Category: Friday on My Mind

We were at home on a sunny Sunday morning, getting ready for a house concert. Our two musician guests had just got out of bed when two well-dressed men wearing suits and hats came to the front door. They were clutching literature and, from the weighty look of their satchels, they had much to show and tell.
She Who Reserves The Right to Edit This Stuff When It Affects Me (Ed.) said: “No thank-you. None of us are the slightest bit interested,” which of course had no impact. By this time the dog had come to the front door, tail wagging, ears pricked, very interested in proceedings.
“I said none of us here are the slightest bit interested,” SWR etc repeated, “So you can leave now.”
After they left, I protested that perhaps SWR was speaking peremptorily on behalf of other people who may (or may not) have been interested. Moreover, the Staffie, with the rather misleading name of Nibbler, seemed vitally interested and had started that curious throaty Marge Simpson whining thing that Staffies do when people leave.
“What if Nibbler had been interested?” I asked. “They say dogs have a spiritual life.”
When was the last time someone knocked on your door and wanted to sell you something? It does not happen much anymore. There was a fair bit of door to door sales going on when the electricity industry first got privatised. But many companies ended up in the Federal Court charged with making false and misleading representations and engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct, so we doubt it is the preferred sales tactic today. I could be wrong.
We live on the edge of a country town and to get to our place you have to walk 100m down a bitumen driveway where you might encounter one or even two dogs. So no, we don’t usually get people going door to door selling electricity supply contracts, solar panels or mobile phones. And, apart from the occasional proselytizer, we don’t recall ever seeing anyone going door to door selling bibles.

There’s a classic low-budget documentary made in 1968 about bible salesmen, falling on hard times but resolved to carry out the mission no matter what.  The documentary ‘Salesman’ tells the story of four determined door-to-door salesmen crossing America selling expensive bibles to low-income Catholic families. ‘Salesman’ is reality TV before there was ever any such thing. It graphically portrays how these men deal with rejection, homesickness and boredom. Former bible salesmen Albert and David Maysles directed the movie but reportedly did little more than hold microphones and cameras while they followed the bible salesmen around, chronicling their daily struggles.
The film received good reviews but was shunned by Hollywood as being too depressing for mainstream audiences, but it seems to have endured. If you have an interest, it can be found here.
York Times reviewer Vincent Canby ranked Salesman as a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life; a film that pulled no punches. He watched it three times.
“The movie’s lower-middle-class, Roman Catholic-oriented landscape is not particularly pretty, nor are the hard-sell tactics employed by the salesmen as they pitch their $49.95 ($330 in today’s dollars), Bibles to lonely widows, Cuban refugees, boozy housewives, and to one young couple that can’t even pay its rent.
“Be sure to have it blessed,” a salesman reminds a customer to whom he’s just made a sale, “or you won’t get the full benefit from it.”

Working as a door to door bible salesman was quite the thing to do in the penurious 1920s and 1930s. It was considered to be a step above selling pots and pans and bric-a-brac, even though some organisations were already giving bibles away (the Gideons starting leaving bibles in hotel rooms in 1907). Today, with more than 50 billion copies distributed and websites where you can download an e-version for free, there’s not much call in 2015 for bible salepersons.
There’s a scene in the Coen Brothers movie O Brother Where Art Thou when Big Dan Teague (John Goodman) a one-eyed con man masquerading as a bible salesman, befriends convicts on the run (George Clooney et al). After a leisurely lunch in a field beside a big tree, Big Dan breaks a branch off the tree, beats up Clooney and friend and steals their money.
If you’ve ever watched the dark, expletive-laden Glengarry Glen Ross, about a posse of desperate real estate salesmen, hounded by their dark master (Al Pacino), you’d come to realise that for a salesman, sometimes you’d be better off committing larceny than being forced to sell to someone who clearly doesn’t want to buy.
Glengarry Glen Ross is a play by David Mamet. It was not made into a movie until 1992, where it attracted an A list of actors (Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, Alex Baldwin, Kevin Spacey and Jack Lemmon).
The drama portrays a group of salesmen; most are just getting by, but one is really struggling, probably because he’s in the wrong business, and the axe is hovering.

I was telling a friend who understands my reticent nature that somewhere in my working life (I left school at 15); I’d had a crack at door-to-door sales. When he stopped laughing and lightly mocking me: “Oh please buy this, oh, so sorry to trouble you, I’ll leave now,” I recalled it was encyclopaedias I was trying to sell, on a time-plan. I also forced myself to recall that I was plain bad at it. A timid little knock and if no-one answered I’d leave (trying not to notice the lace curtain twitching). ‘Dangerous dog’ sign – I was out of there.

Decades later, having found my niche working in the news side of the newspaper business (which exists, let there be no doubt, to sell advertising space), I had cause to remember the day I succumbed to a door-to-door salesman.
He came to my door referred by his nephew, Bazza, a journalist colleague at the time. Bazza knew I was in the market for a new vacuum cleaner so he told his uncle to drop by. Uncle came in with the top of the line Electrolux and proceeded to show me just why the $50 second-hand one wasn’t doing the job.
He had me there. I could have bought a 20-year-old Corolla for what that machine cost, though it was on what the old folk called the “never-never.” But hey, more than 30 years later, it still works!
The dog has chewed the end off the rubber nozzle, the hose is held together with gaffer tape, we make filters out of scraps of foam (I didn’t know that – Ed.) and buy bags by the dozen lest they become obsolete. But I repeat – it still works.

It sometimes makes me sad to think that this old vacuum cleaner outlived Bazza and probably outlived his Uncle too.
I hope he spent his commission wisely.

I was standing in the ensuite talking to my ol’ fella the other night.
No, wait; it’s not what you think. I had got up for a pee in the middle of the night and, not unusually, nothing much was happening.
“Jeez, mate,” I grumbled, sotto voce in the ensuite. “Bloody get on with it, will you?”
Once it starts, depending how long I’ve been holding on, it can take forever. The worst possible thing I can do is sit in a car for hours and not pull over for a pee when I first feel the need. Leave it too long and you could watch a whole episode of Better Homes and Gardens while I’m still in the loo.
So yeah, things can be a little slow in the waterworks department. Life is generally better if I go at the first hint that I need a pee. Now when you are on the road a lot, as we have been, this is not as easy as it sounds. True, blokes can just pull off the road, get out of the car and fertilise a tree. But we don’t like to be a burden.
“What, again? Didn’t you just do that?”
The other thing about travelling is you are sitting on your bum for two to three hours at a time. In the sitting position, you are putting pressure on all of the bits that adversely affect the prostate, which for those who did not know or don’t even want to think about it, is in an inaccessible place between a man’s testicles and his bottom.

Ah, I sense all of my male readers over 60 wincing and empathising about the myriad bladder problems that affect men of that age or older. The usual problem is an enlarged prostate gland, which restricts the flow of urine to one degree or another. It is a complex problem and one cannot immediately assume the prostate is the culprit. Sometimes the bladder or other organs are at fault. The key issue with prostate problems is that urine can be retained in the bladder and that, my friends, is when you go to see an urologist.
There is only one way a GP can assess whether or not your prostate is enlarged and that involves a rather invasive procedure where the doctor takes the only available route to digitally examine the prostate. The problem most doctors have is convincing men to have a routine examination – once a year is not a big ask, but you ought to do it from the age of 45, especially if there is a family history of cancer.

The women who read this column will know that what I’m going to say is truer than their men would care to admit. While the women of the house have their annual mammograms and pap smears diarised from one year to the next, their husbands could go on covertly carrying a bladder problems for years before it might occur to them that it’s a problem.
Having a digital examination to diagnose an enlarged prostate is not what most blokes would volunteer for, especially when forewarned. It does not hurt, as such; but it’s darned uncomfortable.
Not all enlarged prostates become cancerous, but it is fairly prevalent. According to the Cancer Council, and they should know, one in 5 men will get prostate cancer before they turn 85. Generally speaking, it is one of the slower growing cancers and as doctors are fond of telling their 76 year old patients, “You’ll die of something else before this gets you”. This is not always the case, so anyone diagnosed with the disease ought to keep close tabs on its progress.

Prostate cancer can be detected by a simple blood test (prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening). This blood test alone has increased prostate cancer awareness since it was first used as a screening tool almost 28 years ago.
Advances in Urology 2012 carried a scholarly article that discussed the problem of over-diagnosis and over-treatment. Here’s a link so you can print it out and read while having a sit-down pee. http://www.hindawi.com/journals/au/2012/862639/
The authors of this article say that due to the largely indolent course of the disease and the unspecific nature of the PSA test, increased incidence has largely been associated with cancers that would not go on to cause death. This leads to over-diagnosis and over-treatment, which is exacerbated by the high risk of side effects that put patients’ quality of life at risk, with little or no survival benefit.
“PSA testing, while it helps to discover mortal cancers, can also often lead to the discovery of non-mortal cancers, or those which would never have been noticed without screening. Given that 20–50% of asymptomatic men are found to harbor prostate cancer upon autopsy, it follows that the PSA test leads to a much greater detection of cancers, both mortal and non-mortal.”
The National Cancer Institute says the rising incidence of prostate cancer is in contrast to the relatively unchanged mortality rate from 1975 to 2007. The number of newly-discovered prostate cancers is over seven times greater than the number of prostate cancer related deaths.

The low mortality thing is some comfort, but no-one can guarantee that the cancer won’t misbehave in between check-ups. In 2010, 19,821 new cases of prostate cancer were diagnosed in Australia. This represents 30% of all cancers diagnosed in Australian men. Being an occasional betting man, it seems to me that the odds are in favour of getting things checked out. The first GP I consulted about this issue examined me and after some discussion counselled against chemical solutions. In other words, you can take pills to improve the flow of urine, but, ahem, sometimes it improves too much.
According to the World Health Organisation, 200 million people have some degree of bladder control problem. About a quarter of the world’s older people develop incontinence, but it is both preventable and treatable. You just have to front up and talk to a medico about it first.

Medical clinics today often have annual health checks where a nurse takes a medical history before you see the GP. Nurse will take your blood pressure, look in your ears, listen to your lungs and then ask all kinds of questions about your life like, “Are you still active?” Yeh, I mow the lawns and trim the hedge. “No, I mean in the bedroom, mate.”
So, it’s that time of year again – a full blood screen, a lung function test, a flu shot and then playing 20 questions with the nurse. Just so you know – Medicare pays!
Some of the questions Nurse asked last year were about this very subject, like how many times I have to go and pee, do I ever feel like I’m not finished, and, do I “leak”. I could tell you, but a man is entitled to some dignity, don’t you think?

So there you go; another weekly episode of what my songwriter friend Fred Smith calls “stuff you didn’t know that you need to know”. Thanks for giving the column a plug at the house concert, mate – I’d love to keep chatting, but more importantly, I gotta go pee.

I’m taking a week off to promote our album, The Last Waterhole, which is getting noticed after a national radio interview and a 4-star review in the Courier-Mail. Enjoy this piece by my trusty offsider,  Laurel Wilson, who learned a thing or two about carpentry and plumbing at her Daddy’s knee.

 

When Fred called the other day, Bob told me that when he picked up the phone he said “You’re lucky we answered. Laurel’s out fixing a leak in the caravan and I’m doing the vacuuming.” Reportedly, there were no sounds of derision or disapproval from the caller – not surprising, given he is a man of taste and sensitivity. But this apparently somewhat unusual division of labour around our place does cause consternation at times.
It’s an old van and things go bung occasionally, usually when we’re a long way from our usual sources of reliable fixer uppers. On one occasion, we were having trouble with the 12 volt lights. Now, 12 volt systems are not to be trifled with and they can give you a bit of a belt if you put the screwdriver in the wrong place at the wrong time. But unlike 240v, which is best left to the experts, fixing 12v idiosyncrasies is usually considered to be within the capabilities of the dedicated caravanner. I’ve had the lighting system explained to me, I know where the battery and the fuse box are and have my head around the concept of the Anderson plug, unlike “He Who Usually Writes This Column But Is Having a Nap” (HWUWTCBIHAN or HWU for short).

Battery? What battery?

So, when we rolled into Mt Isa with a broken light bulb melted into the socket, I began explaining the problem to the (older) auto electrician. I don’t consider myself softly spoken, but for some reason this particular chap seemed incapable of hearing what I was saying. Surely it couldn’t be that he was ignoring me, in favour of discussing the matter with HWU? At any rate, having failed to elicit the information from the latter, OAE summoned his apprentice, who was quite happy to discuss the problem with me. He took out his mobile and used the ‘torch app’ to get a good look at the offending light (a very useful app, that one: Ed.) The result? One fixed light and evidence of a young man in a country town who has obviously adapted to the changing world of technology and the notion that women can actually have a clue about how to fix things.
Division of labour by gender probably had its beginnings in the Palaeolithic era, when men, generally being the stronger and faster of the two sexes, were the ones who went out slaying Mastodons, while the females stayed in the cave and nursed the young. But was this the case, or is it merely the supposition of (usually) male anthropologists? For all we know, there may well have been big, strong, fast women who loved hunting, as well as men who preferred to stay in the cave and look after the kids (and do rock-art:Ed)
But the conventional division of labour persists. For many, it still seems odd when women are the main bread-winners and their partners stay home to raise the children. Bob even wrote a song about it some time ago, called ‘Househusbands’ (which he was for a while). And as it happened, Fred (remember Fred?), was home looking after a sick child, utilising his employer’s parental leave scheme, which apparently does not discriminate.

The visionary head mistress

I was fortunate to attend a High School where the Head Mistress (as they were called in those days) was an advocate of higher education for girls. The expectation was that ‘her girls’ would continue their studies after Grade 12, attending university or teachers’ college if possible. This was not generally the case in the 1960s and earlier.
The percentage of females to males participating in tertiary studies increased from 23% in 1960 to 33% in 1972 and currently tops 55%. However this does not translate into equality at work. According to the Australian Government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency, women comprise 35% of all full-time employees, but earn, on average, 17.5% less than male full-time workers. And female graduates’ salaries average only 90% of men’s.
Just over 5% of women aged under 64 have post-graduate qualifications, compared to just under 5% of men, and women make up 45% of the ‘professional’ ranks, so, at least on the grounds of qualifications, there should be no reason for women to be under-represented in executive positions. But according to the 2012 Census of Women in Leadership, only 3% of chair positions and 3.5% of CEO positions in ASX 200 companies are held by women. As of 2014, just 17% of directors in these companies were women. Over 20% of ASX 200 companies have no women on their boards.

Peter who?

The Guardian’s take on this situation demonstrated a less conventional approach to statistics – on the 6th of this month, the newspaper claimed that there are fewer women at the head of top Aussie companies than there are men named Peter. Perhaps there’s an idea in there for women aspiring to higher positions – change your name to Peter.
The stats are better for Government board appointments – 38% of board members were women, as of 30th June 2102.
Australia’s population consists of 50% male and 50% female, (Yes, I know there are other options, but that’s how the statisticians write it.) So to have equal representation in government, one could expect the same ratio. However, as of 1 January 2012, fewer than 30% of all Federal Parliamentarians across Australia were women. The current Federal Cabinet has one woman. The Senate does somewhat better, with 38% of Senators being women. In 2012, the proportion of female State and Territory parliamentarians was 30% – slightly higher than the proportion of Federal Parliamentarians, but still less than a third.

The atavistic feminist

It’s 2015. There are still enormous differences between what one could expect for women, based on their educational and employment status, compared to what is actually the case at present.
Hm, that sounds like feminism – something with which Julie Bishop apparently disagrees. I find this somewhat surprising, as feminism could be said to be based on at least the small ‘l’ liberal view that a just society results from the free choices of educated and aware people; that social problems arise primarily from ignorance and social constraints on freedom of choice. Gender inequality, then, results primarily from socialisation that forces people to grow up with distorted and harmful ideas about males and females and from cultural ideas that restrict people’s freedom to freely choose how to live their lives.

Yup, on that definition, I’m a feminist, even if in some deeply hidden atavistic part of my brain, I secretly believe that HWU should know how to fix that leaky caravan pump.

In the late 1990s, a Brisbane developer was briefing me on the future for the city’s yet-to-happen apartment boom. The empty nesters from Clayfield and Ashgrove (old suburbs, big houses and yards), would be the first to opt for the high rise apartment with views of the Story Bridge, he said. But not all of them would stay.

Living in an apartment is not for everyone – there are the benefits of lifestyle, location, security, city views and, for the busy professional, compact living with minimal housework. The body corporate takes care of all the maintenance issues and the utilities. All you have to do is pay and obey the rules. But downsizing comes at a price.
My developer contact was explaining how when the empty nesters sell their large Clayfield or Ascot family homes and move to a three-bedroom apartment with plasterboard walls, the reality starts to set in. What will we do with our antique mahogany dresser, the Yamaha baby grand, the eight-piece walnut dining table and matching chairs? We can get gallery wall hangings for some of the paintings and family portraits, but it’s not the same, somehow. And now that we’re in this apartment, which cost a pretty penny, let me tell you, what will we do with the garden tools and the ride-on mower, given we have been allocated one car space with about 5cm to spare on either side?

This is where the self-storage business comes into its own. Australians move house every seven years on average and typically the person on the move will be going interstate for a job on a two or three-year contract and renting an apartment when they get there. So they put most of their “stuff” in storage and pay at least $250 a month for the privilege.
So after a year or of living above the city and tiring of the traffic noise and nightclub doof beats floating up to the balcony, our typical empty nesters will sell and move to a ground-floor townhouse which is in the suburbs and has bigger built-ins, a small yard and a two-car garage.
The next wave of apartment buyers would be ambitious urban professionals, our developer continued; 32, childless and match-fit to work 16-hour days as the job demands it. They finish work about 8pm, walk next door to the Japanese restaurant, then take the lift to their apartment, where they collapse into bed until the smart phone alarm demands at 5.00am that they go downstairs to the lap pool and the gym. They are in the office by 6am and the whole circus starts again.

Queensland’s capital city was slow to get started building high rise apartments. First came David Devine’s medium-rise, affordable units in the heart of the city’s nightclub precinct, Fortitude Valley. From the year 2000 onwards, Brisbane City Council allowed more development amongst the city’s office towers. Now the tallest buildings in the CBD are either residential towers or a mixture of residential, office and retail.
In Sydney, where we spent couple of nights this week in a friend’s apartment, low to medium-density apartment blocks are proliferating in the inner western suburbs. Sydney town planners are bowing to the pressures of population growth, decreeing that medium density living is the best use of land along major traffic routes like Parramatta Road.
We took advantage of the inner city location to stroll from our friend’s apartment through Annandale parkland to the harbour, joining city workers and their dogs taking their daily exercise in the daylight saving hour. In this area, Sydney’s former trotting arena, Harold Park, is fast becoming unrecognisable, as listed developer Mirvac progresses its series of low to medium-density apartment blocks and terraced homes. The first stage of these, Eden, was launched in 2012 and sold out in hours, at an average price of $1.7 million. The Harold Park master plan is for 1,250 dwellings – one, two and three-bedroom apartments and the aforementioned terraced houses – 21st century versions of the old walk-up terrace house, some running to three levels.
The Trio apartment project, on the site of the old Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children, has been developed since 2007 into 11 medium density apartment buildings, each with two or more levels of secure basement parking. Trio sits within a landscaped environment of walking and cycle paths with restaurants and cafes just a few minutes’ walk away.

You’ll need $810k to buy into this dream

If that all sound attractive, good luck with the mortgage. The median apartment price within inner city Sydney is $810k, with prices rising 4.4% last year. Real estate folklore has it the only way to make some money along the way is to buy off the plan (before the building starts), sell at a profit and do it all over again.
By far the biggest participants in this market are Asian investors who often buy more than one apartment in the same building. Typically, their young adult children will live in these spaces while studying law, dentistry, architecture, engineering or medicine at one of our fee-paying universities. Their shrewd parents don’t mind making this kind of investment, as they will probably make a profit along the way or just hold for the next generation.
Now that we’ve been living in a country town for more than a decade, Sydney’s fast-paced, noisy, impatient atmosphere can be a little wearing. There’s a huge buzz about the city; you can eat out anywhere at any time of the day or night. (It is said there is a café somewhere in inner Sydney that closes only one hour per day (4am to 5am) for cleaning). But as its population of 4.57 million continues to grow (78% of the NSW growth rate in 2013-2014 was in the Greater Sydney area), it is clear to see why the city planners want real estate to go up and not further out.
As you might have read, the median house price in Sydney is now $1 million, which explains a bit about the demand for inner city apartments. The alternative is to buy a long way out and commute to work. Thousands of people already commute from places as far north as Wyong (93 kms) south from Kiama or Jervis Bay (100kms) or west from Katoomba (101kms).

Living in smaller spaces

While apartment dwellers enjoy proximity to the city heart, they have to get used to living in a compact space. Apartments are getting smaller as designers learn how to make more with less. One bedroom studios are rarely more than 50sqm, two-bedroom apartments around 85sqm and three bedroom units range from 100sqm to 125sqm. Compare that with your two-level McMansion in suburbia (300sqm is common). But apartment-dwellers can choose to do without a car, find time for a fitness schedule, stroll to theatres, cinemas or restaurants and become expert at using the synchronised public transport system. And they don’t have to mow lawns.
All this will come back to us, I’m sure, when driving down the 97m driveway to our two-level brick home on half an acre after being away for two weeks. The hedge needed trimming when we left. Hope we can tidy it all up before the house concert on the 29th!

We were softly singing ‘Andy’s Gone with Cattle’ somewhere out near Sofala (western NSW), while picking out dead locusts from our radiator and various parts of the vehicle’s front grille. It was the Mike Jackson version of Henry Lawson’s classic poem we were humming, about a drover gone a-droving, with his missus and his dog pining for him. Mike told us he wrote his tune (one of many versions) in a minor key, as he read the song as a lament and felt the underlying melancholy of the minor key suited it very well.
We were driving across the western plains of NSW on our way to the Blue Mountains Music Festival when we ran into what some journalists would term “a locust plague of biblical proportions”.

Farmers out this way have been reporting swarms of locusts since late January and it seems they are still about. The cosmetic damage locusts inflict on vehicles does not compare to the damage they inflict on cereal crops in Australia.
Australian plague locusts reached such numbers in late 2010 that the world’s media picked up on the story because (a) it made for great television and (b) the statistics are sort of scary. A swarm of locusts one kilometre wide can chew through 10 tonnes of crops in a day. These ugly insects can consume up to a third of their body weight, so even low density swarms can wipe out an emerging wheat crop in a couple of days.

We arrived in Gulgong with a messy windscreen, planning a visit to the Henry Lawson Centre. Gulgong claims Lawson as a famous son, as he spent his childhood and early teens in locations between Gulgong and Mudgee. The environment and the experiences of these years greatly influenced Lawson. The Henry Lawson Centre walks the visitor through the phases of the writer’s life, from his birth in 1867 to his death in 1922.

As it turned out, a coachload of tourists beat us to the 10am opening, where they were being given a talk by Hazel, a local volunteer. Hazel let us know a few things we did not know about Lawson (e.g. he had a very productive period while living in New Zealand) and the things everyone should know – his influence on justice for workers, his advocacy for a republic, the plight of the poor, and support for the emancipation of women.

The Gulgong museum has some macabre artefacts of Lawson’s life, including a bronzed “death mask” of his right hand and the forceps a dentist used to extract all but one of Henry’s teeth (leaving him with the means by which to grip his pipe!).
There is also a first day cover from 1949, when Lawson’s image was emblazoned upon an Australian stamp. His craggy features also adorned the $10 note until the introduction of polymer currency in 1993. We need to reinstate Henry’s image on an Australian bank note. My suggestion would be to replace the Queen’s portrait on the $5 note when we become a republic.

I was amused and informed upon reading Lawson’s letter to the Bulletin magazine in 1903, the subject being his (temporary) sobriety. Problem drinkers could do worse than read this stark baring of the soul; the contradicting internal arguments, the ironic humour. You can find this on the Internet easily enough, which will save me breaching the “fair dealing” provisions of the Copyright Act. Lawson proclaims he is “awfully surprised” to find himself sober. He goes on to discuss drink and drunkenness and ask why a man does it to himself.
“I get drunk because I am in trouble and I get drunk because I’ve got out of it.”
“I get drunk because I had a row last night and made a fool of myself and it worries me, and when things are fixed up I get drunk to celebrate it.”
I spent an hour or so looking into Henry’s oeuvre, as I was fairly sure he had not written of locusts, but if he had, it would have been with the stark honesty he described his experiences in the bush. Lawson was often the bad cop, telling it like it was, whereas good cop A.B Paterson overly-romanticised the bush.

Lawson was sent out to Bourke by the Bulletin’s owner J.F. Archibald, the hidden agenda being to dry poor Henry out, as he was a perpetually broke drunk who often fell off the wagon. Lawson came back from western NSW with graphic images of the drought. In “Up the Country” he begins: “I am back from up the country – very sorry that I went.” He describes “burning wastes of barren soil and sand,” “barren ridges, gullies, ridges! Where the ever maddening flies – Fiercer than the plagues of Egypt – swarm about your blighted eyes.”
Henry Lawson’s work has often appealed to composers and folk musicians, who latched on to the easy meter of his ballads, the immaculate scansion and the succinct use of language.

The Gulgong Lawson Centre’s collection of CDs could do with some updating; the readings by Jack Thompson and Leonard Teale and the Slim Dusty album are just a representation of what has been produced.
At the very least, they ought to find a copy of Chris Kempster’s 1989 collection, The Songs of Henry Lawson (a second edition was released by the NSW Folk Federation in 2008). And former Redgum front man John Schumann and his Vagabond Crew are known for their Lawson album released in 2005.
We saw the Vagabond Crew perform this work at the Gympie Muster, when they engaged veteran stage actor Max Cullen to play the part of the ghost of Henry Lawson. The shabbily-dressed ghost, with battered hat and stick, would emerge from the ruck of the band as the song finished, reciting a poem and giving the audience a glimpse into the peripatetic life of one of our favourite literary sons.
There are many versions of Lawson’s poems set to music – ‘Andy’s Gone with Cattle’ and ‘Scotts of the Riverina’ in particular.
I have often marvelled at Lawson’s knack for observing whole landscapes and human longing in a handful of words.
“The gates are out of order now, in storms the ‘riders’ rattle,
For far across the border now Our Andy’s gone with cattle.”
“The old man burned his letter, the first and last he burned
And he scratched his name form the Bible when the old woman’s back was turned.”
(Scotts of the Riverina)

Poor Henry, chronically poor, deaf since childhood, not ever in robust health, pursued for maintenance by a needy ex-wife, he died of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged just 55 – an age which today is considered to be the prime of life.
Lawson’s life could become a major Australian movie, proceeds of which should go into trust to support promising writers; to help them get started, to send them to the Buttery if they fall off the wagon, and to stop ruthless publishers ripping them off.
Not that this is ever likely to happen under a conservative government or a monarchy.
“Wait here, second class.”

So I’m at the IGA checkout buying three or four organic items, as you do. The young woman behind the till has a Trainee badge on her shirt. “Plastic bags?”

“It’s OK, I brought my souvenir Fred Smith ‘Dust of Uruzgan’ cotton bag,” says I, with a subtle hint about a splendid house concert coming up on the 29^th of March.

“Community benefit number?”

“Umm, it starts with a 2…”

“Savings or credit?”

“Credit,” I say, as it is four more days until the Centrelink payment hits the bank account. I sneak a look at a card inside my wallet where several pins are cleverly disguised as phone numbers. I know, I know, the banks tell you never to do that – in fact, if my account gets hacked, some clever Johnnie at Bobsbank will be on to me, claiming poor card security on my part – and he may have a point.

“Pinandok.”

Pardon? Oh, yes. Surprise – it works.

“Extra cash out?”

“Well, if you’re handing it out, yes.”

She has a literal sense of humour – frowns and thinks to herself, “He’s just like my Dad, always a joke or a pun and he expects you to get it every time.”

So I leave the Supermarket and head to the Post Office, only then remembering I parked behind the IGA. It’s a fairly new car and it looks like every other faux four-wheel drive on the road today. “What’s the Rego number?” I say, searching my memory bank, but the bank’s empty.

And now I have become a “webmaster” which these days can be applied to anyone who bought WordPress for Dummies and just jumped in (as I did).

One of the major drawbacks of being in charge of a website is that you need to know and maintain a half-dozen logins and passwords, all of them combinations of letters, numbers and symbols, with the aim of keeping eastern European hackers from turning your pretty little folk music website into a den for Hot Russian Brides.

At last count I had 63 logins and passwords stashed away in a “secure” corner of my computer and another 130 logins, account numbers and passwords on an electronic diary guarded by a master password. In case I get sudden early onset, I have scribbled that master password down for She Who Knows Where To Look. (Don’t count on it – I have enough trouble remembering where mine are. Ed)

About five years ago when it because apparent that this could be a problem, I made a spreadsheet, pasted it to a word document and copied it on to a CD. Unhappily, I password-protected the word document then forgot the password! Alas, it seems the only password-protected document types which can’t be opened by password-busting programs like Brute Force are simple word document passwords. This I know, because in a fit of Scorpio-like secretiveness I password-protected a 56,000-word novel I was working on and now can’t open it because I forgot the password. I think it was about losing your memory.

Transactions over the internet are becoming more and more common for the majority of us. When was the last time you received a bill in the mail and either mailed a cheque or walked down to the Post Office to pay in cash? A whitegoods repair guy came and did a job on our dishwasher recently, then emailed the invoice to She Who Knows Where To Look, who promptly got on to internet banking and paid the money into his bank account.

The good things about this kind of transaction – they’re quick, easy, and there’s an electronic paper trail if there’s a dispute. The bad thing is that every day we hop on to the Internet, we run the risk of having someone with IT skills and bad intentions gain access to our bank account, investments and phone and computer accounts. Not to mention Centrelink, the Australian Tax Office and Medicare, all of whom are hell bent on having us create an online account and a complex password so we can logon to update the data that (a) they should be updating and keeping secure and (b) should be keeping people in jobs.

If you have become drawn into the online way of doing things, consider having a periodic house-cleaning. The first thing to do is unsubscribe from lists you don’t want to be on. Sometimes this is not as easy as it ought to be. I recently bought a book from an online bookshop which kept sending newsletters and other exciting announcements about “specials” when I clearly do not recall ticking the boxes to say I wanted them.

To unsubscribe from this list I had to log on (with my password), and go through several steps to get off their pesky list. This is a bad way to do business, as is the tactic of pre-selecting choices that you as the consumer should be free to make.

When we flew to north Queensland for Christmas, I hired a car, not noticing that the option to purchase a 7-day travel insurance policy was pre-ticked.

In the interim, She Who Approaches Such Matters with More Caution had already bought a travel insurance policy elsewhere (with a Seniors’ discount). The car hire company did cancel the policy and refund me, but it underlines how careful you need to be online.

There is a protocol when you send out emails to more than 20 or 30 friends, as I do every week. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) require you to advise recipients that if you don’t want to be on the list, just email back “unsubscribe”.

If someone wants to unsubscribe, I just open my Excel spreadsheet and delete the person’s name and email address. I suspect that this does not happen when you decide you don’t want to hear from Cheap and Nasty Hotel Bookings.com.

The electronic database is a scary thing – your local takeaway pizza joint, for example, has your home number, mobile number, home address, probably your email address and, moreover, whether you are susceptible to up-selling (do you want Pepsi-Max and garlic bread with that?).

Our email addresses, home addresses, full names and DOBs are floating around inside dozens of databases, hardly any of which have ASIO-level security in place. Increasingly this data is being exported to the “cloud,” a nebulous place where organised crime is busy working out how to make said cloud rain money.

Web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox aim to make things easy when you’re online. You can choose to save your passwords on your computer and the Web browsers slot them in as required. But I was horrified to find just the other day, that you can not only open the place on your PC where these logons and passwords are stored, you can also make them visible! I was less unhappy when I found you can’t select-all and copy or print the list out.

Or so they reckon!

Ah, just what your cash-strapped Grade 10 kid with advanced computer skills and a dope habit was looking for – go to that old writer fella’s PC – he never locks up.

My sound engineer Pix Vane Mason (left) depressed the hell out of me last December when he predicted the demise of CDs within the next two years.
“But Pix,” I said. “I just ordered 500 of the buggers!”
Whether you can still sell CDs today comes down to the demographic segment which is most likely to buy your music. A famous singer whose fans are mostly in the 70+ category, sold out of CDs on a recent tour of Queensland. But that may well be the exception to a rapidly changing rule.
The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) says digital music revenues overtook physical sales in Australia for the first time in 2013. Digital music revenues accounted for 54.7% of the market, bringing in over $192 million, while CDs, DVDs, and other physical media made up the remaining 45.3% share. Paradoxically, vinyl is back in favour, with LP sales up 40% to 6 million in 2014, according to Melbourne-based tonedeaf.com.au. Artists favouring vinyl (usually as another sales avenue), include Madonna, Nick Cave, Mark Knopfler, Bjork and ex-Oasis singer Noel Gallagher.

Swimming in the digital stream
Billboard and Nielsen Soundscan say the big music trend has been a 54% rise in on-demand streaming, with 164 billion song streams played by consumers in 2014. Meanwhile, physical music sales in the US continue to decline, with compact disc sales dropping to 62.9 million, from 78.2 million in 2013.
Gen Xs and Gen Ys, with the possible exception of DJs, who have whole suitcases full of CDs, almost exclusively download music direct to their smart phones, Ipods, Ipads and computers. Or they pay to subscribe to music streaming websites like Pandora, Grooveshark and Spotify. Streaming audio gives you access to a vast database of music; you can play it through speakers in your house, but you can’t download it. The download option is great if you are looking for a must-have song you heard on the radio or at a live gig. This typically costs $1.99, although independents can charge what they like. Some digital music sites like ‘band camp’ give customers the option to pay what they think the music is worth.
The big plus for independent musicians is that once their music is uploaded to an Internet ‘shop’, there are no overheads, apart from the fees taken by the website. You may, however, read about how little musicians get paid by the proliferating streaming services. They get massive exposure but earn less.

Remember when CDs cost $30 and imports could cost $35 or $40? It doesn’t seem that long ago (1982), since Billy Joel released 53rd Street on compact disc, coinciding with the launch of Sony’s first CD player. CD prices have dropped sharply in the last couple of years as retailers fight to keep their market share.
In a perverse way, the now old-fashioned compact disc favours independent artists who have dipped into their own funds to create a work of art. It not only sounds good, but has interesting artwork; it comes signed by the artist, you feel warm and fuzzy about supporting someone you might actually know, and it has the one quality digital music lacks – collectability.

Truth be known, true music lovers and audiophiles want the whole cake – their expensive Bose speakers dispersed through the house, they play CDs, stream music via Spotify, play songs from their vast Ipod database and, after they’ve been out for an evening drive in the vintage Torana, the old Van Morrison tape hissing away, they’ll come home, slip on their archivist’s gloves, ease the mint copy of Dark Side of the Moon from its sleeve, gently place it on the Denon turntable and settle back with a nice glass of red (log fire crackling in the corner…but that’s probably laying it on a bit thick).

Bob’s been making a CD, did you know?
So yes, we (The Goodwills) have been producing a new recording since May last year. These are all songs written over the last three years which had been burning a hole in my belly since I first wrote the list on a whiteboard in January 2013.
It began with five months’ pre-production (home demos) so that when we got to the studio, we would know what we were doing. (Ha!). It’s important to have an empathic relationship with your sound engineer. Pix and I started each session with a hug and a coffee and a half-hour discussion about what music we’re listening to and why. Multi-instrumentalist Steve Cook offered to help develop the songs. It is a gamble to let someone else interpret your songs, but it can also take them somewhere unexpected. After a month or two of bedding down instrumental tracks and guide vocals, it was time to bring in other instruments for colour and tone.
There were interruptions, creative differences of opinion, a momentary funding hiccup and of course the momentum was disturbed when we took three months off to tour around Australia.
It looks like this
We remain enthused about the 13 songs that emerged from this process, their possibilities augmented by the talents of Silas Palmer, Steve Cook, Rose Broe, Erin Sulman, Tim Finnegan and Mal Webb.
Once we were happy with the “mix”, the album was uploaded to a mastering engineer David Briggs. If you don’t know what a mastering engineer does, when you hear a song on the radio and the singer’s voice floats above the instruments – that’s mastering.
Then it was time for the artwork – designing a cardboard wallet and a 16-page booklet. Someone (that would be me – ed.) had to type out all the lyrics and the commentary about each song, source appropriate photos, come up with ideas and engage a graphic artist (Steve Cook), to make it all work. Once that was done, the whole package was sent to a replication firm which printed the artwork, made 500 copies and delivered them to our door – on time, but a tad over-budget.

It looks like this

At this level, making an independent CD can cost considerably more than $5,000. So to break even, it has to be good, and/or you need generous friends and acquaintances. So tomorrow we’ll launch ‘The Last Waterhole’ at the New Farm Bowls Club and again on Sunday at the Old Witta School near Maleny. We’ve convened a four-piece band for the occasion.
The album will also be available for download on CD Baby. There are people we know who live elsewhere on the planet who might just do that, instead of adding $7.40 postage to the cost of the album.

But as for the five boxes of “physical product” under the bed, as Jeff Lang once teased an audience at the Byron Bay Blues Festival:
“Do any of you want a CD? I’ve got thousands of them and I don’t f’ n want ‘em.”

Footnote: Our new wordpress website should “go live” on Sunday night. www.thegoodwills.com

Today we’re taking a look at YouTube, 10 years old this month, a place where people can get noticed for making a clarinet out of a carrot (left) or singing a David Bowie song while floating in a spaceship. If you are not one of the 24.7 million people who have seen the YouTube video below, go make a cuppa and take five minutes out of your day. Watch it now, and then come back! I was typically late in catching on to Chris Hadfield’s cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Commander Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, performed Bowie’s 1969 epic in space. After striking a deal with Bowie’s publishers, he put it on YouTube for a year. The video had 23 million views before Hadfield took it down in May 2014 to honour the agreement. Over the next six months, the lawyers and music publishers who negotiate such things struck a new deal to have the video, um, relaunched. Meanwhile Hadfield got more famous in Canada than Tim Horton, and that’s saying something.

I decided to write about this Internet phenomenon after the sixth person I engaged in conversation about YouTube professed to not know what it is. So, if you just walked in, YouTube is a way of putting your home movies on the Internet and then trying to harness the attention of the millions of people who spend hours trolling through it looking for their pet interest.
My Kiwi nephew, for example, plays the bagpipes and has a long list of YouTube videos of really good pipers doing their thing. He saves them as “favourites” so he can watch over and over.
The thing about YouTube is you can get actively engaged, opening an account and creating a “Channel,” which allows you to upload your own videos, stream other people’s videos and save them for repeated viewing. Uploading means transferring your video file to YouTube’s servers, a process which can and does take many hours. “Stream” means you can watch, but you can’t legally download the video to your computer.

YouTube is a great way to browse the music of someone you may have read about or heard at a live gig somewhere. You may decide, as I did after checking out mandolin virtuoso Chris Thele, to buy several albums from Itunes. Or you might just develop a late-night habit of checking it out for free. Now that we’re mentioning late night YouTube browsing, there is dubious material on there, some of which might ask you to prove you are 18 (which amounts to clicking “yes I’m 18”). But to Google’s credit, they are keeping it reasonably clean.

So what can YouTube do for you? There have been many overnight successes. Japanese ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro went on a world tour as a result of his consummate performance of While my Guitar Gently Weeps in New York’s Central Park. This video has had 13.6 million views.
YouTube videos with 100 million+ views tend to be of the Miley Cyrus twerking genre. There’s a much-viewed video of Miley swinging naked on a wrecking ball. It’s about as erotic as a cheese and tomato toasted sandwich. A link from Tumblr re-posted on Facebook by Mr Shiraz made a valid point:

“When Miley Cyrus is naked & licks a hammer it’s “art” and “music,” but when I do it, I’m “wasted” and “have to leave Bunnings”.

Mind you, she’s only Number 11 on the all-time YouTube hit parade, her antics eclipsed by Psy’s Gangnam Style (2.2 billion views), and Justin Beiber’s Baby (1.13 billion views).

Legal niceties

There are a few myths about YouTube I’d like to put to bed, if I may. The persistent one is that once you upload a video, particularly a video of you performing your own original song, the copyright no longer belongs to you. Well that’s just an urban myth, according to the good folk at the Australian Performing Rights Association. APRA currently distributes performance royalties each quarter to the top 4,000 most viewed videos on YouTube (within Australia) in three categories, user generated content, record label content, and other studio content. They’re in the process of expanding this distribution to a large pool of songs.
The trap for beginners who make a cover version of someone’s song and post it on YouTube is that they need licensed Synchronisation rights from the publisher/s of the song. If a video is posted without having first had those rights cleared, the video may be blocked or taken down. Alternatively, the copyright holders may choose to let the video stay up, and instead have ads placed around the video.

YouTube’s own statistics show how big this has become:
• YouTube has more than 1 billion users in 75 countries;
• Views per month are up 50% year over year;
• 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute;
• Half of YouTube views are on mobile devices;
• 1m+ advertisers (mostly small businesses) use Google ad platforms;

Advertise or not

While Google says 85% of its in-stream ads are “skippable,” usually the advertiser is going to claim your attention for six seconds, and for a savvy ad-writer, that’s all it takes.
A popular local musician in our own village, musician and innovative instrument maker Linsey Pollak, has made an impression on YouTube.
A video of Linsey at the Sydney Opera House making a carrot into a clarinet attracted 4.26 million views. The Tedx video went to nearly 62 million views when a Romanian Facebook Page edited the clip to make it shorter and re-posted it on their page.
Linsey says that while you can make money by “monetising”, he is not willing to have ads on his YouTube Channel.
“However I am constantly being approached by other Channels to partner with them in order to link to their channel (and Monetise).”
“There is a spin off in that my videos do get noticed and sometimes that leads to job offers, most of which come to nothing, but some do!”
He does most of his promotional work now on YouTube and cherishes it because it has created a “two-way conversation” between him and his larger audience.

Browsing on a rainy Friday night

So if you have nothing better to do tonight, go for a wander through YouTube. For sure you will get lost, somewhere between the myriad “how-to” videos, the moments of musical genius, bum-wiggling dancers and the current fad for getting your dog or cat to perform seemingly impossible tricks. Here are five diverse examples to get you started.
(right click mouse and select ‘open hyperlink’)
1/ The Blue Bird (Charles Stanfield) choral music by Matthew Curtis, singing all parts (and enjoying it). 16,266 views
2/ Beeswing – Richard Thompson (before he took to wearing his trademark beret)
548,578 views
3/ Dogs play bluegrass – it’s fake, but you’ll probably guess that.
1.12 million views
4 Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in G minor – IV – Genre-hopping musician Chris Thele won a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship in 2012 (often referred to as a genius grant). He spent some of the money on “a very nice mandolin”). He started playing when he was two!
41,279 views
5/ Linsey Pollak turns a carrot into a clarinet, using a drill and a saxophone mouthpiece.
4.26 million views

There’s a moment in the terribly sad yet life-affirming movie Still Alice when the husband of a woman with early onset Alzheimer’s says to his daughter, “You’re a better man than I”. Alex Baldwin’s character is ironically quoting Mr Kipling, as he admires his daughter’s ability to cope with Alice, her mind unravelling.
It is also the way, that when parents are faced with age-related illness and adversity, not all spouses or children are prepared to take up the challenge of becoming a carer. While I even now feel sadness and loss from losing my mother to cancer when I was 17 and she just 48, it is also true that I have escaped the difficult life changes that come with caring for ageing parents. The same goes for She Who Fell Down the Stairs But Got Away With It, who lost her mother at age eight. Both of our fathers have been gone 20+ years, so while there are empty seats at the Christmas table, we can just lock the door and drive around Australia for three months with a clear conscience.

I just had a visit from my cousin, who lives in the south of England, just up the road from where my Mum’s surviving sister lives. Auntie is 95 this year and still living independently. Just how long she can keep doing this is the question nobody really wants to ask, or what will happen if and when Auntie has to move into a nursing home. As many adult children faced with this dilemma know too well, parents don’t usually cope well at all with being moved into a 24/7 care situation.

A friend put me up to this particular topic (which had crossed my mind already, as you might guess). He and his wife have just moved her Dad in with them; at 89 he’s struggling with an illness and finding it too hard to manage on his own.
“That was always the plan,” he said. “But it has turned our lives upside down.”
And I can just hear Mr Shiraz turning away from his laptop and telling Mrs Shiraz: “He’s writing about the sandwich generation this week.” The Shirazes have done this twice, for each other’s mothers, now both gone to their graves. Mr S kept his friends in the loop on Facebook with photos of the daily baking adventures (therapists encourage this kind of activity for people with Alzheimer’s disease).
“It’s like ground hog day around here,” he told me. He also related something that may sound familiar – how mother had asked daughter “how many other old people do you look after here, dear?”

Caring for an elderly parent with Dementia and maybe underlying physical illnesses as well does take its toll on carers. Brothers and sisters weigh in with financial support and respite visits, but it is often down to one adult child and/or spouse.
On the other side of the city or in another city altogether, there may be a sibling who does not want to know. If they are well-off, they might ease their own burden of guilt by paying for live-in help. Or not.
As a nation of people, we are all living longer. As the line from one of my songs about a 100-year-old Morris Dancer goes: “They’re saying that a hundred is the new eighty that is what the birthday card did say.”
My white-haired Scottish Auntie now living in the south of England has survived a fall and a broken hip but is still coping home alone. She’d be one of the lucky ones – good genes and family support. She enjoys keeping up with sport on the tele, but needs a walker to get about and deafness makes it hard to communicate her needs.

The thing about volunteering to look after an aged parent in your own home is that no-one knows how long this arrangement may last. Five years is a common enough stretch but 15 to 20 years is not unrealistic. Meanwhile, the carers’ social lives are curtailed; their ingrained living habits fall away in favour of someone else’s needs.
There are ways of dealing with people who have started having short term memory loss or are sliding ever deeper into Dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.* Adult children quickly learn these tricks as a matter of survival.
What usually ends the familial live-in arrangement is a fall that requires hospitalisation, or when it gets to a stage where the carer can’t take any more sleepless nights.
I’m sure Mr Shiraz is not the first carer to be woken by a noise at 4am and on investigation finds Mother, more or less fully dressed, standing at the gate with a packed suitcase.
“Mike says we have to be at the airport,” she says, though Mike has been gone 12 years. The last time they went to the airport at 4am was when the kids were small and the family was going to Disneyland.

I’m changing names and circumstances, but those of you who care for or have cared for parents with Alzheimer’s disease or Dementia will recognise this story.
It is sad when someone who has managed to live into their 90s becomes frail and unable to cope, even if their mind is still relatively sharp. A mobility-related fall will accelerate the process; not just the fall, but the fear of having another one.
According to Australian Ageing Agenda, one in three people aged over 65 years fall each year. AAA, the media partner of the Australian Association of Gerontology, adds that fewer than 10% of falls cause a serious injury requiring emergency department or hospital admission.

All the same, that’s an awful lot of accidents waiting to happen. In 2010-2011, 92,150 people aged over 65 were hospitalised in one year for fall-related injuries. They were in hospital on average for seven days.
Head injuries and hip fractures were the most likely result of falls where someone required hospitalisation. About half of these falls were at or around the home, and about 25% happened in residential care facilities. AAA says many of the people who fell did not regain previous levels of mobility and independence.

So OK, there’s this frail, forgetful old character stumbling around the house in the middle of the night. He puts something in the microwave and sets it for 5 hours; the TV volume is too loud and there’s a funny old-man smell around the place. You were going to read the paper but he’s thrown it out – “They don’t even know who the Premier is and you reckon I’m losing it?”
Ironic, isn’t it, that he looked after you when you were a wriggling bundle wrapped in a smelly nappy; soothed you on his shoulder at 3am when you were teething; turned you on your side so the silly drunk teenager you were didn’t choke on your own vomit.
It’s your turn, son.
*The National Institute on Aging (NIA) defines Dementia as a brain disorder that affects communication and performance of daily activities. Alzheimer’s disease is a form of dementia that specifically affects parts of the brain that control thought, memory and language.

As the dust settles after the huge dust storm that was the 2015 Queensland election, allow me to help rub some metaphorical liniment into the bruised egos and wallets of those who backed the wrong team.

We talked about Compassion over the festive season, and how we could all try a bit harder. A few wise people wrote to me at the time and suggested that first you have to give yourself a break. But this week I felt an unlikely pang of compassion for Tony A, under siege from his own party and the media. Just imagine how he might have felt going into the Press Club on the Monday after Queensland voters turned on the LNP. The PM has a thick hide, obviously, but I imagine he might have had to do some meditation or yoga or at least take a Valium before he fronted the media pack. While it seems clear that the LNP’s narrow defeat in Queensland, with the Premier losing his seat, was all about that government’s arrogance and can-do-ism, inevitably Tony Abbott got the blame.

In typical style, the PM did not refer to the Queensland election in his prepared comments for the Press Club, although some of his detractors rode that particular elephant into the room. You could hear the knives being sharpened from up here in the mountains. A backbencher got a run on Radio National this week saying he had texted the PM to say he no longer had his support. Whether the inexplicable decision to bestow a knighthood on Prince Phillip was the last straw or whether they’ve been keeping a list, we’ll never know. Whatever, I felt a bit sorry for the man. Being PM is an impossible 24/7 job that creates the kind of stress you and I would not want to know about.

(“What did Tony Abbott ever do for us?” I hear you say). True, the Abbott government seems to care less about people who struggle financially; the ones to whom a $7 co-payment is a big deal. This (Federal) government scores low on Compassion, as did the former LNP (Queensland Government), which apparently thought it could do what it liked and no-one would take it personally, or be able to do anything about it. Wrong.

The C-word I’d most like to introduce into contemporary politics is an old-fashioned one – Civility. ‘After you’, and ‘if it’s not too much trouble’, and ‘how has your day been?’. It costs nothing be civil with one another, but from my observations of political life here or in Canberra over the past 20 years or so, there is too much of the ‘us and them’ and ‘let’s get ‘em’. If you’re an Opposition Labor MP you have to vote along party lines, which means you disagree with everything the incumbent government has to say and ditto for the LNP when Labor is in power.

On that basis, the Queensland Parliament will be a shackled institution. The former Premier of Queensland would have us believe that hung parliaments are bad. But just why are they bad? Why not call it Consensus government? Imagine a Queensland parliament with 30 Labor members, 20 Libs, 10 Nats, 10 Greens, 14 independents and five ratbag parties to give us a bit of a giggle and keep the bastards honest. Select the most intelligent and fair-minded member as Speaker and we would indeed live in interesting times, when pollies would have to talk to one another to come up with policies that they can all agree upon.

Corruption is a C-word often associated with politics and politicians. The Honourable Tony Fitzgerald, who presided over a Royal Commission in the 1980s, warned people in the election lead-up that the State was at risk of being “sucked into another vortex of mismanagement and ultimately serious corruption”.

Now we’ll never know just how close we were to returning to the Joh days, when the Premier would pat media chooks on the head and say: “don’t you worry about that.”

Well pardon me for saying, but I do worry, about that and a whole lot of this and that. If we want a better State and a better country, we have to get involved.

Communism and Capitalism are both C-words, but they need to move aside and usher in a new era of Co-operation, Consensus and/or Compromise if we are to move on and rebuild a great country.

As an intriguing article in The Monthly suggests, we can open up the process to Citizen Politicians, formulating good policy in chat rooms on behalf of the people.

Authors Tim Flannery and Catriona Wallace used some of the research you might have read here last week to make their case about the numbers of Australians who did not vote in the 2010 election and the disengagement of the 18-25 generation.

As Flannery and Wallace observed, the internet and social media are making it harder for politicians of any flavour to hide their faults. I might add that sophisticated digital photography plays its part, catching pollies in unguarded moments (Campbell with his tongue out, winking Tony, that bad hair day (Labor Opposition?) fella.

The Monthly’s essayists reckon we can harness the power of the internet and create a new democracy. They imagine a time when you can join an online forum to craft policy in areas of special interest to you.

If you are a retired school teacher, yours might be a valid voice on education policy. If I may extrapolate; a triple-certificated nurse with 30 years’ experience could possibly know a thing or two about running hospitals; an ex-journalist with a strong sense of community could advise government on how to get on with business without overly engaging the media.

I was intrigued by how many successful Labor candidates interviewed on Saturday night said they had been conducting grassroots campaigns and had not been in the conventional media at all. The Courier-Mail (Brisbane tabloid), backed the wrong horse entirely and might now have to review how it addresses its readers, half of whom paid them no mind.

We have the technology sitting on our desks at home and in the office to devolve political policy to the people. We might not like some of what we hear – the right might want to re-introduce the death penalty, outlaw abortion, ban gay marriage and lock drug lord bikies up longer than the average bad bastard. Or the lefties who might want to leave coal in the ground, except for when we’re making steel at home and manufacturing (electric) cars, re-hiring all the coal workers for the proliferating wind and solar farms and green car factories.

As former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery says, near the end of a thought-provoking read, politics is the last of our great institutions that has not yet been transformed by the internet.

“What’s more risky?” asks Flannery. “Continuing with an increasingly unstable political system that delivers governments with ever more power and ever less authority (ed: Credibility), or trying something very new that permits the will of a well-educated populace to become manifest?”