thegoodwills.com - Page 23 of 56 - Witty, thought-provoking songs + reflective essays

Tiptoe through the ukulele group

One Tuesday morning recently I tiptoed into an auditorium and onto the stage, threading my way through the U3A ukulele group to take the one vacant seat. I arrived at the Senior Citizens rooms at 10am but we were supposed to be there at 9.30am. The group was up to song three (Maggie) by then. So I calmly set up my music stand, took the baritone uke out of the bag and joined in at the start of verse two. The delay was due to setting up my songbook, which has chords for a baritone ukulele, completely different to the rest of the group.

There are ukulele groups everywhere you go these days. There’s a Brisbane Ukulele Musicians Society in Brisbane – which accounts for the acronym BUMS and a similar group on the Sunshine coast, SCUMS. I think this probably typifies the attitude of ukulele groups. They don’t take themselves too seriously. Or at least, ours doesn’t, as the tutor wasn’t fazed by my late entry, something which could get you fired if you were, say, second violin in a symphony orchestra.

I decided to buy a ukulele and join a group when we moved to our new town. I figured how hard could it be – I’d been playing guitar for 45 years. I spoke to a musician friend who works at a guitar store. It was his day off, but he recommended someone to talk to and ventured some opinions about ukuleles.

These small, four-stringed instruments are popular with children and bored septuagenarians, as they are easy to learn. Often all you need to form a chord is one finger on one fret. The strumming is something else, but a cinch to a guitarist. The baritone uke is tuned to the top four strings of a guitar. So, with a customised chord chart, I mastered six or seven chords at my first session.

You can’t and shouldn’t diss the ukulele as so many people do when referring to the banjo. The ukulele has enjoyed several starring moments in the popular music spotlight over the last 140 years or so.

If you are my vintage, you will remember Tiny Tim’s 1968 recording of Tip-toe Through the Tulips, which charted for nine weeks and reached No 17 on the Billboard Top 100.

Perhaps it was not so much the novelty of the ukulele but Tiny’s Tim’s tremulous falsetto and his waif-like persona that captured the public’s attention. This video has been viewed 15 million times although you’d have to ask yourself why. Al Dubin and Joe Burke wrote the song in 1929 and it was first popularised by Nick Lucas. If you are a younger person, you may have encountered it in the 2010 horror movie, Insidious.

That’s a good word to describe how the ukulele gets under a musician’s skin. Contemporary musicians to employ the uke include Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Eric Clapton, Eddie Vedder and the late George Harrison. In 2006 a studious-looking Japanese player, Jake Shimabukoro, revived Harrison’s While my Guitar Gently Weeps, performing it in New York’s Central Park on so-so quality video. Nonetheless, it has had 16 million views and set Shimabukoro on a hectic schedule of touring around the world. One of the many people to leave comments said: “My uke must be broken, it sounds nothing like this.” If you thought this was a fluke, check out Jake performing Bohemian Rhapsody at a Ted Talk in 2010.

Like many people who play, Jake describes the ukulele as ‘the instrument of peace’, a sentiment echoed by Loudon Wainwright III in a 2010 song. LWIII remarks here “if every baby was issued with a ukulele at the time of their birth, there would be world peace……and a lot of lousy music!”

Actor, singer-songwriter and comedian George Formby found ukulele fame with a smutty ditty he wrote called When I’m Cleaning Windows. If you’re going to watch this next video, bear in mind what media historian Brian McFarlane said of his movies in the1930s and 1940s, Formby portrayed ‘gormless Lancastrian innocents who would win through against some form of villainy, gaining the affection of an attractive middle-class girl in the process’.

Formby owes much of his success to purchasing a ukulele and marrying Beryl Ingham, both of which he did in 1923. Beryl became his stage manager, insisting that he wear a suit and introduce the ukulele to his act. From such showbiz savvy came hugely popular songs like Bless ‘Em All and Leaning on a Lamp Post (reprised by Herman’s Hermits in the 1960s).

So you may be wondering why I would take up ukulele at an advanced age. I tell people it’s to get me out of the house and that much is true. The U3A group of about 20 people meet every week and our tutor Martin is keen on getting us out to perform at retirement villages and the like.

As most guitar players would know, when you mostly play by yourself, at home, eventually you reach a learning plateau. That’s when many people quietly put the axe away and take up lawn bowls or quilt-making. Buying an easy-to-learn instrument like a ukulele more or less commits you to joining a group, so it becomes a social occasion, but also a way to challenge yourself to keep up with the pace. It is also very soothing. Actors Tom Hanks, Ryan Gosling, Pierce Brosnan and William H Macy play uke for recreation. Macy says he and his wife play the instrument to ‘self-soothe’. I could not agree more, though whether She Who Is Just Down the Hall appreciates hearing my self-soothing experiments is another matter.

The growing popularity of the instrument has created a need for ukulele festivals – weekend events attended by uke enthusiasts. If you like camping, music and camaraderie, go no further than Kenilworth on the first weekend in May. This will be the 7^th annual Sunshine Coast Ukulele Festival. I might even be there!

If you spend time on YouTube, it does not take long to uncover brilliant musicianship. I’m not the first to recommend this YouTube video which features the late Hawaiian ukulele player and singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole (Iz). His 1993 medley of What a Wonderful World and Somewhere over the Rainbow has had almost 80 million views, unusual for a five-minute song. You might have heard it first on an episode of ER.

The ukulele (originally called a machete), emerged from the islands of Portugal in the late 1880s, when immigrant sugar cane workers introduced it to Hawaii. A hundred years later, the 1990s uke revival brought into popular use to augment folk and country bands. Ukulele orchestras emerged; a skilled arranger can achieve a lovely sound by scoring parts for the main types of uke – soprano, tenor, baritone and bass.

My musician pal advised against buying a cheapie (from $12 in discount department stores). I had already decided to do just that and ended up with a $159 baritone instrument made from maple. I learned to play guitar on a six-string classical instrument, so quickly got used again to the different feel of nylon strings.

Music aficionados will say you can never get a good sound out of a four-string instrument with nylon strings. Well, here’s the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (as Mr Waits would say, they’re big in Japan), thrashing out AC/DC’s Highway to Hell. The lead break is awesome.

FOMM will be on the road for the next four weeks so who knows what will happen!

Hoarding, Free Vaccines, Panic Buying

Hoarding-vaccines-panic-buying — Image of COVID-19 by iXimus from Pixabay

Life goes on, amid news reports of panic buying and hoarding, as reporting of the coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to terrify the masses. We have seen manifestations of this terror in the past fortnight with an (ongoing) share market correction, led by the US and blindly followed by investors in Australia and elsewhere. So far it is no more dire than the corrections during the GFC. The popular theory is that global share market investors fear the effect the coronavirus could have on business, imports and exports and the ever-valuable tourism market.

The seven-day share market correction was followed at home by reports of panic buying of non-perishable groceries. Shelves were cleared in supermarkets, amid assurances by retailers that their supply chains were solid. Hand sanitiser is at the top of a curious list.

Toilet paper was one of the items bought in bulk, prompting one Australian supermarket chain to limit sales of dunny rolls to one four-pack per person. Social media gurus have been busy making memes of Aussies swathed in dunny paper, speculating about what sorts of things one needs to hoard, assuming the worst (global contagion, financial mayhem, collapse of law and order).

I looked but could not find references to food or toilet paper in this list from a survivalist website. There are lots of solid tips about water filtration, fire-lighting, charging batteries (with solar), emergency lighting, fishing equipment and a multi-use gadget called a Spork. Oh, and they list a variety of weapons for hunting and self-defence including a crossbow.

By happenstance, last week I picked up a battered copy of The First Horseman by John Case from a public library sale.

The plot involves a virologist (and a journalist), who is trying to locate and exhume five miners who died of Spanish Flu in 1918 while working in the Arctic. The bodies are buried in ice, so the plan is to harvest the hopefully preserved Spanish Flu virus and develop a vaccine. You guessed it, there’s a bad guy; a megalomaniacal cult leader who thinks there are too many people in the world.

As I continued to read The First Horseman, cases of coronavirus increased world-wide. As of 1^st of March, there were just fewer than 80,000 cases in China (3.5% death rate) and some 7,000 cases in other countries, with a death rate of 1.4%). In Australia, the number of reported cases rose to 41. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has previously said the mortality rate of coronavirus varies from 0.7% to 4%, depending on the quality of healthcare and the urgency of the response in affected countries. This week the WHO upgraded the mortality rate to 3.4%, which brings us back to comparisons with the Spanish Flu which had a mortality rate of 2% to 3%, although it afflicted some 500 million people around the world. Author John M Barry put it in perspective when he said in his book The Great Influenza that the flu killed more people in 24 weeks than HIV/AIDS did in 24 years.

A major study done by Chinese researchers said that 80.9% of people diagnosed with Coronavirus exhibited mild symptoms and recovered. Only 13.8% of cases were described as severe and only 4.7% as critical. The highest fatality rate is for people aged 80 and older, at 14.8%. The majority of people who died suffered pneumonia-like symptoms.

Pneumonia is a lung inflammation caused by bacterial or viral infection. (Have you had lunch yet?).The air sacs fill with pus and may become solid. Inflammation can affect both lungs.

Patients usually spend a few days in hospital hooked up to intravenous antibiotics and oxygen/nebulisers to help them breathe. Some forms of pneumonia are contagious. You didn’t know that? Yes, it spreads the same way as the common cold and other viruses.

Pneumonia in the elderly happens fast and the prognosis is poor. The elderly are more susceptible to severe pneumonia, which has a mortality rate as high as 20%. Of the 2.6 million pneumonia deaths in 2017, 1.13 million were aged 70 or older.

Egad! Now where did I file that letter from the medical centre – the one offering (free) immunization for pneumonia? Yes, it’s true; there are advantages to crawling over the peak of the hill, past the 69 sign. I am eligible for a bone density scan ($125), a shingles vaccine ($217) and a vaccine against catching pneumonia ($133), free of charge.

I recommend this reliable website to track the escalation of coronavirus. Of the 52 Australians diagnosed with the virus, 22 have recovered, two have died and six (including health workers in aged care facilities), are the only patients who did not have a recent history of travel to high-risk countries.

It’s not so easy tracking the health of the global share market.Global investors are second-guessing themselves, ignoring Tuesday’s rally (after a seven-day selloff which hacked 11% off the value of the market). On Wednesday, the all ordinaries index was down 113 points after Tuesday’s Reserve Bank interest rate cut. It bounced back again on Thursday by a similar amount and yes, down 111 points on Friday morning.

The volatility is a finger in the air to the world’s central banks, which seemingly colluded in a co-ordinated campaign to cut rates. The conundrum for investors is this: invest in term deposits or bonds and let inflation erode your capital, or trust the share market to claw back value, restore confidence and keep paying dividends.

Despite the clear fact that losses on a share portfolio are paper losses unless physically sold, a major market correction triggers certain events.

The young and brave who hold ‘geared’ share portfolios probably faced a ‘margin call’ last week. Gearing means borrowing money from a financial institution to buy listed shares.

The main catch with borrowing money to buy shares is this: if your portfolio (valued say at $100k), drops in value to $85k, you, the borrower will have to find $15,000 in cash to cover the lender’s risk.

A major study of investors carried out by the Australian Stock Exchange concluded, inter alia, that only 5% borrow to buy shares. Nonetheless, in a survey asking investors this very question, up to 60% of those aged between 25 and 44 seemed keen on the idea.

The other event triggered by a share market collapse is that those retirees receiving part pensions from the government have to report what Centrelink describes as a ‘change in your circumstances’.

So if your part-pension is calculated on assets, you duly report a 10%-12% decrease in the (paper) value of your share portfolio. This should increase your part-pension proportionately. As usual, if you don’t sell, nothing changes apart from the balance on a spreadsheet.

So, of these two global contagions, which will first be healed?

As the ABC’s Alan Kohler pointed out, despite the correction, Australian shares are still over-valued. My take on the share market volatility is to say that when a market is down 200 one day and up 120 the next, day traders are making a killing.

But market volatility is a risk in itself as the fear contagion wafts down to Mums and Dads investors, who all may decide to hide it under the mattress.

As for the coronavirus, senior citizens’ organisations are taking modest steps to ensure their constituents (the age group most at risk) follow simple but effective rules to avoid spreading viruses.

I actually think this set of rules ought to apply in general, adding: “If you are sick, stay home until you are not.” (To which the bolshie Ed aka SWPT adds, that’s one of the many problems of a casualised workforce- even if you’re sick, you can’t afford to stay home – ‘do you want germs with that?’)

February 29 – a most ingenious paradox

February-29-paradox — Sasin Tipchar, www.pixabay

Every four years we get to wish our friend (let’s call her Hannah), a very real birthday, as she was born on February 29. Hannah was born in a Leap Year, so officially celebrates her birthday every four years. Leaplings, as they are known, are a rare breed.

There have been only 2,470 Australians born on February 29 over the past 10 years, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. There are, however, 4.8 million Leaplings world-wide, 205,000 of whom live in the USA.

The chances of being born on February 29 are 1 in 1427. Longer odds might apply to Hannah’s discovery that a fellow Leapling shared her workplace.

Hannah has warmed to the idea over the years, saying it is always a talking point when birthdays are being discussed. In the workplace, there is little chance of avoiding that special day. On her 48^th birthday (when in Leapling terms she was only 12), Hannah’s work colleagues approached her deadpan, declaring it was time for ‘the talk’.

There are a few catches to being born on a day that is only recognised every four years. Chief among them is the plight of Frederic, an apprentice pirate in Gilbert & Sullivan’s light opera, The Pirates of Penzance. In Pirates, G&S, as usual, indulge their penchant for social satire: a man of low social standing is smitten by a middle-class damsel (or vice versa). Someone usually objects to the romance and so the fun ensues.

In this case, Frederic falls for the Pirate King’s daughter Mabel (she reciprocates). Unluckily for Frederic, he was born on February 29. The Pirate King decrees (on a technicality) that Frederic is not old enough to marry anybody and is in fact indentured until he reaches the age of 21 (or in Frederic’s case 84 years).

G&S cut loose on the concept of Leap Year, declaring it “a most ingenious paradox”.

G&S’s copyright expired in the 1980s, so I’m quoting at length the Pirate King’s reasoning (delivered mid-song as a rhyming monologue):

“For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,

Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,

Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,

One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty.

Through some singular coincidence – I shouldn’t be surprised if it were owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy –

You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year, on the twenty-ninth of February;

And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you’ll easily discover,

That though you’ve lived twenty-one years, yet, if we go by birthdays, you’re only five and a little bit over!

I am not the first to observe that by acquiring an extra day every four years, employers are getting our enterprise for a bargain. February 29 is not a public holiday and it matters not if it falls on a weekend (as it does in 2020). The bottom line is, it’s an extra day is squeezed into the calendar, at the expense of working people.

It did not surprise me, then, having made this observation, to discover an attempt in the UK to have February 29 declared a Bank Holiday.

A petition made to the 2015-2017 government argued that the average salaried worker was losing out on £113 pounds ($A233) on account of being required to work one unpaid day in a calendar year.

The government responded to the petition, signed by 16,856 citizens, saying it had no plans to introduce an additional public holiday. An Impact Assessment for the additional Diamond Jubilee holiday in 2012 revealed that day alone cost the UK economy around £1.2 billion. Moreover, the government said, the extra day actually benefited those (Ed: in the gig economy), paid by the day or the hour.

I found a trove of statistics around February 29, which dates back to1582. It started with Pope Gregory III and the Gregorian calendar. It was calculated that it takes 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds for the Earth to go around the Sun. This results in an accumulation of ‘quarter days’. The Gregorian calendar added an extra day every four years to counteract this.

As if 29 days in February were not enough, two countries had a stab at adding yet another day. Sweden introduced a February 30 in the early 1700s (by accident), during a period where the country was switching from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. The Soviet Union observed February 30 in 1930 and 1931 after introducing a ‘revolutionary calendar’ in 1929. This calendar featured five-day weeks, 30-day months for every working month.

Leaplings share their birthday with celebrities including Italian composer Gioachino Rossini, actor Dennis Farina, big band era singer Dinah Shore, rugby league player Nelson Asofa-Solomona, Australian actor and comedian Frank Woodley and US rapper Ja Rule.

But what you probably really want to know is why women are encouraged to propose to men in a Leap Year.

One version is that Ireland’s St Bridget and St Patrick cooked it up between them in the 5^th century. If a woman proposed to a man and he refused, he had to buy her a pair of gloves, so the legend goes.

Other accounts say the tradition started in Scotland, where the unmarried Queen Margaret took St Patrick’s informal arrangement and passed it into law in 1288, giving women the right to propose to men in a Leap Year. Men who refused the proposal in Scotland were ‘fined’, the penalties ranging from a kiss to a silk dress for the jilted woman.

Canadian blogger Omar Ha-Redeye, writing in Slaw, Canada’s online legal magazine, doubts this story, observing that as Queen Margaret was only five years old at the time, her influence on matters of State was somewhat suspect.

Nevertheless, the Celtic folklore about Leap Year was readily adopted by Victorian society, who held Leap Year dances, so women could find suitable men to whom they could propose.

Given its romantic potential, I was puzzled to find only one mainstream movie made around the idea of a woman proposing to a man in a Leap Year.

Perhaps nobody has been game since reviewers gave Leap Year (2010) such a bollocking. Leap Year, starring Amy Adams and Matthew Goode, is set in Ireland. The opaque plot involves a girl (Amy) travelling abroad to propose to her boyfriend. In so doing, she gets involved with Declan (Goode), a grumpy Irish innkeeper with money problems. The movie is said to be loosely based on the silver screen era hits It Happened One Night and I Know Where I’m Going.

Empire critic William Thomas made it clear how far short it fell of the romantic sizzle of the latter (starring Clarke Gable and Claudette Colbert).

“Rubbish. Irish eyes will be hard pressed to grimace, let alone smile,” Thomas wrote.

Donald Clarke of The Irish Times gave the film one star out of five, saying it was “offensive, reactionary and patronising”. He said Leap Year (widely accepted as the worst movie made about Ireland), was evidence that: “Hollywood is incapable of seeing the Irish as anything but IRA men or twinkly rural imbeciles”.

Ah yes, but the romantics leapt at Leap Year, shelling out $32.6 million at the box office.

What do critics know, eh?

Holding out for a Holden (or a Subaru)

holden-subaru-general motors — (Holden Premier Image Jenny Scott, www.flickr.com)

I never owned a Holden motor car but I did drive one in the late 1970s. It was a 1971 HQ Holden Premier , owned by a woman I’d just met. She displayed her political colours early on, telling me she named the car Elizabeth because Joh (Bjelke-Petersen) was Queensland’s Premier at the time.

As she said, you wouldn’t want to name your car after a man who said indefensible things like (apropos industrial relations): “The 40-hour week has given the opportunity to many to while away their time in hotels.”

I don’t remember much about Elizabeth apart from the fantastic lamb’s wool steering wheel cover. Elizabeth (at the time running on five cylinders), went to an apprentice mechanic as a fixer-upper. She was replaced by a green XB Ford Fairmont station wagon, with a two-way tailgate (like a hearse). The Fairmont had two bucket seats in the back with seatbelts, which made it a handy car for larger families.

Rising fuel prices lured us to economical cars; a Toyota Corona and a Mitsubishi Magna wagon (with an awful turning circle). Later, we opted for a 4 litre, BA Ford Falcon wagon for its storage and towing capacity. We drove the Falcon on several long trips and still got $3,000 for it in 2002, when it had 285,000 kms on the clock.

Prior to the Ford craze, She Who Also Once Owned an EK Holden Ute With A Women’s Lib Symbol On The Tailgate, bought Elizabeth in 1976.

Holden produced the Premier between 1960 and 1982, so an original model would today be 60 years old and qualify as a vintage vehicle. The Southern Downs is a good place to spot vintage cars – in particular ‘muscle’ cars with big engines and twin exhausts. I spotted a few Holden models among the vintage Ford, Vauxhall and Buick cars at the Allora Heritage Day, all lovingly restored.

I didn’t spend my formative years here, so missed out on Australia’s love affair with the Holden. US auto giant General Motors infiltrated Australia in the 1920s, but the legend proper did not start until GM purchased South Australian car body manufacturer Holden in 1931.

La Trobe University PhD candidate Jack Fahey explored the history of GM/Holden in The Conversation. He explained how the American company brought then-uncommon PR and marketing strategies to Australia. GM set about selling Australians a car made for local conditions, successfully creating the symbolic myth of the Holden as the people’s car.

Prime Minister Ben Chifley unveiled the first Holden in 1948, which became affectionately known as the “FX”. Holden had previously been manufacturing car bodies for Buick, Chevrolet, Vauxhall and other GM brands. The FX (priced at £733) was such a success Holden could not keep up with demand, with 18,000 people paying their deposit sight unseen.

Holden’s exit in 2021 is an inevitable outcome for a company whose sales had been in sharp decline. At its peak (2002- 2005), Holden sold more than 170,000 vehicles a year. By 2019, sales dwindled to fewer than 40,000, all made somewhere else.

After import tariffs were scrapped, Australians readily switched allegiance to imported 4WD and SUV vehicles and smaller, economical cars. Brands like Toyota, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Hyundai, Mazda, Honda and Kia prevailed.

Watching the last of the four major car firms disappear from the landscape ought to remind us that other manufacturers have gone down the same road. Brands no longer made in Australia include Pacific Brands Clothing, Goodyear and Bridgestone tyres, Electrolux ovens and refrigerators, Golden Circle’s canned fruit operations (sold to Heinz), other fruit and produce processing plants and a long list of car manufacturers including Mitsubishi, Toyota and Nissan.

Manufacturing in general has slumped from a peak the 1960s when it represented 25% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). The figure was 5.77% in 2018.

FOMM reader Gary Shepherd took to his Facebook account this week to lament the dilution of local manufacturing, laying most of the blame on “that idiot team of Hawke and Keating – floating the dollar and removing import tariffs.” (The latter was known as The Button Plan, after former Industry and Commerce Minister John Button)

Cars were not the only victims of the level playing field theory, Gary said. Australia also once made great white goods.

“There are still countless Aussie homes with old ‘Roundy’ Westinghouse and GE Fridges being used under the house as beer fridges, despite being fifty years old,” Gary wrote.

Some of Gary’s friends reminded him of the role played by belligerent unions in the collapse of Australian industries.

Jack Fahey observed in The Conversation that production and sales of the Holden boomed in the 1950s, helped along by full employment for white men, high tariff protection, State-sponsored migration and amicable relations with trade unions. But he also reminded us that Holden’s history included large-scale industrial disputes.

In 1963, 18,500 men went on strike at Holden plants in Adelaide and Melbourne, asking for a wage increase of three pounds a week; about 12% of the average wage at the time.

Although Holden was already in trouble in the mid-1990s, that didn’t stop Prime Minister Paul Keating choosing the factory floor in South Australia to launch the ‘Working Nation’ white paper, in which he ironically argued for Holden’s place at the forefront of Australian nation building.

Economist Dennis Glover devoted a chapter of his book ‘An Economy is not a Society’ to the H.J Heinz factory in Dandenong, Victoria. Glover, who worked there during university holidays, described the idyllic life of an unskilled factory worker in the 1970s, in sharp contrast to the brutal downsizing and final shock closure in 2000, with a loss of 200 jobs.

The World today recalled the moment when Heinz/Watties announced it was centralising bean and soup canning production in New Zealand and closing the Dandenong factory after 45 years. Heinz said, from its Philadelphia headquarters, that it was cheaper to move production to another country than to re-invest in the existing plant.

Glover wrote that the Heinz subsidised cafeteria epitomised the extent to which companies would go to impress unskilled factory hands.

“We must remember that factories like these were built in an era when capitalists knew they had to be nice to working-class people if they wanted them to work for them.”

I had a few factory jobs in my youth and must admit I was hopeless at most of them. Production line work requires people who are good with their hands, quick and co-ordinated.

I feel for the 600 or so people who depended on Holden for a job, but they should have seen it coming. There will be more of this, as automation and global competition reduce opportunities for jobs in the manufacturing sector.

Manufacturing, which still employs one million Australians, obviously can no longer rely on the type of Federal Government financial support Holden was given. In 2012, $270 million was provided, in return for a promise to invest more than $1 billion into car manufacturing in Australia.

Paradoxically, the Australian government chooses to support and subsidise mining, while turning its back on our traditional manufacturers, even though most of our commodities are exported, with the value added in other countries. But I guess the government knows that.

Tales of quarantine and homelessness

quarantine-homelessness — Image: Nurses wearing surgical masks during the 1918 Spanish Flu’ pandemic which killed 15,000 Australians and millions worldwide. State Library of Queensland CC

Had it not been for the coronavirus outbreak (the WHO calls it COVID-19), few Australians would have known of Manigurr-ma, a purpose-built accommodation village 30kms from Darwin.

Manigurr-ma, or Howards Springs as it is zoned by Australia Post, was built in 2012 at a cost of $600 million as part of the Ichthys LNG gas project. Developed by infrastructure company Aecom for the multinational INPEX consortium, the village can house up to 3,500 people in 875 accommodation units, each with four rooms. There is a 1,750-place dining hall, a commercial kitchen which can produce 10,000 meals per day, a licensed tavern, a cinema, medical centre and laundry.

For the next fortnight or so, the village will be home to 266 Australians evacuated from the coronavirus epicentre, the Chinese city of Wuhan. Despite assurances that the risk to the general public is minimal, Howard Springs residents are making their opinions known.

After the LNG plant at Howard Springs became fully operational in 2018, the village was closed, after housing 3,500 construction workers at its peak. In May last year, Ichthys LNG Pty Ltd transferred Manigurr-ma to the Northern Territory government at a ‘peppercorn’ rental. A spokesperson for the NT Government told FOMM a ‘have your say’ campaign was carried out last year.

“Proposals were received from a range of parties, including public feedback for the future use of the Village and its assets.

‘‘The various submissions will be considered in the final decision by the Government about how the site and its assets will be used”

FOMM notes that the proposal required submissions to be “commercially viable”.

Given that a shortage of housing is a key issue for Darwin’s homeless population, I hope someone threw that particular hat in the ring.

Quarantine, from the Italian Quarante (meaning ‘forty’), has been around since Old Testament days. The word referred to a rule introduced in Venice that all ships suspected of harbouring people with infectious diseases stood offshore for 40 days.

Several small islands off Venice known as Lazarettos were established in the 1600s when plague was rampant. Some of these off-limits islands were later converted to mental hospitals or convents. But as far as the general populace were concerned, they were, and still are, ghost towns.

Most countries had a place where people with leprosy or plague were banished. China had a well-established policy from 600 AD to detain plague-ridden sailors and foreign visitors, preferably at sea.

North Brother Island in New York’s East River was used for decades as the site of an infectious diseases hospital. A reporter from the New York Post who was recently taken on a guided tour of the now-closed station wrote that the island’s remote location was deemed perfect in the 1880s for a hospital to treat contagious smallpox and typhoid patients.

“Mary Mallon, who earned the name Typhoid Mary by passing the disease to 51 people while working as a cook in Brooklyn and Long Island, was its most infamous tenant. She displayed no symptoms herself, but was quarantined until her death in 1938.”

Sydney’s Quarantine Station at North Head (Manly) took in immigrants who had fallen ill (as well as some residents). As the authors of a book published in 2016 found, some recovered and were released. Some never made it out.

‘Stories from the Sandstone’, published in 2016 by the University of Sydney’s Peter Hobbins, Anne Clarke and Ursula Frederick, chronicled the history of Sydney’s Quarantine Station. The title of the book comes from archaeological discoveries of inscriptions carved into sandstone by some of the 16,000 people kept at North Head between 1830 until its closure in 1984.

In the mid-1880s, infectious illnesses like smallpox, tuberculosis and scarlet fever were common and there was even a recorded case of bubonic plague in 1900. As Dr Hobbins says in the book, as a result of extensive immunisation programmes, effective antibiotics and improvements in the public health system, infectious diseases do not decimate the population as they did in the 1800s or even during the Spanish ‘Flu pandemic of 1918-1919.

The most visible (and possibly the largest), quarantine station in the world in 2020 is the cruise ship Diamond Princess, moored off Japan with its 2,666 guests and 1,045 crew ‘couped (sic) up’ as an ABC report had it, until time dilutes the fear of contagion. Princess Cruises this week confirmed reports of 39 new coronavirus cases aboard the ship, berthed at Yokohama.

“We are following guidance from the Japan Ministry of Health on plans for disembarkation protocols to provide medical care for these new cases,” the website update states.

The Diamond Princess had been due to leave the Japanese port of Yokohama on February 4, but cancelled the cruise on advice from Japanese health authorities.

The cruise ship’s situation fits the definition of ‘quarantine’ – preventing the movement of those who may have been exposed to a communicable disease, but do not have a confirmed medical diagnosis.

The key difference between Coronavirus (now known as COVID-19) and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) is that people with Coronavirus are infectious before exhibiting symptoms. This may explain the comparatively higher numbers of people contracting the disease and the overly-cautious approach to quarantine here and abroad.

A Medical Journal of Australia report compiled after the SARS epidemic had abated in 2004 demonstrated the effectiveness of Australia’s border screening. Of the 1.84 million arrivals into Australia during the study period, 794 people were referred for screening to the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service. Of these, four travellers met the World Health Organisation (WHO) definition for SARS. None of these people were confirmed to have SARS.

The media loves contagion stories about as much as it drools over earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and croc and shark attacks. Are they beating it up? Time will tell. Whatever you read on social media, as of February 13, 2020, 15 Australians had been confirmed as being infected with coronavirus. Five have since recovered.

As usual, the trail of research leading into the history of quarantine stations lured me away from the point I wanted to make.

When the Northern Territory has 12 times the national average incidence of homelessness, how is it there are 875 living units sitting vacant near Darwin (for at least 18 months)?

NT Shelter estimates that 16.5% of Territorians under 16 are experiencing homelessness. The system seems unable to cope, with Shelter’s findings that 48% of people get turned away due to a ‘lack of resources’.

As Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison conceded, we are no closer to Closing the Gap. The policy was announced in 2008 with noble intentions to help bridge the gap between health and welfare outcomes for indigenous compared to non-indigenous Australians. There are no simple answers to the fact that 90% of the Territory’s homeless are indigenous. As a Triple J story revealed, a survey of non-indigenous people in Darwin revealed a lot of ignorance about ‘long-grassers’ – indigenous people who sleep rough.

Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation’s random survey of 300 people found the majority romanticised the notion of sleeping under the stars. Only six people identified a lack of housing, failed public policy and the impact of assimilation and integration policies as reasons for homelessness.

When the last person at Manigurr-ma is cleared to leave, it would be an interesting exercise, at the very least, to trial the centre as a homeless shelter. After all, though homelessness is not contagious, it does have far-reaching effects.

Wait a minute Mr Postman

So goes the refrain of a much-covered song from a now-defunct genre of love songs involving ‘snail mail’. Well may they call it that, with packages mailed to my sister in New Zealand taking up to 12 days to arrive. A Leunig calendar mailed to a friend in London in early December still has not arrived!

I’ve been hanging out every day for the Postie to arrive. What’s got me on Postie-alert is a series of online purchases, all of which offered free delivery via Australia Post. So far, the items have arrived on time (as alerted by text), although the first parcel took eight days to get here (including a weekend and a public holiday).

You may have noticed I had a month off social media and re-introduced myself with a selfie posting a letter (above). Not terribly original and a bit out of focus but it got some attention. What I didn’t say was the letter being posted was a return-to-sender; a marketing letter to a person who no longer lives here.

My most recent experience of return-to-sender was the return of a Christmas card to someone who moved and didn’t let me know. Several weeks elapsed between the posting and the return. I found that person’s email address and sent an electronic card, which I probably should have done in the first place.

When was the last time you got a personal, hand-written letter in the mail? People do still write letters, but by and large, personal communications have been overtaken by SMS, Messenger, email and PMS (private messages) on social media.

In the heyday of the US Postal service, hundreds of pop songs were written, exploiting the emotions engendered by (a) receiving a love letter or (b) conversely waiting for a letter which probably isn’t going to arrive.

There is no limit to the mawkishness of sentiments expressed in letter songs, as exemplified in Bill Carlisle’s 1938 tune No Letter in the Mail Today, covered by Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers and others.

No answer to my love letter

To sooth my achin’ heart

Why did God ever permit

True love like ours to part

The last verse goes quite close to the man saying that if he does not get a letter he will end it all. My music historian pal Franky’s Dad (aka Lyn Nuttall), put together this Spotify playlist ,which includes three versions of Please, Mr. Postman, a number one hit for the Motown group the Marvelettes.

Wait Mister Postman

Oh yeah

(Is there a letter in your bag for me?) Please, Please Mister Postman

(Why’s it been a very long time) Oh yeah

(Since I heard from this boyfriend of mine)

There has been speculation by reviewers and music historians that the song is a not-so subtle commentary on the Vietnam War.

There must be some word today

From my boyfriend so far away

Please, Mister Postman, look and see

Is there a letter, a letter for me?

Source: lyricfind

Many of you may recall that angst-ridden time when you broke up with someone and then regretted it. So you wrote a letter, didn’t you, and fruitlessly waited for a reply.

Elvis Presley had a massive hit with that earworm of a song, Return to Sender. The man writes to his estranged love and instead of reading the letter, she writes upon it, “Return to sender, address unknown, no such number, no such zone.”

Our romantic protagonist persists, as romantics do, sending it again by special delivery and even hand-delivered. But the letter keeps coming back (to that circular chorus – “she wrote upon it…”).

Writers Otis Blackwell (who also wrote Great Balls of Fire) and Winfield Scott were not to know the US Postal Service would change its delivery system of zones to zip codes the following year, making the lyric redundant. Not that anyone cared – Return to Sender went Platinum in the US (one million copies sold) and was used in the soundtrack of Girls, Girls, Girls in 1962. Songfacts.com, my go-to source when writing about hit records, notes that this song led to the US Postal Service issuing a commemorative Elvis stamp in 1993, marking what would have been The King’s 58^th birthday.

“Enterprising stamp collectors put Elvis stamps on letters that day and mailed them off with false addresses so they would be sent back marked “Return To Sender” and become collector’s items.”

Motown group The Boxtops had a hit with ‘The Letter’, a song which is the polar opposite of Please, Mr. Postman and Return to Sender. In ‘The Letter’, the man gets a letter (‘my baby she wrote me a letter’) and drops everything, saying ‘gimme a ticket for an aeroplane…’.

The song was famously re-invented by Joe Cocker in his Mad Dogs and Englishmen phase, relishing the song’s evocative, if ungrammatical bridge:

Well, she wrote me a letter

Said she couldn’t live without me no more

Listen mister, can’t you see I got to get back

To my baby once-a more

Anyway, yeah.

More recently Australian lyricist Nick Cave penned ‘Love letter’, kissing the seal on a letter and sending it off, having regretted something he said: “Love letter, love letter, go get her, go get her.”

Getting back to the headline, The Marvelettes, four young black women whose publicity photos of the day has them sporting beehive hairdos, first recorded Please, Mr. Postman in 1961.

It was a No 1 hit in the US, followed two years later by The Beatles. A dozen years on, The Carpenters came up with their own version of the song written by Georgia Dobbins, William Garrett, Freddie Gorman, Brian Holland, and Robert Bateman.

There are many lists of songs which mention posties, the postal service or letters, though for obvious reasons Tom Waits’s classic ‘Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis’ does not make the cut.

The ones I discussed must have rung my adolescent bell in the 1960s. Tunes like Stevie Wonder’s 1970 ballad, ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m yours)’, passed me by, probably coinciding with my skiffle and jug band music phase. No, I do not have the duffle coat. (I threw it out when it had more holes than cloth. Ed)

Apart from ‘dead letters’ (undeliverable items), mail sometimes goes astray because of theft or hoarding by postal employees. Recently, a 61-year-old Japanese postal worker was referred to prosecutors after investigators found some 24,000 undelivered items dating back to 2003. The Guardian Weekly’s Global Report item said the postie told police it was ‘too much bother’ to deliver the mail.

Theft by mail employees is not uncommon in the US, where billions of items are delivered every year. The US Postal Service investigated 1,364 suspected employee mail theft cases and arrested 409 employees between October 2016 and September 2017.

Incidents of postal employee stealing or hoarding mail are less common in Australia, but authorities have reported an increase in ‘porch theft’ – persons unknown stealing parcels after they have been delivered.

If you did not know, Australia Post has a service where you can collect parcels from your local post office or have them re-directed if you are not going to be home.

As I discovered with my online parcel deliveries, I received a text offering two choices: 1/ someone will be home or 2/ pick up from the post office.

Given that Australia Post delivers $4.8 billion worth of parcels a year, that’s smart use of technology.

Further reading: https://bobwords.com.au/cancel-po-box/

Australia Day and the Highland Clearances

australia-day-highland-clearances — Image: Ruined croft houses on Fuaigh Mòr in Loch Roag. The island was cleared of its inhabitants in 1841 and is now used only for grazing sheep. Wikipedia/Sarah Egan CC.

Australia Day came and went and alas, not once did I think about my birthplace, Scotland, or the country where I spent my childhood (New Zealand). The older I get and the further away from my Citizenship Day ceremony (January 26, 2000), the more it seems I have assimilated.

I do not mean assimilate in a flag-wearing, gum boot-tossing, beer-swilling, ‘It-was-in- the-‘Stralian-so-it-must-be-true’, sense.

Regardless, it is some admission from an iconoclastic alien, someone who had to be repeatedly pressed by the family lawyer to become an Australian citizen. Prior to 2000, I was a British citizen with permanent resident rights in New Zealand. I held an EU passport (what a relic that soon will be), with a return visa which over the years saw increasingly stringent conditions attached.

In the 1970s, when we first set off from New Zealand on our “OE” (overseas experience), we did not need a passport at all. When leaving New Zealand to visit Australia, we just filled in a two-sided visitor card; on which as it became apparent, too many people entered fictitious details.

Immigration Minister Ian McPhee introduced passports for Trans-Tasman travel in July 1981. The main aim was to stop abuses of the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangements.

Until that time, Kiwis and Aussies were free to travel back and forth to either country to live, work, play and inevitably meet their life partners and settle in one country or the other.

The evidence of this is seen in Census statistics which showed that 518,466 people born in New Zealand were living in Australia on Census night 2016. Conversely, 62,712 Australians were domiciled in New Zealand on their Census night in 2013.

While it may now seem like folklore, the free and easy Trans-Tasman arrangement fell apart due to revelations about the Mr Asia drug syndicate run by ruthless Kiwi criminal Terry Clark.

He was 2IC of the syndicate in the late 1970s, but rose to the top by ordering the killing of syndicate head Marty Johnstone. The influence Clark and his couriers had on importing heroin into Australia has been well-chronicled. The sordid story was also dramatized in Channel Nine’s Underbelly series.

The years between 1978 and 1983, when Clark died in a British prison, were trying times for law abiding, adventurous Kiwis who travelled across the ‘Dutch’ to work. Young Kiwis thought of Australia as the equivalent of eight countries (six states and two territories), with six times more people, hence unlimited job opportunities. They were escaping New Zealand at a time when unemployment was around 7%.

Australia’s unemployment was also high, but New Zealanders came looking for jobs with a built-in reputation for punctuality, honesty and hard work, Terry Clark notwithstanding.

When I became an Australian citizen on Australia Day 2000, I’ll admit I went into it a trifle blasé – for me it was a necessary formality. But the event in Brisbane Town Hall brought out a lot of emotions as I realised, in company with 699 others, many of whom were refugees, that for some people this ceremony was literally life-saving.

So to Australia Day 2020 and I’m watching the Wugulora Morning Ceremony on ABC TV. It is being held on the lawns of Sydney’s best-known waterside location, Barangaroo. As an armchair viewer, I was immediately touched by the dancing, singing and ceremony, not to mention appropriate speeches by NSW Governor Beazley and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

For me, the televised spectacle was exemplified by a young Aboriginal boy holding aloft two flags – in the right hand the Commonwealth’s symbol of colonial power and in the left the red, yellow and black Aboriginal flag. There was a decent-sized crowd there on the foreshore and the overall impression was one of peace, reverence and inclusion.

Elsewhere in Sydney that day, 10,000 [people marched to protest ‘Invasion Day’, the central tenet of which is that Australia Day should not be held on the day Queen Victoria’s vassals took the country by force.

As someone who was not only born in Scotland, but can trace ancestry back through the same small coastal fishing village to the 1700s, I should know more about the Highland Clearances or the ‘eviction of the Gaels’ than I do.

The eviction of rural tenants between 1750 and 1860 was driven by Scottish lairds, some of whom may have been English or at least owed money to the English. They drove the changes to increase their income and pay off debts.

Previously, farms were run on the runrig system of open fields and shared grazing. These collectives were replaced with large-scale pastoral farms stocked with sheep. Rents were much higher, with many displaced tenants forced into crofting communities, to be employed in fishing, quarrying or the kelp industry. The sudden demotion from farmer to crofter caused much resentment.

Between1815 and the 1850s, as a result of famine and/or collapse of crofting industries, crofting communities lost the means to support themselves. Assisted passages became commonplace, with landowners paying for their tenants to emigrate.

Some of this sounds a little bit like the oppression of Australia’s Aboriginal people, dispossessed and eventually herded into State-run settlement or missions.

Census papers list my forebears’ occupations as ‘agricultural worker’, ‘crofter’, ‘railway gatekeeper’, ‘flax mill worker’ or ‘labourer’. There is a high school teacher in the family tree, but in the main the Wilsons were working people and for centuries stayed in the one place. That is until my Dad had an epiphany and started looking for work in another country under the ‘assisted passage’ scheme. We missed out on going to Ontario for reasons which were never discussed with mere children. Instead, we were booked to sail to New Zealand in the southern winter of 1955. We arrived in Wellington and then took a night train to a small town in the centre of the North Island.

Bob’s song, Rangitiki

This week we watched the documentary, Gurrumul, a unique glimpse into the late indigenous singer’s life in a remote Arnhem Land community. Gurrumul became famous the world over, singing his own songs and stories in the Yolngu language. He touched people with his music, even when they did not understand the lyrics.

According to custom, the Yolngu people request that the names and images of tribal people not be used after their deaths. In Gurrumul’s case, they made an exception.

In a similar vein, Scotland has produced numerous bands that sing in Gaelic, including Manran, a band that recently toured Australia. I find myself moved in a spiritual way by Gurrumul’s music just as the often patriotic songs of modern Gaelic bands give me goose bumps. We don’t understand the content but we absorb the emotional message.

I’m never sure how many people actually look up links, although I must recommend the intriguingly-named Red Hot Chilli Pipers. I will leave you with this snippet from this energetic nine-piece band.

As always, the skirl of the bagpipes sends shivers down the spine and brings goose bumps to the forearms. Once a Scot always a Scot.

Red Hot Chilli Pipers

Last drinks at the Paradise Motel

alcohol-last-drinks — Image: Michael Jarmoluk, Pixabay.com

As I gave up drinking alcohol some 36 years ago, it was probably not surprising I forgot the essential ingredient for a house-warming party.

“Um,” said She Who Trusted Me with the Catering, “What about the ice – for those who are bringing something to drink?”

Off I went on a mercy dash to buy a bag of ice. The first guest had arrived before I returned and showed me the best way to prepare ice for an esky (drop it on the concrete driveway).

There was quite a bit of wine left over at the end, which suggested our guests were moderate drinkers (or intended that wine be left for mine hosts). In all, it was an enjoyable christening of the Paradise Motel (named after one of my more fanciful songs).

My mind turned to this subject with a timely new report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare about the effect of drugs and alcohol on the health of the general public.

This intersected nicely with an observation made by an emergency medicine veteran. His view was that if everyone gave up drinking alcohol and taking illicit drugs, Emergency Department staff would then have ample time to care for people who are genuinely sick.

The National Hospital Morbidity Database showed that in 2017-2018, there were 136,000 same day or overnight hospital admissions for a drug-related principal diagnosis. On its own, alcohol accounted for 53% of these admissions. No prizes for speculating about the other 47%.

Ah, you are thinking, the wowser’s view: “all health problems caused by drugs and alcohol are self-inflicted.”

Perhaps the ER veteran’s views would also include people whose health has deteriorated over time as a result of smoking tobacco.

The AIHW report confirms a noticeable decline in the use of tobacco in the 14 and over age group (from 24.3% in 1991 to 12.2% in 2016). Despite this impressive statistic, smoking is still the leading cause of cancer in Australia (22% of the cancer burden).

Alcohol abuse, however, is a far more worrying problem. The World Health Organisation found that 3 million deaths result every year from harmful use of alcohol (5.3 % of all deaths). The harmful use of alcohol is a factor in more than 200 disease and injury conditions.

It is generally accepted that (excessive) alcohol consumption and its aftermath contributes to more than 6000 deaths in Australia every year.

You’d never know it, but sometimes in the privacy of our own lounge room, we watch the reality TV show, RBT (the ex-probation officer and the (sober) ex-journalist relishing the opportunity to make snide comments). We did sympathise to a degree with the young chap who freely admitted to using cannabis every day (‘but I don’t drink alcohol at all’). Nevertheless the law finds that he is still driving under the influence and he thereby paid a price.

A month or so ago I had to drive to Toowoomba for the day and was stopped by a roadside breath test crew. Did I say this was at 9.10am on a weekday? She Who Still Enjoys a Drink or Two observed that such roadside blitzes often catch people who are still over the blood alcohol level limit after a night of partying.

The AIHW report found that while the majority of Australians drink alcohol, the overall daily intake is on a downward trend. The proportion of people drinking in excess of lifetime risk guidelines continues to decline.

The apparent consumption of alcohol in 2017-2018 was equivalent to an average of 2.72 standard drinks per day per consumer of alcohol aged 15 and over.

That is a fair way below the binge drinking and ‘pre-loading’ that goes on among the must-get-drunk-to-socialise cohort.

Almost 40% of Australians aged 18 and over exceeded the single occasion risk guidelines by consuming more than four standard drinks in one sitting. About 1 in 6 (17.4%) Australians aged 14 and over put themselves or others at risk of harm while under the influence of alcohol in the last 12 months.

I guess these are the people the RBT teams are out to catch.

Alcohol consumption inevitably increases on festive occasions like Christmas, New Year and public holidays like Australia Day. Special birthday and anniversaries are also vulnerable times for those who find it difficult to stop after two or three.

So how much is too much? The Australian Bureau of Statistics defines binge drinking as more than 7 drinks a night for men, and more than 5 for women. The NHMRC Australian Alcohol Guidelines defines excessive drinking as more than 4 standard drinks per night.

So how did we all go after those festive season parties? Many start at home and stay there. Others start with a few at-home drinks (sometimes known as pre-loading), before partygoers wisely catch taxis to the next venue, where the drinking continues.

Drink-driving laws have done much to help drinkers self-regulate. Many of the people stopped by officers on RBT were consciously monitoring their drinking.

But not everyone is as keen to avoid losing their drivers’ licence. In my court reporting days for a daily newspaper, I recall cases where the defendant was found to have a blood alcohol level of (extreme example) 0.34 – quite a long way beyond the Australian limit of 0.05). Quite often people with this level of blood alcohol have been found asleep at the wheel of a stationary vehicle (and a jolly good thing too).

Not that it should fall to me to make such withering observations, but I sometimes wonder how the evening ended for three young women, so much under 18 and under the influence after the footy (about 10pm) that they took off their high heeled shoes and wobbled down Milton Road.

“Are we going clubbing?” I heard one of them ask a less-than sober friend. “Do you reckon we should we catch a cab to Valley or walk?”

Given that a round of four beers at the footie will set you back $40 or so, this type of drinker is unlikely to belong to the ‘average’ household that drinks $32 worth of alcohol per week. Did you notice that the NIHW report implicates adolescents as young as 14? In a country where the legal drinking age is 18, this implies that older friends (or family) are buying alcohol for the under-agers.

The AIHW report found that 9.1% of adolescent males and 6.8% of females aged 12-17 exceed the adult guidelines for single occasion risk.

Young people are arguably more likely to be influenced by alcohol advertising at major sports events, prompting targeted opposition from alcohol education lobbyists.

You might have heard tennis ace Nick Kyrgios say to John McEnroe after Tuesday’s night’s Australian Open win – ‘he’s had too many beers’ – a response to a spectator who yelled out something incomprehensible.

The National Alliance for Action on Alcohol is taking on the Australian Open, urging organisers to consider the role of advertising in youth drinking. An e-petition to this effect has so far gathered 151 signatures.

Another critic observed: “…exposure to alcohol advertising places children at greater risk of drinking earlier and at more dangerous levels than they otherwise would.”

This is a long way from my youth in 1960s rugby-mad New Zealand, where drinking beer to excess was considered to be a badge of manhood. It’s not, but I guess the statistics in 2020 show that more of us realise that now.

Water theft a sign of crumbling civilisation

water-theft-drought — Image: Storm King resident Penny Davies indicates the ‘normal’ dam water level. Contributed/

As communities across drought-paralysed Australia patiently wait for rain, reports of water theft, ranging from relatively trivial incidents to a 25,000-litre heist, are troubling. Can we be far from outright anarchy when dishonest (and sometimes honest but desperate), people help themselves to other people’s water?

There are precedents for this – just think back to Cape Town‘s ‘Day Zero’ crisis in 2018 when a city of 3.74 million was set to run out of reticulated water. The rich white South Africans relaxed behind their high fences and simply bought in more water as and when needed.

Meanwhile, the poor black (and white) people were forced to queue at a public standpipe for their daily rations. While Cape Town’s immediate crisis is past, water is still a scarce and expensive commodity. There have been reports of water theft from there too – allegedly by residents fiddling their water meters to give false readings.

The Cape Argus News reported that the percentage of water lost or not billed for was at 34.27%, above the normal 20% band.

Last year the City of Cape Town warned of water shortages and introduced incremental water levels to discourage high usage. Punitive tariffs for high water users (more than 35,000 litres a month), costs R768.64, or $77 per 1000 litres.

That does seem steep when compared to Australian cities that charge $3.12 (Brisbane) $2.11 (Sydney), and $3.35 (Melbourne) per kilolitre (1000 litres). Some cities quote a range of prices – Perth ($1.82 – $4.85), Canberra ($2.46- $4.94) and Adelaide ($2.39 – $3.69). As you’d expect, water-rich Tasmania is the cheapest (Hobart $1.06, with Darwin not much dearer at $1.96.

So yes, we can see how an excess water tariff charge of $77 per kilolitre would galvanise people into trying to find a way around the system.

In Australia, water theft is more brazen; the rogues just back a water tanker up to an absent neighbour’s dam, stick a hose in and turn on a pump. A year ago, Southern Downs Regional Council authorities acted to secure water standpipes after neighbours reported numerous trucks illegally filling up at Connolly Dam. In December this year, police were called to investigate the theft of 25,000 litres of water from a Council depot in Murwillumbah (northern NSW). The thieves did just that – backed up a tanker, filled it up and drove away. This was at a time of bushfires (the Rural Fire Service said the stolen water was equivalent to six or seven fire tankers). Not only that, Murwillumbah, like other rural regions in NSW, was under severe water restrictions at the time. In this context, water thieves are no better than the two people who looted an abandoned electrical goods store in Bateman’s Bay. Leon Elton and Kylie Pobjie were arrested, charged and denied bail. It was alleged the pair traded the stolen electrical consumer goods for drugs.

Belt fruit growing town of Stanthorpe, which officially ran out of water last week. The town has just one water supply – Storm King Dam. Water is now being carted from Warwick, which is itself in danger of running out of town water by Christmas 2020. The State government has commissioned a $1 million feasibility study to extend the SEQ water pipeline grid from Toowoomba to Warwick. But what if it does not rain between now and the 18 months it could take for this to happen?

Other towns in Queensland (Miriam Vale near Gladstone comes to mind), have faced similar issues, although Queensland is often rescued by the northern wet season. It is not uncommon for drenching rain in southern parts of the state to follow a cyclone in the tropical north. Even then, Tablelands residents tell us the wet is late (again).

Drought-ravaged New South Wales is another matter, with the State government last year canvassing plans to evacuate up to 90 towns that are in danger of running out of water.

They include sizeable cities (Bathurst, Dubbo, Tamworth), and smaller towns like Orange, Armidale and Tenterfield.

In our new home town of Warwick, the Southern Downs Community Relief Group is hosting a weekly free water pick up from the Warwick Showgrounds The water is donated, rationed and available only to those who live in outlying towns which do not have reticulated water. Similar charitable groups are also operating on the Granite Belt.

Tambourine Mountain in the Gold Coast hinterland has no reticulated water service, forcing residents whose tanks have run dry to buy in delivered water,

A Mount Tambourine acreage dweller told FOMM the waiting time for truck-delivered water has blown out to eight weeks, because there are only two aquifer suppliers.

“It is a controversial issue on the mountain that a couple of other landowners are contracted to supply big commercial bottled water/soft drink companies. This means that thousands of litres are being trucked away from those aquifers every day, not available for local supply.

“Some residents have their own bores to supplement their needs but the water is of varying quality because those bores usually do not go as deep as those of the commercial suppliers.”

The Beverage Council of Australia, the peak body which usually responds to such reports, received some sort of vindication in December.

Its water division, the Australasian Bottled Water Institute [ABWI) welcomed the final report on the impacts of the industry on groundwater in the Northern Rivers by the NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer.

“After a thorough and independent review into the bottled water industry in the Northern Rivers, the NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer found that less than one per cent of groundwater in the Tweed is extracted for water bottling purposes,’’ Chief Executive Officer Australian Beverages Council Geoff Parker said.

The bottled water industry, which now generates over $700 million annually, has expanded in the past five years due to what Mr Parker says is “consumers’ preference for convenience, taste and rising health consciousness.”

A Queensland Urban Utilities survey found 35% of people preferred bottled water over tap water, while 29% thought it was better for them than tap water. But blind testing in South Australia revealed many people cannot tell the difference without packaging.

A report by consumer advocate Choice quoted Stuart Khan, an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales and an expert in drinking water quality.

“Australia is a world leader in the way we manage drinking water quality and we have some of the best tap water in the world,” Khan says. “Tap water and bottled water are regulated differently in Australia, so they don’t need to meet the same standards. Tap water needs to meet more stringent quality criteria and actually gets monitored more carefully than bottled water.”

Even so, no disrespect to the local Council’s efforts to keep supplying potable water, but I’m not used to the treated water here. Occasionally I’m one of those who buys bottled water (on average Australians consume five litres per week).

But here’s the thing. At its cheapest in a retail grocery store, 10 litres of water costs about $4, or 40 cents per litre. That compares with about 0.2 cents a litre for reticulated town water (in Warwick). (It’s merely supply and demand economics, Grasshopper. Ed. BTW I can say what I like today, ‘cos it’s my birthday.)

Return of The Wastemakers

wastemakers-computers — Image: INESby, pixabay.com

I had a Vance Packard moment this week, thwarting the concept of planned obsolescence, which he wrote about in his 1960 best-seller, The Wastemakers.

My triumph was no big deal, but they were hard-won as I finally, after four weeks, got my 32-year-old Technics stereo system working again.

Before we get into that, and on a similar theme, I would like to have a rant about the complexities and nonsense of Windows 10. Microsoft’s latest operating system deserves inclusion in my seldom-heard song, ‘Windows F*****g 8’, which I wrote in honour of the man who warned me to stick with Windows 7 (…”It isn’t fair, but they don’t care, that I can’t find F*****g Solitaire”….)

When we moved, my 2015 laptop, running on Windows 7, was labouring, crashing, not responding to commands, giving me blue screens and multiple hard drive error messages. My new Lenovo has a lot going for it – extremely light, fast and not too expensive at all. But it came with Windows 10 pre-installed and an infuriating voice-activated robot called Cortana, who offers to solve any problem but more often will say “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand.”

So Mr Microsoft, why did you dump Windows 7 (which, after this month will no longer be supported). in favour of an operating system that tried to look like Apple Mac and failed? Just like Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1, it has so many bugs you do so yearn for good old Windows XP. IT companies constantly upgrade and invent new software and gadgets. The manufacturers of computers, smart phones, mobile entertainment and all their peripherals have no choice, if they want to stay in business, but to continue selling us flawed ‘upgrades’. In the case of Windows 10, Microsoft forced us into it by withdrawing support for Windows 7.

Windows forums have a lot to say about 10, its dodgy updates and other shortcomings. The most irritating thing is the assumption (by Microsoft) that you will take up the expensive annual subscriptions to pre-installed software trials and store all your personal data in the cloud, at a cost, of course. After some reading, I managed to install Office 2010, which I bought and paid for once already.

The good news is there are plenty of ‘fixes’ out there for Windows 10 glitches. I found one key piece of advice (not from Microsoft). In Windows 7 I used the ‘recent documents’ link constantly. It was easily found under documents/folders. Windows 10 has done away with this useful tool.

Solution: use the keystroke Windows key/e. Thank me later.

She Who Also Has Windows 10 is now regretting asking me to upgrade her laptop. The worst part of upgrading was that (initially) we could not get the printer to work, or the network sharing we previously employed.

There is now a security feature called Network Credentials which requires you to enter your Microsoft outlook name and password if indeed you succumb to that malware-type exhortation. That only took me three hours to fix – to whom should I send the invoice?

Nevertheless, if you still have Windows 7 and it decides to stop working, you will be in trouble. The good news, if you are game, is that Microsoft’s free upgrade is still available (rather than buying it for $169). Not that I recommend it, but here is the link I used to download and install Windows F*****g 10 on SWAHWT’s laptop.

Vance Packard saw all that coming, three decades before personal and business computers became a mainstream, multi-billion dollar industry. Packard was well ahead of his time, writing a number of thoughtful books about consumerism and the stealthy way the industrial-military complex manipulates people to its own greedy ends.

The thesis Packard pursued in The Wastemakers is deftly summarised in an article found on Trove.

The author of The Hidden Persuaders and The Status Seekers analysed over-production and the planned obsolescence of so-called consumer durables.

“The average American family throws away about 750 metal cans each year,” he began. “In the Orient, a family lucky enough to gain possession of a metal can treasures it and puts it to work in some way, if only as a flower pot.”

Packard claimed that in 1960s America “each individual man, woman and child was using up to an average of eighteen tons of materials a year”.

The concept of eternal growth which developed after WWII required “insidious promotion and worship of ‘consumerism’ the encouragement of waste, the temptations of encouragement of waste and the temptations of limitless H.P (hire purchase).”

Sixty years after Packard published his book, consumerism and the advertising that encourages it is no less insidious. Rampant and shameless consumerism suggests that anything “used” is shaming to its owner.

“The escalation of self-indulgence and the planned chaos leaves the buyer bewildered and helpless amid that shambles of phoney price-cuts, sales prices, special discounts etc.”

As people often do when moving, we purchased some new consumer ‘durables’, well aware that the generic 12-month warranties suggested a limited life span.

Meanwhile, the Technics stereo system, bought from one of Brisbane’s Brashes stores in 1986, was still sitting in carefully packed boxes in the garage. Sure, I was listening to MP3s on my Bluetooth speaker, but it is so not the same.

The Technics system was top of its class in 1986 and still performs well. It has seven individual components all interlinked by a maze of cables and power cords (one feeds the other until finally, one goes to AC power).

The problem this time with installation was (a) delving through the five manuals to remember how to reconnect everything and (b) the speaker leads were too short. They were always too short, but in our previous home it was never a problem.

I am not, as you’d know, not the world’s most practical chap. But I’m stubborn (and cheap). I turned to YouTube’s host of geeky how-to videos. What I wanted to do was work out how to extend the stereos leads, which is hard to do when said speakers are sealed boxes which offer no easy way to replace leads.

The first video I found (1:47) when searching ‘how to open sealed speaker cabinets’ is a classic example of why you can sometimes find helpful hints, and sometimes not!

After I stopped laughing and explored some other more useful options, I went into town and bought a 6m roll of 14 gauge speaker cable and some electrical tape. I used a box cutter and a pair of pliers to hand-cut the cable into two lengths, stripped 1cm of plastic off both ends of each cable and then used electrical tape to connect the longer leads to the short speaker cables. As such jobs go, it is not pretty. But it works.

I finished setting up the system about 11pm and rewarded myself with a cup of tea, listening to Homeless, a vinyl album by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. As you may recall, the acapella African choir’s music formed the basis of Paul Simon’s amazing 1986 album, Graceland. Simon’s song Homeless is track 1, side one. Of course I fell asleep listening to side two and never got to flip the album over.

The really good news is there are a few hundred more vinyl albums in boxes in the garage. (Ed: Not that we have anywhere to store them).