Now that we are traversing the country’s highways, cruise-controlling along at 95 towing a small pop top caravan, we become very aware of semi-trailers. I can see a couple right now in my extending wing mirror, closer than they ought to be and itching to go faster than the 100 kms they pressed me to attain on the Great Western highway between Melbourne and Adelaide. A passing lane appeared and I gratefully ducked into it, still doing 100. They soared past like I was nailed to the ground.
We have been using our GPS planner to pick out routes which will get us to where we want to go and avoid major roads wherever possible. It takes a little longer but the pressure eased as we skirted through Maryborough and Avoca via the Pyrenees Highway. A pleasant country road and not a truck in sight, although there are many signs saying to beware of kangaroos for the next 25-45 kms. On the first leg of our trip from Brisbane to Warwick, every second vehicle on the Warrego Highway was a truck, a semi-trailer or a B-double (a prime mover and two trailers) and much of this traffic cluttered up the Newell Highway heading south. As all Grey Nomads know, as you move into the interior, B-doubles become triples and, in some places a prime mover and four trailers. http://www.melbournecyclist.com/ produced a scale drawing which shows 13 cyclists alongside a B-triple, so you’ll get the picture.
To be absolutely fair, the number of truck drivers who drive responsibly and pass when it is safe to pass far outnumber the tail-gaiters and those who cut back in too quickly, their rear trailer swaying and almost taking the front bumper bar with them. The wide and over-size loads (pictured) are well telegraphed by escorts so no real problem there unless you are not paying attention. I sometimes watch a show called “Outback Trucker” and sympathised with the truckie who found himself stuck behind Mavis and Bill doing a steady 80 kmh in their Prado 4×4 towing a 20-foot van. In their defence, a lot of outback roads are sealed, but the bitumen is a narrow strip with soft dirt shoulders sloping away into the scrub. Many a Nomad has found themselves upside down in a paddock, their dream of spending a year doing the big circuit cut short.
Over the years spent writing for newspapers I have taken something of an interest in the various schemes to build new railways to carry freight across this vast land. The road transport and distribution businesses that send fleets of trucks out on our highways day and night might not like the idea, but there would still be business for them in distributing goods from rail ports to local destinations. But it would end the realm of the long-haul truckie, freeing the nation’s highways for domestic traffic. There would be fewer pile-ups and roll-overs, much less wear and tear on the roads and truckies, re-deployed to deliver local freight within a city’s boundaries, could spend their nights at home with family.
Company director, railway pioneer, seniors’ advocate and fundraiser Everald Compton, 83, published his memoirs earlier this year. City Beat columnist James McCullough reported that Compton, a long-time advocate of inland rail, felt he should simply put his life into some sort of record before he forgets it all.
He printed 400 copies off his 350-page book Tracks to Somewhere to give away to family and friends. Compton is a friendly, intelligent old character I have met on numerous occasions. In 2008 he proposed an inland railway from Melbourne to Darwin, linking with other inland rail links (Toowoomba to Moree, Toowoomba to Gladstone). Compton has to be credited with putting the concept of long-haul inland rail freight on the agenda and he has kept hammering away at it for years.
In 2008, the Federal Government asked the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC) to assess the feasibility of a proposed Melbourne to Brisbane inland railway and to identify the optimum route. Preliminary analysis by ARTC showed that the cheapest version of the inland railway would allow freight to be moved from Melbourne to Brisbane in just over 27 hours. Running from Melbourne via Albury to Cootamundra, Parkes, Narromine, Dubbo, Werris Creek and Moree to North Star near Goondiwindi in Queensland, new track would then have to be laid from North Star to Toowoomba and on to Brisbane.
The Australian Logistics Council now says the $4.7 billion inland route could achieve transit times between Brisbane and Melbourne of 20 hours over 1,700 kilometres, seven hours faster than the existing coastal railway. The route would be more competitive on transit time, reliability, availability and door-to-door freight prices, compared to road transport using the Newell Highway. Mayors of inland New South Wales and Queensland towns have started serious lobbying to make sure the rail passes through their town. One option is for the route to pass through Warwick via the Cunningham Rail Link on its way to Bromelton/Beaudesert and the Port of Brisbane. The alternative is Toowoomba//Brisbane via the new, privately owned airport at Wellcamp and Toowoomba’s industrial suburbs.

 We were mulling the rail versus road traffic debate as we spent a couple of chilly days in Echuca, on the border of New South Wales and Victoria. Echuca was a wealthy town in the late 1800s and early 1900s, built on the monopoly of steam-powered river traffic. Fortunes were made carrying wool from distant pastoral properties down the Murray River to Echuca and then on to Melbourne and foreign ports.
The great depression of the 1890s, combined with rail being extended into NSW killed off the river boat freight trade by the 1920s. A handful of paddle steamers from that era survive to take curious tourists on a brisk one-hour trip down the Murray, recalling the days when paddle steamers, powered by a seemingly endless supply of red river gum, dominated freight and distribution.

Fast forward to 2014 and the continually rising cost of fuel, together with the immense cost of expanding and maintaining the country’s main road freight corridors, is putting immense pressure on the Federal Government to commit to an inland rail freight system. Given that road freight is expected to double by 2030 and triple by 2050, they’d best get on with the job of building the alternative rail infrastructure. The Abbot Government found $300 million to spend on the rail study, so what’s another $4.4 billion? (Sounds like a huge sum, but it’s only $176 each, folks). Clearly Mr Abbot has a thing about transport infrastructure. Taking responsibility for building this railway network could be his lasting legacy

As we prepared to embark on a three-month trip to Western Australia via NSW, Victoria, South Australia and the Northern Territory, we were drowning in lists. My better half is a Capricorn, which as you know, is the star sign which likes to organise other people. There are six packing lists – one each for our clothes and personal things, one for the caravan, one for the car, a list of medications and the all-important technology list. The latter is my department and what a tangled shoebox full of crap it is: chargers, USB sticks, keyboards, mice, earphones, Internet dongles and all of the usefully useless ephemera of daily life in 2014.
But don’t diss the list. I have been keeping a to-do list notebook for at least 20 years. As a former editor of a specialised section of a daily newspaper, I’d have to say that without a list or two, nothing would have got done. The habit persists today, my personal to-do list notebook (as distinct from ancillary lists provided by She Who Reads Newspapers), can contain up to 20 items per day, but rarely more. The real challenge, as we advance into our 60s, is remembering where we left the bloody list. I try in vain to persuade SWRN to take up the notebook habit as opposed to scribbling things down on the backs of envelopes, scraps of paper, flyers advertising something else and the latest version, a magnetised notebook stuck to the fridge. It would not be the first time (as I cross “washing” off my list), to find a wet soggy paper mess in the pocket of her gardening duds. (Don’t you check the pockets first? Ed.)
I still do a modicum of consulting work from the home office, so I start the day with an A4 notebook page divided into six sections: consulting, music/social, SMSF/pension, domestic, private and bills etc. Sound familiar? We busy folk who work from home need to have a system as there is no chief of staff or office manager to chide us about things that slipped our minds.
It was this system of establishing order into the life of a semi-retired person that made me realise there were too-few things in the “private” list. Much of my time was given over to domestic chores, doing the tedious but essential paperwork needed to run your own super fund and keeping enough cash coming in to balance the household budget. So it was that I took a big breath, arranged to take a lump sum from my one remaining external super fund and started recording an album of songs I had written over the past year or two.
A recording project, mind you, is far more about lists than it is about the creative process; then again, who says making a list is not a creative action? Ironically, the first song we recorded, “Another Year with You”, explores the list-making mania of those who have seen the movie “The Bucket List” and set out to do all of the things they always wanted to do, or things they think other people would admire them for doing.
The so-called bucket list is supposedly all of the things one must do before kicking the bucket. (Squeamish people ought not to look this up.)
In this context, the bucket list is a summary of one’s grand life ambitions: a corporate box at the State of Origin; Niagara Falls and a night in the honeymoon suite with the heart-shaped bed; jumping off the Kawarau Bridge with a rubber band attached to your ankles; tandem skydiving; trekking in the Himalayas, or pilgrimages to the Grand Canyon, the Pyramids, Uluru and the Kimberley.
Italian author Umberto Eco has a thing or two to say about lists: “The list is the origin of culture,” says Umberto. “It’s part of the history of art and literature.”
He believes that people make lists because they want to escape thoughts about dying. Death is finite, whereas a list is infinite.
Lists run contemporary life: the guest list, the short list, the who is being retrenched list, the VIP list, the shit list, the friends of the band list and the ever-present shopping list. As someone once said (perhaps it was me?) “people without lists are listless”. Former opera singer Jamie Frater, creator of the website Listverse, www.listverse.com developed a thriving business by providing a one-stop-shop for all manner of trivia lists. He employs copy editors and moderators to sift through list submissions (Listverse will pay $100 for a list). Lists currently being written about at Listverse (link) include “10 lucrative ideas sold for almost nothing”, “10 historical figures with hidden talents” and “10 cool facts about The Hulk”. The website explains how Frater, a former software developer who became entranced with opera, gave in to “an insatiable desire to share fascinating, obscure, and bizarre facts”. He now makes do with singing in the shower.
Those of you who go abroad or on the road for months know all about multiple lists. As I write this we have been condensing our lists into one master list. Unhappily, I had somehow let “check caravan water tank for leaks” drop off the list. So by the time we were ready to pull out of the driveway on Wednesday, a tell-tale damp patch on the bitumen told the story. So we stayed an extra night with a friend in Warwick while the helpful people at a local trailer repairs shop sealed the 60-litre tank. This proved to be a useful delay as we had time to tick the last items off our master list, including making an on-line application to perform at the National Folk Festival in 2015 (describe your act in no more than 300 characters (including spaces).
The trouble with making lists is that we slip into the left side of the brain where logic and order overpower impulse and romantic notions. I realised with a pang there was one thing missing off the list, best described by reference to the Simpsons episode where Homer thinks he has eaten a poison blowfish and has 24 hours to live.
Homer’s list of the 13 things he needs to do to get his house in order range from “Make a list” to “Be intamit (sic) with Marge.”
Friday on My Mind is published by Bob & Laurel Wilson Consulting Pty Ltd. To catch up with earlier columns or snippets from Deadly Diary, go to www.bobwords.com.au where you can also read our privacy policy and disclaimer.

We were 200-strong and asked to sing Salaam (Peace will come upon us), written in both Hebrew and Arabic. Singers from 10 community choirs had been taking part in the annual Sunshine Coast Choral Festival, this year held at the Kawana Community Centre. All choirs had been sent the dots for the two songs we were to sing together, and everyone was assumed to have done much work on the finale, Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. Conductor Kim Kirkman (right), who also directed three choirs, said after our second run-through at morning rehearsal: “Some of you need the music! So either watch me, or read the music.”
The day began with a combined choir rehearsal, bending to the will of directors, some wanting us to “feel the music” (as in a song about Nelson Mandela and the aforementioned Salaam), while Kim Kirkman wanted precision, pitch and breath support for the high (and low) notes in the Hallelujah Chorus.
Doors opened at 1.30, the punters streamed in and pretty soon all 500 seats were taken. Each choir was introduced by celebrity MC Louise Kennedy, a much-experienced opera singer who briefly terrified judges in Australia’s Got Talent with her comedic take on the dark art of opera. The show got off to a terrific start with the Oriana junior choir, golden-voiced children of various ages who showed why the Oriana adult choir has become such a good group. As an audience stacked with singers, we yelled and hooted and applauded as loudly as possible for every group.
Just before interval, it was time for Louise Kennedy’s unique take on opera, turning the Queen of the Night Vengeance aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute into an hysterical, slapstick story about a menopausal chook. You had to be there.
The second half went by in a blur – our choir, Tapestry, was on last, so stage nerves were building. We had to quietly thread our way out of the auditorium while the choir before us was walking on stage. Then we gathered back stage for a pantomime warm-up, remembering all of our cues, what to do and not to do when the song is over. All the things we’ve been rehearsing every Tuesday for months. In the end it was all over in a heartbeat. We sang three short pieces – Mozart’s Ave Verum, Till There was You from The Music Man and that old ear worm of a tune, Java Jive. The audience clamoured, as they’d been doing all day. Our director made sure we all bowed at the right time and off we went, with just enough time to shed our gold brocade scarves, catch a breath then head back on stage for the massed choir performance.
That too went by in a blur, but I do remember the bliss on the face of Yvonne Coratorphin, who led Mosh Ben Ari’s song Salaam, as we all shared in that mysterious connection, perhaps thinking about the resurgent troubles in Iraq as the song reached its crescendo – Salaam (live performance by New World Rhythm).
Singing for joyful good health
While I’ve been appreciating music since Santa put a harmonica in my stocking when I was eight years old, I was well into my 50s before I joined a community choir. In the intervening years I eventually got over chronic stage fright and started performing, first in a jug band, then a bush band, then a band which played my own songs, then as a duo with my partner and as a solo singer/songwriter.
I thank Brian Martin for helping to transform the shy boy, who had to be quiet after school because father the baker was sleeping, into someone who is able to sing out loud. Brian Martin runs The Joy of Singing at Camp Creative, held in Bellingen in January (Brian and Imogen Wolf also run a winter camp there in July).
Brian’s approach is that everyone can sing and everyone should. After attending this class a few times, I have witnessed a few miraculous things. Many people seriously feel as if they want to sing, they should sing, but something has held them back, usually a bad experience at school, their aspirations crushed by unthinking, unfeeling idiots, sometimes known as mates or parents. Brian somehow manages to coax even the most fear-paralysed person, to voluntarily stand in the centre of the room surrounded by 39 other people who are all feeling the love. It is indeed a joy to hear this person finally sing out, alone, jumping over the fear barrier and joining the world of those who can’t get enough of the endorphins released by the joy of singing.
If only more blokes would join mixed choirs. A survey of 200 choirs by Communities Australia found that only 30% of mixed choir members are males. Tenors are hard to come by and many choir directors assign women to the tenor part. I’ve always been a tenor, but as a self-taught guitarist and singer-songwriter I’d have to say that stage nerves and a lack of practice and technique did not always produce a pretty sound. Now, after seven years of singing with a choir, I understand so much more about breathing, body awareness, communicating with an audience and blending my voice with others.
The teacher at our primary school who doubled as music mistress had a none-too subtle method of hand-picking a choir. Everyone in the class would stand in rows and start singing. She would then walk along the front of each row with her head inclined, listening, listening. People would be plucked from the group and made them go outside and run around the oval until the lesson was over. As I recall, there were many so plucked, their dreams of being another Elvis nipped in the bud. I was never thus plucked, although I did try singing tunelessly, in a bid to join my mates running around the oval. Teacher would whack me behind the knee with a long ruler and say, “Sing properly! I know you can.”
A natural musical ear is a gift, I know that now. You get it from your parents, grandparents, or some distant relative who used to be an opera singer or played the trombone in a jazz band. One ought not to waste such a gift. If you have such an ear, and a good sense of pitch and rhythm, you can be an asset to a community choir.
You will make new friends, learn a lot about music and about yourself. I prescribe singing as a way of improving your quality of life and mental health: take daily with a glass of water.
Friday on My Mind is published by Bob & Laurel Wilson Consulting Pty Ltd. See our privacy policy and disclaimer at www.bobwords.com.au

 

Other people at the Winton caravan park were trying to get the same sunset photo of a horse in a paddock. I took a few with my Iphone but none were as good as the one taken by Laurel Wilson. Our mate Giulio Saggin, photo editor for ABC online, wrote and asked if he could include it in the audience submitted photos section of the website. Flattering as that may be, news organisations who offer this kind of “exposure” do not pay their contributors. Our local paper the Sunshine Coast Daily publishes a reader’s picture Monday to Saturday. Same deal, you get the byline and the thrill of seeing your work in print, but sorry, no cash.

As we noted in an earlier column, there are 31 million mobile phones in Australia and all have cameras, some rivalling the most expensive digital cameras. If you are first on the scene at an accident or newsworthy event, your Iphone photo will be on page 3 tomorrow or even in today’s online edition. You may or may not get paid.

News photography is not the life-time career it once was and the smart snappers figured that out years ago, drifting off into photo-journalism, free-lancing, specialisation and book publishing. The aforementioned Giulio Saggin is one such entrepreneurial snapper. His evocative book So I Did captures black and white images of everyone who gave him a lift on a hitch-hiking trip around Australia in 1998. Giulio has done a few other things since then. His current gig as photo editor for ABC, is a classic case of a job that did not exist 10 years ago.
Back in 1995 I was among a small contingent of journalists flown to Mt Isa, Darwin and eventually, to Borroloola in the Northern Territory and next day to the McArthur River mine, which was due to be officially opened by then Prime Minister Paul Keating. I remember this well, as it was my first ever taste of the top end (it took 12 hours to get there by commercial airliner, private jets and a bus).

The miners put on an NT barbie with buffalo, kangaroo, crocodile and barramundi and they opened the wet canteen for the regulation couple of hours. There I met an unusual character, a fiercely independent free-lance photographer who clocked up huge mileages every year taking assignment-specific and what the trade calls “stock” photos around the top end. He was constantly on the road, this bloke, saving news media outlets the hideous expense of sending photographers from Sydney or Melbourne on an outback assignment.
Who knows what this enterprising fellow is doing now, but clearly his business model will have changed. Recent developments suggest that all news organisations, Fairfax in particular, plan to lay off full-time photographers and rely more on agencies and the few determined free-lancers still in the game. There is just too much competition and the agencies that pay have all but given up the fight to chase people republishing material in blogs and on Facebook without permission or attribution.
The BBC reported in March this year that Getty Images, the world’s largest photo agency, would release up to 35 million photos free to use. This move, said to be an effort to combat piracy, infuriated professionals who have been submitting their work to Getty for years.
Photography journalist Daniela Bowker told the BBC News website her Twitter feed lit up as angry photographers vented their feelings.
“They feel very strongly about that because photographers don’t work for free and they don’t work for exposure.”
“But at the same time, the genie is out of the bottle. There are so many images that are being shared and liked and tweeted and clicked on.”
Getty will continue to charge “commercial users” like news outlets, televisions stations and advertisers, to use images. But some images may never be used commercially and the photographers who took them will never get paid.
Maleny photographer Steve Swayne has taken some stunning pictures of the outback on his lengthy tours. He says it is now too difficult to make a living taking photographs.
“About two years ago the image agency I use (Getty Images) radically changed their royalty policies and now the income that used to be up to $700 for a photo for use in advertising has diminished to a few dollars per image.

“The proliferation of good DSLR cameras means that millions of people have the gear and are willing to sell their photos for a few dollars due to the flattery angle as much as anything. Lots of agencies now scour the internet to find suitable photos and then they approach the photographer to use the original full sized image.”
Some former newspaper journalists I keep in touch with occasionally get ticked off with the whole business to the point where they vocalise on Facebook. The most recent kerfuffle was when Tennis Australia opened up opportunities for “volunteers” to take photographs during the two-week Australian Open. A special Facebook page was set up “Tennis Australia – pay your photographers” which attracted 967 “likes.” Tennis Australia (no doubt horrified by the Facebook outrage), issued a statement which described their initiative as more of a way of encouraging an army of young photographers to gain high level experience and that (of course) TA would continue to employ professional photographers.
Dr Sabrina Caldwell,  thinks professional photographers are in the same position as someone reapplying for their own job.
“They have to show that they can create better things than others. They need an edge not just over others, but over who they once were.”

I took my brother-in-law Jon to Kings Beach Caloundra when he was over here from Canadia. We were watching a couple doing a tandem surfing exhibition for a television crew. While Jon got a couple of great photos with a telephoto lens, what interested us was the film crew’s remote-controlled helicopter camera. Anyone can buy one of these helicopters for as little as $160 (you also need one of those tiny sports cameras and attach it to the chopper). Of course you can pay thousands for sophisticated models which come with 20 megapixel cameras. Whatever the level, it is demonstrably cheaper and easier to take aerial photos and video using a remote-controlled drone than it is to commission a professional aerial photographer.

As for the privacy issues…well, that’s a topic for another Friday

 

 

The thing about my generation is we expect things to last for years, if not decades. My 12-year-old laptop, for example, has recently gone to a good home for a parcel of bunyas (more about that later). The new laptop, meanwhile, bosses me about, telling me to back up data in the cloud, wherever that is. The why of that appears to be based on the need to keep a retrievable copy of all your irreplaceable photos, videos, and music in the likely event your cheap new laptop, tablet or PC blows a fuse. Most of the computer-savvy people I know buy a portable hard drive from the Post Office and back up their own data. Then they will spend countless hours tweaking, customising, and nursing their computers along into the old age they were never designed to have. The wastemakers have been at this game for a long time, and the constantly evolving world of computers and consumer goods has delivered a highly profitable new generation of planned obsolescence.
So no surprise to learn I’m patiently waiting for the next Fixit Café (a fortnightly community effort in our village), to yet again repair our ancient lawn mower. This time it needs a perished fuel line replaced (I paid $3 for the part). Last time a Fixit Cafe volunteer replaced the mower’s broken starter cord ($4 for a length of cord). The time before that the front wheels fell off. I took the mower to a repair shop. The bloke looked at me like I was an impractical folk musician with long fingernails. “Mate,’ he said. “It’s not worth fixing.” I looked up petrol mowers on Google and decided I didn’t need to pay $700 to mow a garage-sized piece of lawn every three weeks or so. I tied the front wheels on with fencing wire and carried on regardless. It reminded me of the time I took the then new-ish mower in for a service in Brisbane. The mechanic looked in the oil reservoir then looked at me as if I had just played the first two bars of Duelling Banjos: “Mate, there’s no oil in here! It’s a wonder it was working at all.”
Dear old mower, with your fist-sized rust holes, wired-up wheels and blue smoke. I’m sure the friendly folk at the Fixit Café will do the right thing by you.
The Fixit Café is a concept started in Amsterdam, with the primary aim of making things last longer and sending less garbage to landfill. We go along to the Community Centre every second Thursday with our broken stuff, pay $5 and wait for a volunteer to fix it.
Around the same time as the mower cord broke, I was having this weird problem with my desktop computer. The bloody thing is only six years old! Most mornings it would not power up (although the green power light on the back was flashing). I found the solution on an HP support site.
The best way to fix this problem, they said, was to get a hair dryer and blow warm air into the power vent for a few minutes. (It may not work for you, but it worked for me). The only issue was when She Who Reads Newspapers wanted to use the hairdryer.
Eventually I accepted that I would have to replace the desktop with something more reliable. The local computer shop had a new laptop for $849. My first laptop (the one mentioned at the outset), cost $3360 in 2002. The $849 version has 8GB of RAM, a 2GB video card, 750GB of hard drive storage, card readers and other stuff that no-one understands except Geek Boys (and girls).
IT equipment and accessories are now very cheap, but don’t expect anything to last. They are being assembled at warp speed in offshore sweatshops by poor people earning $1 an hour. The young guy in the computer shop told me that while laptops are getting cheaper all the time, they don’t last. He seemed genuinely amazed that my old laptop was still working (on Windows XP). The battery died, so I kept it plugged in all the time. The keyboard was also dead so I used a $20 USB keyboard. The fan no longer worked so I bought one of those USB fan bases for $20 and no longer got the message that the cooling system had failed and to shut down the machine and return it to the authorised dealer. Whatever.
So I bought the $849 laptop, stapled the receipt to the 12-month warranty and retired the old desktop PC to the music studio (it just needed a new power supply unit). Then I decided to let go of the XP laptop, which happily coincided with a local LETS (Local Energy Transfer System) market. LETS is a local, not-for-profit community enterprise that records transactions of members exchanging goods and services by using LETS Credits (known as ‘bunyas’ in The Village). So the 2002 laptop went to a good home for 50 bunyas, which I plan to “spend” by employing a young person to mow my lawns (using the old mower, soon to be resurrected by the Fixit Café).
This will give me time to confront the daunting nature of Windows 7 (“at least you didn’t get Windows 8”) I hear you say. Times have moved on since Windows 98 and XP. Computer users are encouraged to trust people they don’t know who live who knows where to store all of their confidential files, contact lists, photos, videos, audio files and so on in anonymous data banks located, well, somewhere.
Many of us do this already without realising. Like on Facebook, where we post photos, videos, audio clips and inane or inflammatory comments that are stored off-site for what may end up being a very long time. Far too many of us have our confidential banking details stored in the cloud. If the recent hacking of Ebay was not a warning sign I don’t know what is.
Like it or not, we are all enslaved to this brilliantly flawed technology – its makers rolling out new versions and updates so fast it makes planned obsolescence seem obsolete. I’ll bet that when the late Vance Packard wrote The Waste Makers in 1960 he was probably not thinking it would still be around 54 years later – in paperback and ebook!
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