Tuesday, January 31

When you are bombarded day and night by the plethora of media, it's hard to keep track, let alone make the connections which you need to make sense of the world. A Jane Hutcheon interview this morning of Baroness Jean Corston started to fire synapses in my brain and some random ideas started to come together.

Baroness Jean is a remarkable woman and is best remembered for a report she produced on Women in Prison (in the UK). This made me think of several comments I have heard in the past few weeks, and raised some questions. How come a 77 year old inmate of Long Bay Gaol can murder his 71 year old cell-mate with a Breville sandwich press? What are 70 year olds doing in prison anyway? How come our incarceration rate is rising at the same time as our crime rate is dropping? Is it true that there are more people in prison on remand than have been found guilty of a crime? How come 2.4% of our population provide 25% of the prison population?

And the big question - is our system of controlling crime working or is it time for a re-think?

It terrifies me that we are thinking of going down the US path of handing over the running of more of our prisons to private enterprise. If there is money to be made by locking people up, there is a built-in incentive to throw away the key. Surely a clever society like ours can come up with something better.

It's hard not to see the truth in the old socialist line that prisons are just one more way for the privileged white middle class to keep the plebs in their place.
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Sunday, January 29

'It's the final we had to have. It's the final we never thought we would see. We can dream the impossible dream. It's the dream that will come true.'

This, or something like it, was the TV introduction to the Men's Final of the Australian Tennis Open 2017. Hardly sports journalism at its best. But some producer in Channel 7 decided this was good enough for the uncritical audience who tuned in.

in any other sports event, the organisers would be devastated if the final was fought out between the Number 9 and the Number 17 seeds. But, when the unthinkable happens, you have to make the best of it. It's a shame that the above introduction is the best they could come up with. Still, it matches the quality of the ads which make the telecast possible.

Sunday, January 29

I'm having Afternoon Tea with five other people today. That's not unusual, I suppose, but their names are Marilyn Elizabeth, Margaret Elizabeth, Melanie Elizabeth, Madeleine Elizabeth and Macie Elizabeth. Perhaps I should contact the Guiness Book of Records to see if they would be interested.

Sunday, January 29

As a change from talking about Donald Trump, I feel like a little whinge about Barnaby Joyce. He only pops up on my horizon when something goes wrong but that seems to be quite often. Whether it's rorting his travel allowance to attend a colleague's wedding, or transferring a whole Government Department to boost his re-election prospects, he is no stranger to controversy. Maybe that's why he has become so irritated with the media lately. I've been tossing around, looking for the right word to describe his manner and I think irascible is the best I can come up with.

His latest comments underline his total lack of empathy for the difficulties faced by the people he is elected to lead. His solution to the problem of affordability of buying a house in a capital city? Move to Tamworth! That's only matched by Joe Hockey's advice to people wanting to buy a house: get a good job and earn a lot of money. Or, maybe, get a millionaire wife, as you did, Joe.

Barnaby's other zinger this week was to suggest that it would not be the end of the world if Donald Trump pulled the plug on the proposed deal to re-settle Manus Island refugees in the US. Maybe not for you, Barnaby, but what about the poor buggers who are stuck in that hell-hole? Or your leader, Malcolm, who is under increasing pressure to find some sort of solution to the mess your party has created. All Malcolm wanted for Christmas was a positive story. You're certainly not helping him get one.

Time to go, Barnaby. You are the weakest link.

Saturday, January 28

I heard a fellow called Bruce Pascoe being interviewed by Richard Fidler. He is an historian and his field of study is how Aboriginal Australians lived at the time Of the British colonisation. At school we were taught that native people were simple hunter gatherers who chased kangaroos and were essentially nomadic.

Apparently, that is far from the reality. Early explorers wrote about their encounters with various tribes and their society was much more complex than we have been told. Charles Sturt met a mob of hundreds near Coopers Creek where they had established a village of substantial houses and were harvesting grain, probably millet. Sturt talks about being fed roast duck and the best 'cake' they had ever tasted.

Other explorers report coming across vast fields of grain, haystacks and stores of harvested grain. On the coast, their fish traps are among the best engineered in the world. We know that the native people used fire to clear land but it's now clear it was for agriculture not just to round up kangaroos. They were a sophisticated agricultural society.

We've also had the wrong message about their housing. We can all remember the pictures of Aborigines standing on one leg in front of their wurly: a simple sheet of bark leaning against a tree. But there is evidence right across Australia of solid houses built of interleaved sticks covered with clay. In Tasmania, there were even houses with frameworks of whalebone!

As you can see, I was enthused by the interview and by reading his book, Dark Emu, Black Seeds. I think Australia needs to take a long hard look at the extraordinary society we supplanted and start to give some credit for the way they lived in harmony with the environment, and with each other.

Friday, January 27

It's been a while since I wrote on my blog. Of course, it's been a busy time as we made a quick decision after Christmas that we would move house. Leaving our little cottage at Dilston was necessary but the house we moved into in Launceston was not a long-term solution. So, here we are, back in Deloraine and, already, we are caught up in the busy social life which this little town offers.

Yesterday, we left the big smoke of Deloraine to have an Australia Day breakfast at Chudleigh, about 20 minutes down the road. What an extraordinary event! There were about 400 people there, all celebrating life in Australia and enjoying a terrific breakfast. This event has been going for years and seems to get bigger all the time. All the locals get involved in the organisation but the participants come from far and wide.

Happily, there was no jingoistic display of national fervour. A little girl sang the national anthem and the servers had Australian flag aprons but there were no faces painted in red, white and blue and no Oi! Oi, Oi!, just a motley group of people celebrating their good fortune in living in a country like Australia. Just think, if our parents had chosen to slip across the Atlantic to the US, instead of the long voyage to the antipodes, we might be having to deal with The Donald and the American style of national pride. Certainly, we have a lot to be thankful for.