the port city of Shenzhen[correct], just north of Hong Kong, in the province of Guangdong[correct] with its 100 million population.
The obvious attraction, Jacobs says, is an emerging, huge wine market, ``the size of America in just one province’’.
He distributes a line of Australian wines sourced from the Sunraysia district of Victoria –Commissioner’s Block, Calder Grove, Roberts Estate and Red Opal – which are targeted at the mass market. Red Opal is positioned at $A10-15 a bottle.
Jacobs says growth has been steady coming off a low base but China is a
difficult market to penetrate if you are not one of the recognised brands such as Penfold's, Wolf Blass or Jacobs Creek.
``One of the important things is to be liberal with your wine tastings so that people actually taste the wine,’’ he’s found.
``When they compare what they taste of the domestically available wines, and even some of those brand wines, they recognise that some of these new entrants are very good value.’’
Jacobs says the special challenges he has faced include the ``degree of fluidity’’ and the ``broader interpretive capacity’’ of Chinese officials who administer the legislation covering wine.
``It means that every same transaction can be treated differently. I am not suggesting that is an issue of bribery or anything of that nature, it's just the nature of the beast.’’
The problem, Jacobs says, is the Chinese regime of rules and regulations, from quarantine requirements to Customs duty, is not applied uniformly.
``For example, back labelling – you will get 10 different variations of what is required to convert the back label into Mandarin. It depends on the port of entry that you take your shipment into and the day of the week and the particular individual, to determine what it is they are going to require you to do.’’
One of the essential keys has been to find a Chinese partner who knows how the system works.
``Anybody who thinks they can enter the China market, in particular, without having some savvy, multilingual feet on the ground is kidding themselves.’’
Back in 1991, within easy walking distance of the Wig and Pen, was South Australia House – when SA still had stand-alone trade representation in London – whose basement contained a wine shop deeply stocked with Grange.
The exact price has gone out of my head but it was something like 30 per cent off what Grange sold for in Adelaide.
Why so cheap? A glut of Grange? Discount dumping?
No. A duty-free loophole, I was told: even a pallet of Grange was so miniscule in relation to the vast wine lake of Europe that it was treated as a ``sample’’ shipment, too small to incur EU import duties.
I bought my host a bottle, which should be perfect drinking right about now. Sadly, we’ve lost contact.
I checked recently and the 1990 Grange so beloved of Robert Parker could be picked up for between $750 and $800 in Australia; or $US300-400 in America; or £340-400 in the UK.
Not a discount in sight.