F01 The Bulletin - 23/30 December 1986 2014 words Farmers drive a new coalition of businessmen against Hawke Nineteen eighty-seven, says DAVID BARNETT, will see the emergence of a dynamic new political group of business interests - possibly a new party - taking its lead from the New Right and not only threatening the Labor government but also the Opposition parties. BUSINESS organisations are cranking up to end the Hawke government in 1987-88 and none is more moti+vated and mobilised than the New Right's spearhead, the National Farmers Feder+ation, whose leader, Ian McLachlan, has united a broad spectrum of powerful industry groups. The fringe benefits tax, trade union superannuation, interest rates and Labor's in+dustrial and fiscal policies are to be critically bombarded. McLachlan has provided the impetus for the setting up of a whole range of new political structures. Committees are being formed in the marginaL seats. They say money has been raised and more is coming in. Nineteen eighty+seven will be the year of the New Right. It may be Bob Hawke's last year as Prime Minister. If it is not it could be the last year of the Liberal Party as it now exists, and the same can be said for the National Party. If the coalition parties do not suc+ceed at the next elections, when they are held some time between March 1987 and March 1988, the mood, the money and the structures are there to pave the way for a new conservative party, with pressure going on industry leaders such as Ian McLachlan and John Elliott to enter political life. But on present indications it is high+ly unlikely to come to that. The Bul+letin's Morgan Gallup Polls show that Hawke's budget session strategy has failed. The government went into the budget session with the polls last Au+gust showing support for the coalition at 50 percent and support for Labor at 40 percent. By mid-November the gov+ernment had narrowed the Opposi+tion's lead to 1 point. They were trailing 44-45. Hawke, the Treasurer, Paul Keating, and the ministry set out to discredit Op+position Leader John Howard and his colleagues by means of personal attack, with the aim of producing a gory Lib+eral Party upheaval, and a challenge from Andrew Peacock, setting the scene for an election in March or April next year based on the inability of the coalition to present a united front and a coherent set of policies. For that strategy to succeed, Hawke needed the level of government support to con+tinue its rise, overtaking Howard's coa+lition during the end-of-year holidays, and it needed the Liberal Party to fall apart. The Liberals did not fall apart. In+stead, some unknown well-wisher sent them a copy of a letter to Keating from the Taxation Commissioner about his unfiled tax returns, striking a dramatic and devastating blow at Keating's standing in the electorate. The day Hawke learnt that the Morgan Poll was showing a recovery in support for the coalition to 48 points, and a fall in support for his government back to 42 points, was the day McLach+lan as president of the National Farm+ers Federation came to Canberra to see him. McLachlan's appoint+ment, originally for 2.30pm, had to be put off for 3 1/2 hours because cabinet was still wrestling with the problem of logging Jackey's Marsh. It had earlier dealt with Rupert Murdoch's takeover offer for the Herald and Weekly Times, and Keating's sub+mission for clearing his pro+posals for the double taxation of company dividends, so they do not produce the host of unintended and adverse consequences which have marked all the other propo+sals in the package of busi+ness taxes. When McLachlan was shown into the cabinet room, he found Hawke shaking with rage. Hawke berated him for having talked to the media on the way into the meeting and for having made public his submission to the gov+ernment. He refused to discuss the Farmers Federation's concerns and stalked out after five minutes, leaving Keating to evict McLachlan, which he did with an insult to McLachlan about seeking publicity instead of pursuing the interests of farmers. McLachlan is a central figure in the New Right groundswell which is trans+forming the business community. Un+der his leadership, the Farmers feder+ation has so raised its profile that it ranks as a major political institution, backed by $15 million raised by popu+lar subscription for a fighting fund which gives it enormous financial sol+idity. The federation has devised a five-point strategy for 1987 designed to ad+vance the economic and political inter+ests of the nation's 170,000 farmers and their families. It has commissioned the former director of the Bureau of Agri+cultural Economics, Andy Stoekel, to survey global markets for Australian rural produce and recommend on where the efforts of the marketing cor+porations should best be directed. It has decided in principle to commission a lobbyist to watch out for Australian rural interests in Washington, and it has commissioned a series of studies (which Stoekel will also carry out) of the economies of countries which subsi+dise their rural sectors heavily, such as Japan and the United States, along the lines of an earlier study of the Euro+pean Community, to draw out the hid+den costs to living standards of such subsidies. Apart from filling vacuums created by government inactivity, two aspects of the Farmers Federation's strategy for the year are of direct political relevance to the Hawke government. The feder+ation has $1 million a year in interest from its fighting fund to back the pri+vate sector against the trade unions in disputes such as Mudginberri, which is continuing because of an appeal, and Dollar Sweets. About 40 percent of the fighting fund came from secondary in+dustry, and the Farmers Federation, ac+cordingly, will not confine its backing to the rural sector. It is also setting up committees in the marginal seats to question candidates about their atti+tudes towards economic and industrial issues. The federation sees the committee as long-term, and it is their intention to in+fluence not only the result of elections through campaigning and advertising, but also to be able to influence the pre+selection of candidates for all parties. The Australian Small Business As+sociation, which is only three years old, operates on the basis of a mass mem+bership, and so far has acquired 7000, of whom 2500 were enrolled between June and September, because of con+cern about the fringe benefits tax. The association wants 20,000 members by the end of 1987. It contributed $30,000 towards the Mudginberri fighting fund, and lately has responded to union pick+et lines with its own counter picketing, modelling itself on the United States National Federation of Independent Businesses, which has 750,000 mem+bers, and the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses which has 55,000 members. Counter pickets were used in the La Trobe Valley against in+timidation by the Building Workers In+dustrial Union and in Deniliquin, against the Australian Meat Industries Employees Union. They say that once they have suffici+ent members, they will just opt out of the present industrial system, refusing to acknowledge the authority of the federal and state tribunals and negoti+ating directly with employees. In the meantime, the Small Business Association is also setting up organisa+tions in the marginal electorates to sup+port "pro-business" candidates. The Australian Tourism Industry Association has identified 14 areas which it regards as vital to tourism and is developing a strategy for its ap+proach to marginal seats. Many are also seats where tourism is economically significant. The strategy is to concen+trate the level of interest rates and in+dustrial issues, particularly penalty rates. The chairman of the Australian Fed+eration of Employers Andrew Hay is endeavoring to achieve some co+ordination of activities through 21 af+filiated organisations, which include the Farmers Federation, Small Busi+ness Association and the Tourism In+dustry Association, but at this stage co+ordination is not a problem. They are all determinedly marching in much the same direction, basically that outlined in the paper which McLachlan gave Hawke, and which Hawke refused to discuss. McLachlan's submission argued that the government's budget strategy had failed, and that it was no longer tol+erable, either for farmers or for the business community, to operate with interest rates at 20 percent, as they have been for the past 15 months. He wants Hawke to freeze wages for at least one year and possibly for two and to drasti+cally wind back government expendi+ture. McLachlan says that supporting the dollar by holding interests rates up without controlling either wages or government spending is no longer ten+able. Hawke's problem is that he already knows all that for himself but, for party political reasons, won't do anything about it. Not only does he not contem+plate a wages freeze, but he has stepped aside from the hard slog of expenditure control. He has decided not to chair the Expenditure Review Committee which spends at least five months each year going through ministerial expenditure bids. The decisions about how much money is spent each year on defence, education, pensions, the environment and so on are formally made by the full cabinet and announced in the budget, but the allocations do come from the Review Committee, whose work is central to the conduct of government. Yet it is this process from which Hawke has withdrawn. Instead, he will devote his energies to being a publicist, campaigning non-stop for the next election with speeches, interviews, radio talk shows and public appear+ances. Hawke is no longer trying to run the country. He is leaving that to his colleagues. Instead he is trying to get his government re-elected. The polling which showed that the government's standing had slipped back also showed that Keating and the fringe benefits tax are both electoral lia+bilities. Keating's own standing has slumped since the controversy about his private finances, while more people are against the fringe benefits tax than are for it - 47 to 44 percent. The government's skilful advertising campaign has had some effect. Five months ago the number disagreeing with the FBT was 5 percent higher. But 51 percent, up 7, believe the beneficiary should pay the tax, not the employer, and 34 percent of Labor voters are against the tax, which has stirred up strikes all the way from the Pilbara to the banks. The Morgan polls suggest the tax is both a prime reason for the slide in the government's popularity and an indication that the government is in an unwinnable position. Howard's strategy for 1986 was to discredit the government's economic management, a task in which he could not easily fail. His strategy for 1987 is to convince the electorate that the com+paratively youthful and not particular+ly well-known front-bench which he leads is a credible alternative to the government, and that he has credible alternative policies. He has called a meeting of shadow ministers for the first week in February to finalise a new batch of policies, more for the sake of appearances than any+thing else. The crucial industrial policy, with its measured approach to deregu+lation, is already announced and he is hanging on to his tax policy until it is too late for the government to pre-empt its more palatable bits. He also has to continue to isolate Peacock and his small band of supporters and to live with the mysterious polls which appear from time to time, commissioned by unknown persons, and which consist+ently rediscover that he lacks charisma. Howard has decided that he can live with this. (The latest Morgan Gallup Poll - see page 29 - shows that Howard has failed to make any impression on the electorate's view of the Liberal leader+ship.) Hawke and Keating were tempted by the November trade figures to spy the first swallow in an economic summer, despite the question mark placed over them by the Statistician. The deficit fell sharply to $635 million from $1578 million in October, which itself had been revised downwards from a record $1.7 billion. The figures were treated with scepti+cism by the media and with derision by the Opposition. They showed that the deficit on mer+chandise trade, when smoothed and seasonally adjusted through the Statis+tician's computer, was down to $140 million, and that there has been a pro+gressive improvement in this deficit since June, when it was $368 million. F02 Time Magazine 2010 words F02a Time Magazine - 22 September 1986 Kakadu: paradise in peril By Alan Attwood Can the federal government have its park and mine it, too? In shoes better suited to Parliament House corridors than dry stony scrub, Barry Cohen was taking a close look at the Olgas, second-most popular at+traction in Uluru National Park. The Min+ister for Arts, Heritage and Environment was exploring his portfolio at the grassroots level and recording the experience with a video camera. A station wagon sped by on the nearby red dirt road to Ayers Rock, leaving billowing dust in its wake. "Perhaps what we need here, Barry," said Professor Derrick Ovington, director of the Austra+lian National Parks and Wildlife Service, "is a monorail." The look on Cohen's face was similar to the expression favored by New South Wales Premier Barrie Unsworth when he hears the word byelection. Cohen spent the next few minutes shaking his head in amazement. What next - a lift to the top of Ayers Rock? Then it struck him that Ovington, an eminently reasonable man who is on Uluru's board of management, was not joking. Nor was Chip Morgan, the park superintendent and another reason+able man. As a second car went by stirring up more red dust he noted how much less mess a monorail might make. Cohen re+turned to his car with far more to think about than sore feet. A monorail is not going to be built at Uluru; certainly not while Cohen is min+ister, and probably never. No matter how many arguments are posited about lack of dust or noise, cartoonists and conserva+tionists would pillory anyone brave or foolish enough to authorize it. But even the possibility of such a project being raised is indicative of increasing pressures on the Uluru and Kakadu National Parks, both visited by Cohen recently. The an+cient landscapes have fallen on modern times; the ruggedly beautiful parks are being regarded less as wilderness areas and more as resources for tourism, recreation and commercial ventures - all of which must be balanced with Aboriginal interests in the land. Although a monorail can be dismissed as a chimera, the question of mining cannot. The mere thought of mining in Uluru caused Cohen on his recent trip to endorse a suggestion by Yami Lester, Aboriginal elder and chairman of the Uluru board of management, that the park should be nominated for inclusion on UNESCO's list of world heritage properties. This followed a submission from the Northern Territory government on the proposed plan of management for Uluru, in central Austra+lia, which suggested that the possibility of exploration and mining in the park should not be precluded. In response, Lester de+scribed the NT government as "a bunch of cowboys, interested only in quick bucks," and Cohen privately expressed his opinion that certain NT ministers would "mine the gold in their grandmothers' mouths if they got a chance." Thus there was considerable piquancy in the news that Cohen had received a letter from Prime Minister Bob Hawke ex+pressing his concern that the proposed plan of management for Kakadu, 200 km southeast of Darwin, did not make provi+sion for any future recovery of minerals. In two weeks Cohen had moved from the tranquillity of a bush trip into contro+versy, seemingly defending a besieged en+vironment not only from northern ma+rauders but also aggressors within his own camp. It may have made him appreciate the prescience of Justice Russell Fox who, in his second report on the Ranger uran+ium project in 1977, said of the Kakadu area: "Possibly no other part of Australia is faced with as many strong and concur+rent competing claims for the use of the land as this region." At issue is the proposed stage three ex+tension of Kakadu, consisting of about 6,000 sq km from the Gimbat and Good+parla pastoral leases. (Stage one of Ka+kadu, including 6,144 sq km, was pro+claimed on April 5,1979. In 1980 it became the first part of Australia to be included on the world heritage list. Stage two, contain+ing 6,929 sq km in the north, was pro+claimed on February 28, 1984.) At the opening of the present parliament, the government announced its intention to extend the park. The proposed stage three would take into the park virtually all the water catchments of the South Alligator River system that feeds into Kakadu wet lowlands, rich with birdlife. In his 1977 recommendations on the development of the region, Fox stated: "It is desirable to in+clude at least one large total catchment in a regional national park ... the South Alliga+tor River catchment is clearly the most sui+table." The problem for Cohen and his ministerial colleagues is that this same region is being regarded by mineral explo+ration companies as a potentially rich source of gold and platinum. And while the proposed Kakadu plan of management states that a main objective "is to protect the park's resources from exploitation," it also acknowledges that mineral leases issued before the declaration of the park should be respected. Such a lease is that held by Coronation Hill joint venturers, with the major partners being BHP and the Canadian-based mining company Noranda Australia. Located near the South Alligator River, the mine would be in the park under Kakadu's stage three extension. The ques+tion is: Can the government have its park and mine it too? Barry Cohen describes as one of the few mystical experiences of his life a heli+copter ride he once made over the Kakadu wetlands as thousands of magpie geese rose as one from the water. But his first view of the Coronation Hill site during his recent trip did not inspire rhapsody. From the helicopter as it circled the scarred hill the prospect was of dry olive-colored scrub and ochre abrasions. The uranium mine that was worked on the site from 1955 to 1961 resisted encroachment by the sur+rounding bush: still visible are the disused shafts and tailing heaps. Waiting to greet the minister were four men from BHP, led by Richard Carter, the company's general manager for resource planning and devel+opment. Wearing a peaked cap and sun+glasses against the midday glare, Carter made a presentation replete with charts and figures about what had been done in the way of mineral exploration. At the end of 1984 the old data from the mine was reassessed; since then exploratory drilling in the area has been carried out. What has been found are significant quantities of gold - an average of five grams per tonne. There are also workable amounts of palla+dium and platinum and BHP believes there are diamonds and silver. Carter showed a perspiring minister a map with an area of about 60 km by 20 km colored red and marked "Potential Exploration Area", al+though he added that present exploration is being done in an area measuring only 400 m by 150 m. Asked by the Nat+ional Parks' Ovington why the joint vent+urers were not interested in a less contro+versial area, given the environmental sen+sitivity of the South Alligator region, Carter replied, "I would rather dig in a place I know there is gold." This year the Coronation Hill joint venturers will spend well over $A2 million on exploration and research. They hope that by next year they will know if a mining operation is feasible, and also that the future of the region has been decided by the govern+ment. Not unnaturally, the miners would like some return for their investment, but once again Cohen has reason to recall Fox, who wrote of difficulties being ac+centuated "because companies were en+couraged to explore, and were encou+raged in the belief that mining would be allowed, before environmental consequ+ences were fully examined. Great care should therefore be taken to ensure that no expectations are raised that further mining development will be permitted." In a confidential submission to Cohen on the project the joint venturerers wrote: "We believe the Coronation Hill deposit has less environmental problems than many other mines in Australia." But Ovington and conservationists doubt if any mining operations could be contained. If there was any leakage of noxious materials into the river system feeding into the park, damage to the ecosystem could be incalcu+lable. This is why one proposal about the future of the Coronation Hill project - that it be excised from any stage three extension of the park, just as the Ranger uranium mine is inside the park but officially not part of it - makes more aca+demic than practical sense. On the question of Coronation Hill specifically and, more generally, explora+tion for minerals in the park - even if, as mining groups maintain, it is just to ascer+tain what is there - Cohen faces such dis+parate opponents as NT Chief Minister Steve Hatton, National Party Leader Ian Sinclair, Resources and Energy Minister Gareth Evans and the Prime Minister him+self who, while denying reports that the government was considering further ura+nium mining in the park, does not want to preclude exploration for other minerals. A semblance of unity was achieved on Sunday when Cohen and Evans co-issued a statement discussing how "overwhelm+ingly important national economic inter+ests" could be balanced with "one of the most beautiful and important parts of our whole natural and cultural heritage"; but their portfolios - Resources and Environ+ment - are uneasy bedfellows. Although mining has dominated recent discussion about the future of national parks, in the long term, other issues such as booming tourism (increasing at Uluru an+nually by about 10%; at Kakadu about 30%) and the delicate juggling act involved in reconciling black and white claims on the land, will warrant equal attention. The parks are old, but not indestructible. As cabinet met this week off Sydney aboard HMAS Stalwart there were reports that Hawke faced a backbench revolt on the qu+estion of mining in Kakadu. One matter before cabinet was Kakadu stage three. It was hard not to feel that the government's parks policy, like the cabinet itself, was all at sea. F02b Time Magazine - 22 Septembder 1986 TV Hopefuls Stalled in PNG By Judith Hoare A$10 million station lies idle as Packer hovers The anti-television Third World Prime minister saw no harm in giving a few minutes of his time to two representatives of the local video company. But when two white strangers entered his office with them the prime minister's warning signals began to flash. He did not know who they were, and all four had signed an appointment book under the one card. After 15 minutes the irritated PM asked everyone to leave, but not before the stangers had been asked to identify themselves. It turned out they were executives of an Australian TV network lobbying for permission to introduce the upbeat bonanza of its entertainment medium. The senior of the two was Lynton Taylor, executive vice-president of Kerry Packer's Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd, operator of the Channel Nine Network and the man who did most to bring the World Series Cricket "circus" into being. The country where he was lobbying, in February this year, was Papua New Guinea; the angry prime minister was Paias Wingti. Packer's PBL - which now owns 50% of Media Niugini, the company whose local executives Wingti had agreed to see - soon afterwards received a letter of protest against the tactics used to beat a path to the prime minister's door. Such is TV politics PNG-style. It has left a rival company controlled by Perth Millionaire Kevin Parry high and dry with a $A10-million new TV station and a complete ban on broadcasting. PBL already has the right to establish broadcast TV in Fiji. PNG is its next frontier. But once again it faces opposition from Parry's Newcastle-based NBN Ltd, whose PNG arm is the 87%-owned Niugini Television Network (NTN). Knocking over the Parry Corporation in PNG presents Packer with a much tougher proposition. In fact, if there had not been a change of government in PNG, chances are Parry's subsidiary would have been beaming TV around the mount+ainous nation already. When Wingti ousted his former chief, Prime Minister Michael Somare last November, NTN had already won approval from the PNG government to be the first entrant to the nation's untapped broadcast TV market. F03 Readers Digest 2012 words F03a Readers Digest - September 1986 Kids on the local council By Elizabeth Adlam In more than 50 towns and municipalities around Australia, young people are being successfully initiated in community involvement and responsibility Proudly wearing his shining chain of office, Brett Chant, junior mayor of Shepparton, Victoria, takes his seat on the raised dais in the town's crowded council chambers, beneath the official photograph of a young Queen Eliz+abeth. Beside him, the junior town clerk and junior city engineer look down at the horseshoe-shaped con+ference table where 21 boys and girls , smartly dressed in their school uni+forms, sort through their papers a little self-consciously. At the press desk at one side sits a reporter from the local paper; from the opposite wall, portraits of the town's ex-mayors and town clerks watch over the proceedings. As the doors close, everyone stands for the opening prayer. The October 1985 meeting of the Shepparton Junior Council has begun. A prosperous rural town in north+ern Victoria with 27,000 inhabi+tants, 46 per cent of them under 25, and 4500 between 10 and 20, Shep+parton is typical of the more than 50 Australian local-government areas that have established junior coun+cils. Its youthful councillors have launched a wide range of programs over the years; thanks to them, the town now has a network of Safety Houses, identified by letter-box stickers, where children being har+assed or followed can seek help on the way to or from school, and a maze will soon be built in a town park. Junior councillors have per+suaded authorities to improve sev+eral dangerous town intersections and mounted a campaign to reduce vandalism in local schools. Recently, moving into more serious political areas, they proposed that Shep+parton be declared a nuclear-free zone, and complained about the short notice given to ratepayers when the town's water supply was fluoridated. Last year, on Shepparton's sugges+tion, more than 150 members from 10 of Victoria's 40 junior councils met at Altona for an inaugural state conference. Discussion ranged from the need for drop-in centres for homeless young people to the inad+equacy of public transport in country towns. "The conference showed us that our problems were not unique," says Brett Chant, "and we learned how other communities had dealt with them." The junior council was the brain+child of Alex Rigg, mayor of Shep+parton fom 1965 to 1968. Rigg believed that such a council could give the town's teenagers invaluable training in the realities of govern+ment and administration, interest them in local affairs, and instil a sense of civic pride. With the help of local schoolteachers, Rigg estab+lished the council in 1968, and its success and community standing have grown ever since. Each February, Shepparton's high-school students and teachers choose a junior council consisting of two Year-9 and two Year-10 students from each of the town's six second+ary schools. The councillors then choose from among themselves a junior mayor, a junior town clerk and a junior city engineer. Each school and its representatives are allocated one portfolio: public ser+vices, finance and administration, health, community amenities, plan+ning and development, or recreation and culture. Throughout the year, the school and its representatives, supervised by a teacher, will be responsible for all junior-council projects and proposals within the relevant portfolio. Going it alone. Being a junior coun+cillor has many benefits beyond the obvious "perks" such as invitations to attend important functions and gala occasions. Brett Chant claims that his term as junior mayor im+proved his self-confidence greatly. "It is so good to have one's views taken seriously," he says. Juanita Grevill - a junior councillor in 1980 and now working as a reporter with The Shepparton News - believes that the experience she gained in public speaking and dealing with people has helped her journalistic career. Adds town clerk Ivan Gilbert, "The junior council can also encourage young people to make careers in local government - one of our for+mer junior councillors is training to be a city engineer." Meetings are held monthly, follow+ing the exact meeting procedure of the city council, with the junior mayor presiding. Two adult council members attend each session to give advice or guidance. Junior-council coordinator Joanne Church, 27, also attends. "I am there to help the kids," she says, "but usually they choose to go it alone." Most junior-council mo+tions result in one of the schools writing to a relevant body for infor+mation or action. Most people are happy to cooperate, and indeed the junior council has won so much re+spect that organisations such as the Freedom from Hunger Campaign and the Foster Parents' Plan of Aus+tralia have approached it directly to ensure publicity among school+children. Although most adults welcome what they consider to be reasonable proposals, such as setting up a com+petition to design a sticker promot+ing the 1986 International Year of Peace, some say the young council+lors are too idealistic. "They some+times leap up and demand action without first considering the possible difficulties and how to overcome them," says Ivan Gilbert. On the other hand, the junior council sometimes draws attention to a problem that adults might never see, such as overcrowding on school buses. Gilbert agrees that junior council "is an invaluable way of dis+covering what things look like from young people's viewpoint." Shepparton's schools take turns to prepare junior-council agendas. "The whole school gets involved," says Goulburn Valley Grammar School's coordinator Beverley Manson. "Many students not on the council ask for the agenda, discuss items and, afterwards, want to know what happened." Although all their council meet+ings are public, the young officials soon forget the presence of adult councillors, coordinators and visi+tors, and speak openly. "Sometimes they seem to be competing to see who can move the most motions," says Wayne Johnston, Shepparton South Technical School's coordinator. "But during their term as council+lors, they overcome their enthusiasm to speak their piece at all costs, and learn to listen and think before talking." Says Gilbert, "By working as jun+ior councillors, they learn to make properly supported submissions and to recognise what course to follow to get action." They learn also to curb their youthful impatience. Says Brett Chant, "At first, I got frustrated by delays in getting things done, but now I understand the reasons. I've learned too that persistence gen+erally pays off!" At the meeting I attended, junior councillors debated a report, pre+sented by Olivia Clarke of Goulburn Valley Grammar School, on the dangers of children riding bicycles on footpaths. "Several people have been knocked down by cyclists," she said. "It isn't fair." "Cyclists should stay on the roads, where they belong," agreed her schoolmate Stuart Gowty. Andrew Mulcahy of Shepparton High School disagreed emphatically. "If cyclists ride on the roads, then they are knocked down by motorists! It is much safer if they ride on the footpaths." A fierce debate ensued on what penalties, if any, should be enforced for riding on the pavement. Sugges+tions ranged from hefty fines to let+ting down offenders' tyres. "Penalties aren't the answer," said Kim Crowley of Wanganui Park High. "We need a public-education program to make motorists more aware of cyclists on the road." At this point, the junior mayor showed his talent as chairman, taking control just when things might have got out of hand. "Well, here we have two points of view," he said, and neatly summed up both sides. At Brett Chant's suggestion, the council agreed to invite a police officer to the next meeting to give the official view. After the meeting had closed, I spoke to Shepparton's mayor, John Weir. "Young people are full of ideas," he told me, "but they don't find it easy to get them through to the older generation. Often, their views are casually presented, in fragments, to parents over the tea-table or to teachers at school. The junior coun+cil provides a unique forum where kids can think their ideas through, express them effectively - and know they'll be listened to. No community should be without one." F03b Readers Digest - September 1986 A rainforest journey By Margaret Hotson Evolving undisturbed for millions of years, Queensland's tropical wonderlands are a trove of natural treasures worth protecting THE TROPICAL rainforest is a cathedral. Its trees form pillars that soar into the sky. The leaves create a can+opy like stained-glass windows. The ground is a tap+estry of a thousand shades of green, dim in most places because the tree-tops block out the sun. Some 7800 square kilometres of such forest lie in scattered fragments along Queensland's coast between Ingham and Cooktown. They contain some of the oldest undisturbed eco+logical systems on earth - formed more than 100 million years ago, when the great reptiles ruled the globe. Over 50 national parks protect about one-seventh of this area, pro+viding unique holiday camps for nature lovers. Last summer, I joined the growing number of tourists who arrive here to bushwalk, birdwatch, spotlight for nocturnal mammals, raft the rivers and swim in crystal pools beneath waterfalls. On the first evening of my visit, I went with two biologists, David Thomae and his wife Kerstin, to spotlight possums in the Mount Hypipamee National Park on the Atherton Table+land. More species of marsupials live in this 3.6-square-kilometre stand of rainforest than in any other area of comparable size in the world. As the sun set, David identified the birds whose songs filled the clearing where we sat. "Emerald dove ... eastern whipbird ... spotted catbird ... Lewin's honeyeater ...." A large black brush turkey emerged from the forest and stretched out its red head, yellow wattle dangling, to peer at us, then scurried off. "Grey-headed robin ... crimson ro+sella ..." David continued. Queens+land's tropical rainforests, though covering just one-thousandth of our land area, are home to almost one-fifth of our bird species. Darkness closed in. The birds fell silent and a chorus of crickets took over to a background of frog mating-calls. Kerstin swept the spotlight over the trees. "There's a green ringtail," she whispered. Gazing along the beam of light, I saw two brilliant orange pinpoints - its eyes - and made out the shadowy form of the possum's body. Then I saw the glint of a second pair of eyes - the young on its mother's back. Both re+mained stock-still while the light was on them, but disappeared behind the cover of branches and leaves as soon as it was swung away. "The ani+mals don't seem to mind the light," said Kerstin, "and by mesmerising them, it allows us to get much closer than would be possible otherwise." Later, we spotted a coppery brush+tail possum, a dark brown and white Herbert River ringtail and a pair of lemur-like ringtails with rich choc+olate-brown coats and fawn bellies. Our evening's climax, however, was finding a baby green ringtail on a low branch by the road. It stared at us balefully, clasping a half-eaten leaf, so close that I could count every whisker on its delicate pink nose. My next expedition was to a water+fall hidden in the rainforest behind the little sugar-producing town of Mossman. Local guide Sue Goadby led me past pandanus and tall, para+sol-like fan palms into the heart of the forest. After an hour's climb in extreme humidity, it was a relief to head down a gully towards the water+fall. Across our path lay a fallen rain+forest giant, its trunk covered in orchids, bird's nest ferns, staghorns and lichens. Bright orange fungi already sprouted from its damp underside, beginning to break down the dead plant and return its nutri+ents to the soil. Across the gully, the snaking roots of a strangler fig spread their fatal embrace round another liane-draped tree. We scrambled down to the water+fall, where shafts of bright sunlight pierced the forest canopy. Around us, beautiful forest ferns grew thickly, and overhead danced a blue Ulysses butterfly, 10 centimetres from wingtip to wingtip. Film star Diane Cilento, who owns and pro+tects the land below this waterfall, says, "People who view the forest from the roadside have no idea how full of life it is." My next stop was at Cape Tribu+lation, in the Greater Daintree re+gion. This area boasts one of the world's most remarkable concen+trations of primitive angiosperms, or flowering plants. F04 Good Government 2002 words F04a The rising tide of change: rethinking money and taxation issues SEMINAR - 8-9 MARCH, 1986 This weekend seminar, organised by the Association for Good Government, will be held to discuss some of the many prob+lems of our times and the possibility that both their arising and their solu+tion could be integrally bound-up with one central adjustment: that of humanity to land. It is essential to become aware that alternatives to our present system of taxation exists and that money and tax+ation influence all social matters. That none of our present socio-economic-political systems has brought a solution to these problems is without question. Also, that new ideas, new and peaceful approaches to these problems are urgently needed, can hardly be disputed. There+fore, it is fitting to bring such ideas to the fore in the International Year of Peace, 1986. The proposition for analysis is that taxation should be based on structures relating to land on which all life depends, and other taxes should be gradually phased out - partially or tot+ally - as may apply. Land is the only commodity which humans cannot produce. We cannot make more land to meet more demand. This proposition is not a new brain wave, a clever scheme. It has been advocated for generations. The origin can be found in the Old Testament. Personalities like G.B.Shaw, Helen Keller, Leo Tolstoy, Woodrow Wilson, Albert Einstein, Sun Yat Sen and many others, including Winston Churchill, all have underwritten the morality and prac+ticality of the idea that land values which are created by the community should be the source of public revenue for the government, and not taxes on labour, thrift and industry, as we have it today. Site value rating is in use by some two-thirds of Australian municipalities and was first intoduced by Henry Parkes, a friend of Henry George, the modern protagonist of this principle. That no political party of whichever persuasion and of whichever geographical location has ever had the courage to follow up this proposition to its full extent dem+onstrates only the lack of understanding, the lack of morality of our society but nothing more. Re-thinking a new economic system, one which harmonises with human needs of body, mind and soul is the issue. Once right thoughts are established, right action will follow. At this seminar we do not want to concentrate on the tech+nicalities of such a scheme. We want to make the effort to realise that changes are necessary. We can not go on from boom to inflation, from peace to war for ever. This cycle must be broken if our and future generations are to live. SPEAKERS Speakers will include Deborah and Martin Banham, Stella Cornelius, Hal Gingis, George Hardy, Penny Keable, George Parson, and Chris Whittle. Chairman will be Chris Veitch. F04b Good Government - February 1986 IS DEMOCRACY POSSIBLE? Professor John Burnheim Professor John Burnheim is from the Department of General Philosophy, University of Sydney. The Problem of the State Surely we have democracy! Not if it means that all citizens have an equal chance of an active participation in public affairs. What we have is a competition between organised political elites for the majority vote, which gives them the right to govern. We elect professional power-brokers who trade with each other their votes and patron+age. The results of the game are determ+ined by concentrating power in organis+ations which are not controlled directly by the people affected by their activi+ties - political parties, commercial organisations, lobby groups of all sorts and so on. These in turn attempt to manipulate public opinion and voting behaviour, especially the relatively small group of `swinging voters' in mar+ginal electorates. On the whole the power of the electorate is limited to refusing to re-elect a government that offends these strategically placed bodies of voters. It is a far better system than any of its actual competitors, but it has very serious weaknesses. The central problem is that it rests on an assumption that public life must be organised in the form of States which exercise sovereignty over every aspect of life in a given territory through their monopoly of legitimate force. The system of States normally ensures a sort of peace and order within each State, but at the cost of a perpetual tendency to war between States. Internal peace is achieved at the price of a concentration of power that breeds abuse of power. Rival groups strive to use State power to their own ends, and in doing so constantly tend to increase the range of functions of the State and the range of means at its disposal. Social life becomes more and more standardised, bureaucratised and mystified. The tasks of government become increasingly more difficult and as they fail in those tasks governments are drawn into repression and war. Advocates of `small government' con+trast the efficiency and responsiveness of the market with the inflexiblity, expense and stifling effects of bureau+cracy. But the market, too, is far from democracy. If it enables us to have a more flexible say in what we get as con+sumers, it gives most of us very little opportunity as producers. Most of us simply sell to somebody else the right to tell us what to do in our work. More+over, the market cannot take account of things like the needs of future gener+ations, the provision of public goods, or the righting of wrongs. One may argue endlessly about its scope, but there must be a `public sector'. One of the crucial powers of the State is that of taxation. I believe, in sympathy with Henry George, that public revenue should come from the revenue from natural resources, though I envisage the way in which this would best happen and its rationale somewhat differently. The power to tax should, if possible, be eliminated. Functional Decentralisation In the context of the State public goods of all sorts are provided by centralised authorities at each level of government. Even at the local city, mun+icipal or shire level a large range of functions, e.g. roads, parks and recre+ation facilities, health clinics, libraries, building regulations, waste collection and so on are provided by a centralised body, even though there is no reason in terms of the functions them+selves for doing so. The problems of libraries are quite different from those of garbage collection, and each has more affinity with similar activities in other areas than with each other. More+over, granted modern mobility and the diversity of people's work and recreat+ional interests, the local community hardly exists. We belong to many differ+ent specialised communities that overlap each other in a host of differing and fluid patterns. The diverse activities that are joined together at municipal level are united solely by the need for administrative and financial control. Would it not be better to hand each over to a committee of people who had an interest in that specific activity? That way we would ab+olish a level of bureacracy, allow more flexible allocation of geographical boundaries to various activities, and increase the opportunities of popular participation. The same principle can be applied at every level of government, right up to international level. The idea of a world State is horrifying. But there are already some international agencies that exercise considerable authority in spec+ific areas without being dependent on any higher body. The functions of States could be dispersed to a variety of in+dependent bodies. Naturally, these would have to cooperate among themselves and recognise appropriate regulatory and adjudicating bodies which would hear appeals against them, adjust their constitutions in tune with changing circumstances and needs, and resolve disputes between them. Insofar as these higher bodies need co-ordination in turn, it would not be a matter of some higher power forcing them to obey its injunct+ions but of a recognised arbitrating body settling disputes brought before it. The sanction on bodies that refused to accept arbitration would be the refusal of other bodies to cooperate with them. Since each specialised body would need the cooperation of many other bodies in many ways, the sanctions could be very powerful. There would be no self-suffi+cient or sovereign bodies at any level. Democracy by Statistical Representation Supposing that it is in fact possible to break up the bodies that provide various public needs into specialised functional agencies of this sort, how is it possible to control them democratic+ally? Elections would not be satisfactory. Each of us has some interest in an enor+mous range of activities, not because we are actively involved in them, but be+cause they affect us in varying degrees. Because we cannot know much about the various policies that might be pursued in all these areas, the candidates seek+ing office or the practical problems of doing anything to change things, we would not make an intelligent vote in most cases. Moreover, granted the ex+treme unlikelihood of our vote making any difference to the outcome, it would not be sensible to try. On the other hand, most of us could get to know and under+stand quite a lot about a few of the activities that affect us if we had any incentive to do the necessary work, if we had a substantial chance of having a significant say in the matter. In the absence of such opportunities there is little we can do in most cases except vote for a party ticket. At least a party endorsement tells us something about a candidate. But that puts power back in the hands of party machines, powerful lobbies and the professional image makers. Politics becomes a career and careers depend on patronage. The power game takes over at the expense of substantive issues. The alternative is that representatives be chosen not by voting, which is a very poor way of conveying and aggregating information, but by a statistical proced+ure that ensures that the representatives are representative of those affected by the decisions they will have to make, weighted to take account of the import+ance of the varying ways in which different groups are affected. The representatives would need to display an interest in being chosen by nominating for selection, and one would expect that in most areas there would be a good chance of a candidate getting a turn on the relevant committee sooner or later. So it would be worth their while to try to find out as much*muct as possible about the activities in which they expressed an interest and follow the proceedings of that committee. Moreover, one might expect that such committees would be more responsive to suggestions and criticism than politicians or bureaucrats as we know them. Members on each committee would be re+placed one by one at regular intervals in order to ensure continuity. Political organisations might, of course, urge their members to nominate for various committees in the hope of influencing their decisions. But they would not have the power over their members that part+ies now have, since there would be no place for endorsement, advancement or patronage. It would be very difficult, too, for these committees to become corrupt, since the membership would be constantly changing in a random way, and those who had served on the committees would probably keep a keen eye on their successors. If the committee veered too much in a certain direction that would stimulate a rash of nominations from people of the opposite tendency for the next round of sortition. Market Socialism The higher level bodies which would allocate resources, adjudicate disputes, hear appeals and so on would be chosen by lot from a pool of people nominated by their peers on lower level bodies as having the qualities necessary for these more difficult tasks. There are obvious+ly many ways in which various social systems might work using such a framework. My own preference would be for a `market socialism' in which each of the major natural and accumulated resources would be entrusted to committees of trustees who would lease them out to entrepreneurs, whether individual, com+panies or cooperatives under conditions designed to protect the environment, the public interest and the interests of posterity. F05 Cleo - November 1986 2007 words What's childbirth really like? Six women tell the truth The stories about giving birth are many and varied. No two experiences are the same. Here, six women tell it as it really was. By Tina Harris GAYNOR WHEATLEY, 28, TIM, 2, AND SAMANTHA,1 "How can I get this over fast?" "When I was pregnant I went to class+es run by physios. You learnt to pant politely and distract yourself when things got tough by counting dots on the wall. They also wouldn't let you use the word pain. We would have contractions, not pains. Well, I reckon whatever you call it, it still hurts. If they could mix me a cocktail of pethidine*pethadine, panadol and gas, I'd take it in one hit and hope to pass out. With my first baby, Tim, I went to hospital where I was to be induced. The contractions began about an hour after I was in+duced and I took everything they could give me. Glenn, my husband, was there - probably wishing he wasn't - but it was great to have an inter+mediary to plead for me. One nurse kept pushing my tummy really hard. I said, `Please don't.' She just seemed not to hear me, so I said to Glenn, `Tell her if she had a dreadful pain in her stomach, she would hate someone doing this to her,' so Glenn said to the nurse, `I think you're annoying her. Why don't you go and make yourself a cuppa?' She disappeared, thank heaven. I know you're supposed to think how wonderful all this is, but I could only think `How can I get this over with fast?' When Tim was born and they put him on my tummy, that in+stant love thing didn't happen. He was a stranger. I wished they'd take this in+credible goobie thing away and clean it up and give me a cuppa. It wasn't till next day that I held him and thought, `Wow! This little thing is mine.' "I'm having my third soon, so, in spite of what I'm saying about birth, I think it's worthwhile in the end." (A few days after this interview Gaynor gave birth to a daughter.) If there is any such thing as the text-book birth, it is the one where the first stage of labour begins with irregular contractions. You might just feel tightening of the tummy muscles and a slightly uncomfortable sensation in the stomach or back. This may go on for hours or days. Then the contractions become stronger and more regular. When they are about 10 minutes apart, you ring your doctor, probably go to hos+pital, and after some time enter the second stage where you experi+ence an overwhelming urge to push with the contractions, give birth to the baby, then expel*expell the placenta. That's what the book says! When the day comes though, there seems to be as many vari+ations on this theme as there are women giving birth. Nearly everyone makes some deviation from the pattern, ranging from trivial or funny to downright frightening. Women are urged to think of giving birth as an exciting experience that is both natural and beautiful, and while very few mothers would deny all three adjectives aptly describe the event, most would have a few of their own to add. Labour is an adven+ture that is probably more enjoyable in the recounting than in the ex+perience. Like the best of adventures it presents, along with the inter+esting and the unexpected, the routine, but it may also have its alarm+ing moments. You experience anticipation, exhaustion, determination, maybe even despair. Then progress, intense excitement, a surge of power, triumph and peace. Peace and love of a magnitude you've never imagined. You are in a zone all of your own. No one could honestly rave about the physical joys of labour and most mothers manage to truly forget the level of discomfort, but the hours of labour are more than balanced by the heights of emotional pleasure reached when you at last feel that new life wriggling in your arms instead of in your tummy. It is indescribably special to be cud+dling the world's most important baby. Cleo spoke to six women about their experiences leading up to that special moment. PEPPIE ANGLISS, 26, AND DAUGHTER KOBI,1 "I gave birth squatting in the water." "I once saw a Russian film about giv+ing birth in the water and decided that would be the thing for me. I was a swimming teacher and surfer and have a great affinity with the water. I contin+ued to swim a lot when I became preg+nant - two years after I saw the film. "The first sign that Kobi was coming was the water breaking one night. I went to the doctor next morn+ing and he said if the contractions didn't start soon I would have to go to hospital. I began pacing the floor and saying to the baby, 'Please hurry up or we'll both finish up in a bright, clanging hospital theatre'. I so much wanted the birth to be quiet and natural and the pool was right there - in the next room at my doctor's birthing centre. "Luckily, the contractions began and became strong very quickly. I felt I had to get straight into the water even though it hadn't had time to warm up properly. My teeth chattered to begin with but I felt relief from the intensity of the pain immediately because I was relaxing beautifully with the feeling of weightlessness. My husband, Rod, was with me all the time in the pool. I gave birth squatting in the water. The midwife leant in and we gently raised Kobi to the surface. I'd been in the pool two hours or so and the water had heated to body temperature. It was beautifully comfortable. Kobi was so relaxed. She just opened her eyes and looked at us. We stayed in the pool another 40 minutes while she floated peacefully, then Rod carried her from the water and the doctor helped me out. We lay down, but I didn't sleep. I was too excited." LYA SHAKED, 32, AND SON EZRA, 18 MONTHS "I wouldn't say it was painful." "As a lay midwife I have worked with about 150 births myself. I know that for me, home is the best place to have a baby. I prefer to be with people who trust and support me - this doesn't always happen in hospitals. "When you give birth at home you would normally have a doctor, a regis+tered midwife, possibly a childbirth educator and, of course, your hus+band. That's what I had for my first two, but with the third, Ezra, things were very quick. We would have had a doc+tor and midwife if it were necessary but there were no surprises. Things went very smoothly - there were only three hours between the first contractions that woke me around 4am and the birth. When I began to feel twinges with the contractions I tried to wake Ian. He'd had a very hard day and I couldn't stir him, so I woke my daugh+ter and she sat with me as the contrac+tions got stronger. "My body was working very hard over the short period of time. The physical build-up to the birth was very intense. I wouldn't say it was painful. When the water burst Ian had woken up. Ezra came very quickly and we de+livered him together. I was kneeling on the floor. After the birth I got the shiv+ers and shakes. I think I was in mild shock because the birth had been so fast. I knelt there holding the baby till I stopped shaking. Ian wrapped us both in a blanket. "It was another hour before the pla+centa came. We gave Ezra a Le Boyer bath and I had a wash. Then we all went back to bed and rested. You seem to get the most wonderfully calming feeling after giving birth." ANNE STEPHEN, 26, AND SON RY, 10 WEEKS "I felt pain but nothing I couldn't control." "When I was about seven months pregnant with Ry I was support partner for a girlfriend who gave birth with the aid of acupuncture. I could see it was really helping with the pain. I decided then and there to have it, too, to has+ten my labour and help me control the pain. Despite plans to have my first child, Kim, at a birthing centre, things had gone wrong. I finished up in theatre with spinal block injections, forceps, the works. I didn't want that to happen again. "I went to hospital at 4pm one Sun+day - the contractions I'd been hav+ing all day had become regular. When I got there, they stopped! I had one hour of frustration and was getting quite emotional with the disappoint+ment of it all, when the acupuncturist arrived to induce me. "I probably had about 12 needles in various parts of my body. There were three in each foot and one in each hand between the thumb and first fin+ger. Others were moved around - ears, knees ... You don't feel them. "After one hour I was having regular three-minute contractions. During the contractions I felt pain, but nothing I couldn't control, and between them I felt terrific. I was eating sandwiches and drinking orange juice. It was won+derful to feel so alert. "When the second stage of labour started they removed the needles so I could move about and give birth on my hands and knees. Ry was born only three hours after the acapuncture had begun. It was all very exciting." WENDY SKELTON, 35, WITH TWINS DANIEL AND TIM, NEARLY 4 "I think I began to panic... It was enormously confusing." "I don't think I've ever actually recov+ered from the birth of the twins. It was the most enormous shock because all through the pregnancy I had no idea I was carrying two children. "The labour itself was very calm and uneventful - after about 11 to 13 hours of the normal build-up, Daniel was delivered. The doctor lay him on my tummy and I remember thinking `What a small baby!'. He was small - only two kilos. Then the doctor went white and looked shocked. He said, `Hold on. I think there's another one there'. It was a wonder they hadn't heard the two heartbeats before this. I was stunned. My first thought was very selfish. After that beautiful release you experience after giving birth, all I could think was, `Oh no! Surely I'm not going to start all over again'. "All of a sudden the room seemed to fill with more and more people. They put me on a drip to help strengthen the contractions for the second birth. I knew I had to try to keep my mind on pushing at the right time, but there was a flurry of thoughts running through my head. How would our daughter Rebecca cope with two babies in the family? I heard my husband, Russell, sounding very excited because it was twins. I think I began to panic. Nine minutes after Daniel was born, Tim ar+rived. After expecting one baby for nine months I'd had nine minutes to get used to the idea of twins. It was enormously confusing." JOANNA STEWART, 43, WITH CHRISTOPHER, 3 "I became frightened something was wrong with the baby." "When I was about four days overdue, tests showed Christopher wasn't get+ting enough food through the placenta, so my gynaecologist decided to in+duce me. I went into labour 30 minutes later. I could feel the contractions in my back. I had tubes up my nose - for oxygen, I suppose - and a moni+tor in my tum listening to Christopher. I felt like something from Mars. "At 11am they gave me an epidural and around 12.30 I sensed quite a lot seemed to be going on. They rang my gynaecologist and he came and looked at the miles and miles of sheets that were coming out of the ma+chine monitoring Christopher's heart+beat. F07 Dolly 2013 words F07a Dolly - November 1986 "I'm PREGNANT ... and i don't know what to do" "It could never happen to me..." So many girls fool themselves like this. The truth is, one in 20 teenage girls will fall pregnant. What if you're faced with pregnancy? What are your options? By Daphne Sider Louise grew up living with her mother in a southern suburb of Sydney. She fell pregnant at the age of 15 and was determined to keep her baby. Now Ashley is a beautiful and happy three-year-old. "When I fell pregnant the first person I told was a good friend of mine who was much older. She said I could move into her place because I was fighting with my mother, and we discussed what I was going to do. "I was determined to keep my baby because I didn't feel abortion was right for me. I was really happy about being pregnant. You see, before all this I was really wild. I was always getting drunk and just out for a good time. I felt a real fear of responsibility. But after I had Ashley, I realised that someone else's life depended on me being stable. "Also , I wasn't getting on with Mum. I felt she had abandoned me and I really wanted someone who needed me and loved me. "Now I've got to think of things like budgeting and I don't waste money anymore. I feel heaps more mature than other girls my age, because Ashley needs me to be. "I didn't set out to get pregnant. I didn't use contraceptives because I never thought it would happen to me. I'd had sexual relationships before and counted on my luck. Ashley's father and I hung out together for about two months. He was Indian and never told his family about me because they would have freaked if they knew he was seeing an Australian girl. He was 15 too. Ashley was conceived the very first time we slept together. "I don't see him anymore. It was best that we separated. Maybe when he's older he'll be able to handle the situation better. I don't feel I need his money or anything, but maybe Ashley will ask for his support one day. "Currently we're living on a Supporting Mother's Pension. It's hard to exist on a little over a hundred dollars a week, but I'm lucky enough to have other friends who help me out. "I like the thought that when I'm 30 Ashley will be 15. I'll have just stopped doing the things that she's getting into and so I'll be able to understand her and I hope she'll never have to lie to me. We'll be friends leading a similar lifestyle." One in 20 teenage girls in Australia became pregnant in 1984. More recent statistics aren't available yet, but it looks like the trend is continuing. The majority of girls will opt for abortion, fewer will become single mothers and fewer still will marry. The numbers that will have their babies adopted are miniscule. The reasons for this rate of pregnancy among young, unmarried girls are varied, but naturally enough it begins with the level of sexual activity: It's increasing, starting at an earlier age for both girls and guys. Studies have shown that the earlier you start having sex, the greater the risk of becoming pregnant soon after. One-fifth of teenage pregnancies start within a month of first having sex, and half will occur within six months. More reasons why: Although there appears to be an increased knowledge of contraception, their use is still relatively low. This could be due to lack of access; unplanned sex; worries that parents might find them; a fear that using contraception may indicate loose morals; the belief that "it could never happen to me"; and basically, not considering the consequences of unprotected sex. Also, some girls won't admit to themselves that they are involved in a sexual relationship. For moral reasons they'd prefer to take a deliberate risk, rather than a real precaution, as a way of reassuring themselves it's a one-off situation. Even though it may very well be a one-off affair, the risks of pregnancy are too high to ignore. For a teenage girl who feels unloved or unwanted, having a baby may be seen as the answer. It needs looking after and is wholly dependent and will provide love and, for some girls, a real purpose for living. Some also view motherhood as a means of achieving self-worth or independence. Sue King, executive officer of Preterm, Sydney, says that alcohol is another major cause of pregnancy among young girls. When they get drunk they often forget themselves, and have sex without thinking or without really wanting to. That's where the problems start. With free discussion of sex in magazines, books, films and amongst peers, coupled with the option of contraceptives and their ready availability, you may be sceptical about the relatively high incidence of teenage pregnancy. The problem lies with the confusing attitudes towards the subject. It's promoted by some, it's rejected by others ... just think of the messages you're getting from the media, peers and parents. SINGLE MOTHERS Like Louise, between 25 and 35 per cent of young, unmarried girls who fall pregnant will decide to keep their babies. It's a hard decision to make as it affects the rest of their lives and their relationships with parents, friends and future loves. It's a decision which also affects their social and economic prospects. Some of the real problems they face may include isolation and lack of support; inadequate income coupled with fewer employment opportunities; limited education; poor housing; inadequate medical care both during and after the pregnancy; and fewer opportunities for free time from being a parent. Louise stressed the value of having friends, particularly those older and more experienced, who help with the baby's upbringing and with finance. But not all teenagers are so lucky. Some risk alienation from their families, boyfriends and friends. So what are her other options and how does she decide? Generally it will depend on her age, her family, personal beliefs and values, her knowledge and access to prenatal services, the length of the pregnancy before it's confirmed, whether she sees a child as interrupting her future plans, and whether she feels motherhood is a natural and inevitable conclusion for her. These days options available to girls faced with an unplanned pregnancy seem to be changing in emphasis. They will more than likely opt for abortion or single parenthood rather than adoption or forced marriage. ABORTION The majority of girls - between 35 and 50 per cent - will choose to end their pregnancy by abortion. It's an extremely stressful and emotional decision for any girl to make, but in Jenny's case she felt it was her only option. At the age of 18, Jenny suspected she was pregnant. This suspicion was confirmed for her when she missed her period (which she'd never done before). Jenny talked it over with her boyfriend. She'd been going out with him for more than a year and, although there was no reason for it, she felt it was a way of gaining more of his attention. At that time what frustrated Jenny was that she had to wait six weeks after her missed period to have a pregnancy test done at the Family Planning Clinic. She knew she'd choose to have an abortion. There was no way she was about to give up her studies, her career plans, her independence. And it seemed outrageous to her that her parents and boyfriend should suffer for it, as she was sure they would. The test proved her suspicions. She wanted to cry but couldn't. She felt sorry for herself, not for what she was going to do. And the same sentiment carried her through the abortion and the days to follow. Jenny's boyfriend, Mark, was with her all the way. He accompanied her to the clinic and offered moral support. Jenny's not quite sure what his reaction would have been had she decided to keep the baby, but doesn't think it's important now anyway. Prior to the abortion she was counselled. It was the first time she'd been counselled about anything and she appreciated it, although she didn't feel she really needed it. Other girls in the clinic that day were quite hysterical. Jenny felt cold - a little religious remorse perhaps, but she put that aside too. It all happened in about ten minutes. That night she went home, cooked dinner for herself and her parents, and told them the movie she'd seen that day was interesting. It was a relief for Jenny that the problem faced by her unplanned pregnancy was gone, and although sentimental when relating her experiences to me, there was no remorse at all. But the ethical problems of remorse do affect many people. Those who believe human life begins at the moment of conception will probably be outraged at Jenny's apparent lack of concern for her child. Their vocal protests are the reasons why many clinics must lock their doors, which can only open after you've knocked. The physical risks of a young girl giving birth are reason enough for some to choose abortion. Medical reports suggest that young girls, particularly those under 16, have a greater chance of giving birth to a premature baby and developing anaemia or high blood pressure in pregnancy, as well as suffering many other complications. MARRIAGE Marriage is an option, but a limited one. Teenage marriages have a poor success rate - nearly half break up within five years. Adolescence is probably the most unstable period of anyone's life; you change your attitudes, you experiment in all types of ways. It's difficult to imagine that a decision you make, particularly under duress, will be right for you in years to come. Still, 15 to 25 per cent of pregnant teenagers will choose to marry by the time their babies are born. ADOPTION The percentage of girls who put their babies up for adoption is very small indeed. That's not so surprising, when you consider that they have carried a child for some nine months. WHERE TO GO FOR HELP It's been proven that the numbers of pregnant teenagers in countries where contraception and advice are readily available are considerably lower than those countries where it's not. Limiting the availability of family planning courses results only in sex without protection. Teenagers are not too immature to use contraceptives effectively. The problem is ignorance. There are many counselling services you can ring or visit to ask for pregnancy help or advice. Youthline is one of them; it's a young person's version of Lifeline. Fifty per cent of all the calls they get deal with pregnancy. Girls facing the prospect of an unplanned pregnancy, or those pregnant girls who need information about their health and financial situations, or who require accommodation, are usually the ones who call. The counsellors at Youthline are aged between 18 and 30; they are well+trained to offer you all the options available but will not give subjective advice. Youthline is a national counselling service and can be contacted on the following numbers: list, omitted F07b Dolly - November 1986 BOYFRIENDS. to have or have not. Guys. You can't live with them, you can't live without them. Or can you? Being single is not the end of the world. In fact, some girls even prefer it. So, you want a boyfriend. Why? Because your best friend has one and you feel left out? Because the formal's coming up? Because you're tired of kissing mirrors? Or maybe you feel that deep down inside you need to share your life with a special guy. Mmmmm. I guess that sounds reasonable enough on the surface. No matter what guys are like, it seems we're desperate to put up with them. In fact, we feel our hearts will break if we can't find a guy to break our hearts. Funny, isn't it? Why is that the idea of being single unleashes all our hidden fears of lonely spinsterhood? F08 Caring For An Elderly Relative: A Guide to Home Care 2020 words Intellectual failure Loss of competence is frequently but incorrectly attributed to getting old. Very often, what we think to be decline in an old person's mental powers is the result of emotional problems, such as depression or anxiety, or simply disuse; young people kept in solitary confinement need re+training to regain mental competence. Often we overcompensate for old people's mental decline: A colleague working at Harvard University began to suspect that, however well-meaning, the very act of helping old people may reduce their ability to look after themselves. The opportunities for practis+ing a necessary skill are removed, and the message that they are becoming incapable of self-care, producing a state called `learned helplessness', is subtly conveyed. Three groups of old people were given jigsaw puzzles to test their performance. An examiner sat in on one group, encouraging , sug+gesting where to put pieces, and actively assisting in finding pieces to fit. In another, the examiner gave only minimal assistance and encouragement. In the third group there was no examiner, except for assessment before and after the experiment. The people who were helped performed less well than those who were only encouraged, while they did less well than those who were left to themselves. The `helped' group completed on the average fewer pieces, and worked more slowly. This suggests that, although helpers mean well, they may be reducing the competence of older people in their charge. It also shows that being helped may make a task seem more difficult than it is and so reduce self-confidence. This does not mean, of course, that the many frail, aged people who require assistance for their very survival should have it withdrawn! But we must judge carefully when to interfere. The old idea that you were always losing brain cells over the age of sixty seemed bad enough, but now we learn that the big losses are when we are younger. In fact the present theory is that we are born with brain cells in excess of normal requirements and are losing a daily quantity from birth. The greatest loss is around the age of forty when we begin to notice failing memory. However, from the start we have learned to do without the ones that become discarded. Mental skills requiring most flexibility are lost quite early - children and young teenagers take to computers and solve the Rubik cube better than anyone. But our ability to make judgments on the basis of information already acquired continues to develop throughout life. We must therefore make certain whether or not an old person's men+tal failure is intellectual, and this may require testing by someone specially trained. We are all familiar with remarkable people who pre+serve their mental powers and personality intact into the nineties. We are also painfully aware that many become depressed and lose their mental acuity. For the majority there is a falling off in certain mental abilities, particularly those tasks that require a solution within a given time. There is a slowing of response due to delay within the central ner+vous system, and so patience is needed in communication, and instruc+tions are best given simply and briefly to allow plenty of time for absorption. Old people find doing two things at once difficult, so you may see an old lady stop walking while she puts on her gloves. Then again you may notice old people moving their lips while reading, and this is because they need to reinforce their understanding by hearing the words as well as seeing them. Of course it is characteristic for the elderly to become less adaptable, as we already discussed in Chapter 2, and this can make them difficult to live with. Even more important, perhaps, it may be a serious barrier to successful rehabilitation after an illness when new skills have to be learned. In this chapter we describe the different ways your relative's mental processes may be affected and how you may cope with these problems of the mind. Normal changes of aging The emotions In old people, emotions assume an increasingly domi+nant role and are liable to colour their beliefs about their lifestyle. There may be a blunting of feeling leading to apathy or indifference, or an accentuation of former characteristics so that someone, say, who used to be strict and have demanding standards either mellows into tolerance or hardens into despotism. It is well known that emotional activity in the elderly tends towards certain patterns of behaviour - resistance to change, lack of spontaneity, greater caution and distrust of the unfamiliar. Memory It is often said that when you are old you can remember the distant past, but not what has just happened. This distinction, however, is not by any means clear-cut. We have a short-term memory and a faculty for retaining information, such as shopping lists, for a short time only, and then discarding it when it is no longer needed. Certainly when someone's brain starts to fail, short-term memory is more vulner+able, but this is really because of an inability to register the information in the first place. We all begin to notice that our memory is not so good once we have passed forty, and this type of forgetfulness is characterized by difficulty in recalling names and events. Loss of recent memory - or indeed of any period involving whole episodes, is a different type of failure and should be regarded as a symptom of disease rather than a feature of aging. This may be due to a number of conditions, both physical and mental (stroke or alcoholism, or dementia, see page 94), and including the effect of drugs. So a good medical opinion based on experienced assessment is needed. Memory aids There are many practical ways you can suggest to help your relative remember necessary facts and domestic details. These will both provide confidence and can act as a form of memory training: 1. Keep a large daily diary with space to write all the day's activities, hour by hour 2. Use details in the environment - definite times, places, objects - to act as reminders to do a particular task. For example, put the coffee jar in a prominent place in the kitchen so that preparing a routine mid-morning snack is remembered 3. Reduce daily activities to those that are easily remembered by your relative 4. Encourage occupations that do not tax the memory too much, for example, painting or gardening 5. Praise, even reward good recall, but avoid putting your relative to the test. Quite often elderly people lose their sense of identity, and need to be reminded who they are, where they are and what time of day it is. Keep+ing clocks and calendars, family pictures and mementos on hand so that your relative can refer to them constantly helps strengthen self-confidence. Make sure these aids are large, clearly marked and accurate. Reminiscence can be used as a pleasurable form of mental stimulation. But when old people begin to ramble, it is a good idea to change the subject to something more concrete. Encourage your relative to make choices, and so retain his or her independence. These suggestions are useful for everyone with a degree of memory failure. They can also be helpful in stimulating elderly people with more severe mental disability. Mental disorder The idea of mental failure I want to say that whereas medical labels are useful to the profession, I am not speaking only of dementia here. True dementia is irreversible, but the brain may fail - that is, become confused - for many other reasons, which are reversible. We have to think of mental failure rather in the same way as we do cardiac failure. This means that it can be compensated for and kept going with various forms of help, such as I suggest above. The necessary adjustment can be made by reducing incoming strains and providing a simple, familiar routine. Perhaps the most important task for the doctor is to dis+tinguish the elements of dementia and confusion from treatable de+pression, and this is not easy. Confusion Confusion can unfortunately give a false impression of dementia. But it is simply a descriptive term indicating that someone has a disordered awareness of his or her surroundings. Of course you can be confused more easily when you are dementing - but anyone submitted to too many stimuli can be made confused. Old people who cannot dis+criminate between sights and sounds are predisposed, so that confusion is particularly common at dusk, when it is difficult to pick things out from the background and stereoscopic (simultaneous) vision is much reduced. A state of confusion may be accompanied by delusions. Perhaps you have felt confused for a moment on waking up in a strange hotel, or when suddenly questioned while daydreaming? On a lazy holiday you may not be able to say what day or time of day it is. So remember that anyone can become confused in situations where too much or too little is happening, the surroundings are unfamiliar and emotional drives are strong. In fact, if your relative is only confused, you can feel optimistic about the outcome. In many cases confusion can be treated by removing the cause, which may be one or a combination of the following: • A full bladder • Constipation • The effect of drugs • An infection • Heart disease • Minor stroke. Looking after a confused person requires skilful handling. It is import+ant not to thwart, but to learn how to guide and soothe your relative. If, for instance, your old father has got up in the night with the idea of going to work it is better to say, `Can I come along too?' and lead him into the kitchen to sit down and wait for the bus, than to get into a noisy confrontation. After a while he may take a glass of milk or a hot drink and quietly return to bed, having forgotten where he was going in the first instance. Let me say at once that this cannot always work, but it is the approach most likely to succeed. Dementia Although it is so prevalent in old age - it has been estimated that about one person in five over the age of eighty suffers from moderate or severe dementia - it is not easy to detect at first. If you notice that your relative has serious memory lapses, as I explained on page 92, or starts to behave in unusual or obsessional ways, or has trouble with language, you should speak to your doctor about it. Any of these may be due to anxiety or drug effects, to confusion, or to brain damage, so skilled test+ing will be needed to decide what is at the root. Coping with dementia At least eight in ten elderly people with dementia are cared for at home and they are also likely to be affected with other mental and physical illness, imposing a severe strain on the relatives caring for them. Depending on the degree of dementia, there will be repetition, restlessness, mistaking people's identity - even yours - lack of motivation, memory lapses, hitting out at supporters, and dis+turbances at night. Falls and incontinence are caused by lack of physical control and the sufferer's unawareness of his or her own body. I think it is true to say that the wish to care for someone with these problems grows out of an established pattern of life, reinforced by bonds of affection and obligation. But, of course, the personality change and the accompanying problems mean you will feel sadness, and at times exasperation, more acutely. When you care for someone in this condition, one of the worst features is the inability to sustain a con+versation. It seems as if the person is gradually becoming more and more remote, although the physical resemblance is there. What should you look out for if you suspect your relative has dementia? The following are typical symptoms; they can be alleviated provided you are alert to them and take the measures suggested here and by your doctor or geriatrician: list follows F11 Good Weekend 2002 words F11a Good Weekend - 18 October 1986 How England's other half learns JOHN ARROW went back to his old school and the arcane world of Eton College as 200 new tits (new boys) trooped in for the beginning of term. Mud, glorious mud; the College (scholarship boys) play the Oppidans (fee-payers) at the wall game - the ultimate example of sporting violence and futility. Peculiar to Eton, the wall game requires the ball to be taken from one end of the wall to the other. Years can pass without a single goal being scored. Eton hides a secret behind the winding streets and elegant facades I WENT BACK to my old house at Eton the other day. And it was full of girls. In the room where my old mate Faulkner major used to sit surrounded by cheesy foot+ball socks and dirty coffee cups, Joanna Haselden, a stunning 17-year-old blonde from Manchester, was chatting to her friend Alyson from Solihull. Down the hall the festering aroma of teenage boys had vanished, to be replaced by wafts of hairspray, soap and scent. It was enough to make an Old Etonian traditionalist fear for the future of his old stamping ground. The opposite sex - whatever next? Well, pretty much the same as always, actually. The girls, it transpired, were pupils of a summer school, run by Eton Col+lege during the holidays to help state school pupils prepare for their Oxford and Cambridge exams. However, life returned to normal with the beginning of the new academic year in Sep+tember and doubtless it will be cheesy-sock time again. For no matter how smart and self-assured the Etonians in these pictures may appear to be, the truth is that their natural instincts are those of Adrian Mole. The average Etonian al+ways walks around with his hands in his pockets, polishes his shoes only when absolutely necessary (ie under duress from a teacher or older boy), and has about 10 centimetres of ankle showing below his pinstripe uniform trousers because he's growing like a weed and his mother has no intention of spend+ing hundreds on a new suit until the last one has had every possible moment of wear squeezed out of it. The same young sprig of the upper classes lives, like every other boy in the school, in his own room. It has a fold-down iron bed, a desk, a wardrobe and an ottoman - the chest into which the average Etonian shoves his football shorts, jock+straps, dirty magazines and anything else he wants to keep away from the matron's gaze. Any Etonian knows that I have committed several terrible errors in the preceding two paragraphs, There are no teachers at Eton. They are called "beaks". Uniform is "school dress," a desk is a "burry" (short for bureau) and the woman who looks after the welfare*wefare of the boys in any one of the school's 25 houses would be shocked to be called a matron. She is "dame," as in pantomimes, ugly sisters and the like. As you read this there are around 200 13-year-olds who are extremely nervous about the fact that all these strange words are about to become part of their vocabulary. They are this term's new boys. Once the head boys and cricketing heroes of their prep schools, they must now adjust to life as the lowest of the low. Within the past decade Eton has abandoned "fagging" - the system in which junior boys acted as the seniors' servants - but the gulf between the "new tits" and their elders can still be intimidatingly wide. All the more so when the new arrivals are confronted by their "colours test," some two weeks after the term - sorry, the "half" (of which, naturally, there are three in the Etonian year) - begins. The test examines every aspect of the arcane trivia that the school so adores. The terrified new boy must learn all the colours of all the houses and the 52 various sports teams that the school puts out, all of which dress entirely differently from any of the oth+ers. And they have crazy names, too. The under-16 cricket team is "Upper Sixpenny." The soccer First XI is the "Association." Somewhere in the rowing hierarchy, which is based on eights, there is an immensely important boy called "The Ninth Man In The Monarch." I have no more idea of what he does now than I did when I took the colours test some 15 years ago. Passing the colours test is like an induction into an ado+lescent freemasonry. Once you can identify "The Keeper of the Field", once you can find your way from "Agar's Plough" to the "Burning Bush", you've become an insider. You know something the rest of the world does not. You can look at the busloads of Japanese tourists and visiting journalists and feel the heady sensation of everyone else's curiosity. To the average visiting foreigner, Eton is no more than an+other example of the way the British continue to live out their past. The boys all wear black tailcoats and stiff collars - gee, how quaint. And to the English Eton means Super-Sloane chinless wonders with braying accents and the old school ties. It means a place where standards are still maintained, or - depending on the point of view - a disgusting symbol of an outdated and oppressive class system. But Eton hides a secret behind the winding streets and el+egant facades that make it look more like an ancient university than a school. A closer look reveals brand-new laboratories; a 400-seat theatre; a new Olympic-standard gymnasium and swimming-pool; a design and technology centre. These are the jewels in the crown of a school that is determinedly, even ruthlessly, modern. Eton is a business that sells a very expensive product. It costs a basic £5,835 ($13,570) a year in fees, not including extras, uniforms and the boys' incidental expenses. An Etonian par+ent is looking at around £15,000 of pre-tax income per boy per year at the school. Eton is competitive and success brings ample rewards of freedom and privilege. It is hierarchical; senior boys organise the discipline of the school by a number of bodies that are self-electing. If you want power for yourself you have to get on with the people who have it now. This may not be very nice, but it is realistic. This adaptability to the present, rather than any links with the past, makes Eton what it is and gives its pupils an advan+tage that some may consider unfair. On the other hand, they pay a price that may be more than financial. There is very little physical bullying at Eton, but any weakness of personality is seized upon instantly. Boys learn to cover up, to hide their feelings or insecurities behind the confident, articulate, often arrogant facade that characterises the average Etonian. Would you want that for your child? When I asked the sum+mer school girls for their opinions of Eton, their feelings were mixed. Compared to regular state schools the facilities were staggering. And they were struck by the degree to which teachers expected them to take the initiative in class and in+formal tutorial sessions. But there were drawbacks. Everyone agreed that the food could be truly awful. Tales abounded of mouldy sausage rolls and over-ripe grapefruit. Alyson Guiel looked around her small whitewashed room, covered in posters, snapshots and mouldy bits of Blu-Tack left here by its usual male occupant and said: "I had imagined huge, wood-panelled rooms, but each of the boys pays £6,000 a year and gets a room half the size of the one I have at home." They had not met any of the boys, who had long since left for their summer holidays. But they wondered how 17- and 18-year-olds could stand the rules and restrictions of boarding-school life. They didn't think that it was a good idea for them to be shut away from real people. And, as Joanna Haseldon added: "There should be girls here. The boys must be sex-starved." Now there she may well be right. And it is probably also true that the presence of girls at Eton would make the boys pleas+anter, cleaner, more considerate and much more understand+ing of the opposite sex. What it would do to the girls, however, doesn't bear thinking about. ETONIANS THERE are about 1,250 boys at Eton. Each boy's parents pay £1,945 a term in fees, plus extras. Each boy must have at*a least two schoolsuits, consisting of pinstripe trousers, tail coat and waistcoat, at around £150 each. He will also need hundreds of pounds' worth of shirts, ties, games clothes, casual clothes, towels, curtains and so on. There have been 20 Etonian prime ministers, including Wellington, Gladstone and Macmillan. Current Etonian pol+iticians include Cabinet members Lord Hailsham, Nicholas Ridley and Paul Channon; Tory "Wets" Francis Pym, Ian Gil+mour and Lord Carrington and Labour MP Tam Dalyell. Etonian writers include the poets Shelley, Gray and Swin+burne. In the 20th century 1984, Brave New World and James Bond are all creations of Etonian authors in George Orwell, Aldous*ous Huxley and Ian Fleming (Bond himself was not an Eton+ian). Novelist Anthony Powell, art historian Harold Acton, critic Cyril Connolly, economist J M Keynes and philosopher A J Ayer all attended the school. The Old Etonians won the FA Cup in 1879 and 1882 and were runners-up four times. In 1967 the Eton rowing eight were the world junior champions, beating the Russian and East German national teams. F11b Good Weekend - 18 October 1986 Flower children's autumn By Phil Jarratt IF YOU'RE a baby boomer with a long memory, you may recall Haight-Ashbury, Dr Timothy Leary, Indian headbands, fringed frontier jackets and The Summer of Love. It is almost 20 years since Sergeant Pepper told the band to play - beginning a bizarre cultural revolution of sorts that had a profound effect on the way we looked at drugs, the environ+ment, even the war in Vietnam. The hippie movement had many homes, from Amsterdam to Istanbul, from Greenwich Village to Glebe. but nowhere was the beads and bangles brigade so evident, so pervasive, as in San Francisco. "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair," went the song. And they did, filling the seedy streets of the Haight with the spirit of free love and cheap thrills. But San Francisco got sick of the hippies even before the rest of the world did and so they moved on, generally finding rural retreats where their unorthodox behaviour was rendered acceptable by sheer force of numbers. In the way of human evolution, hippies became New Settlers who became disaffected subsistence farmers who drifted back into the cities and became fully-fledged yuppies. Except in northern California, where the spirit of Jefferson Airplane lived on long after the band had become a Starship and succumbed to commercial temptation. And in one northern Californian town the spirit lives on, albeit a little wheezily, today. In 1971, two oil tankers collided off Bolinas - an hour north of San Francisco, in ritzy Marin County - leaving the area's beautiful beaches fouled with slick. Environmentally concerned young people from the Haight, the houseboats of Sausalito and the Berkeley university campus descended on the tiny village to help clean up. Many of them decided to stay and the hippies controlled the town of 1,500 people by the mid-1970s through stacking the boards of such instrumentalities as the Bolinas Community Public Utilities. This board managed to halt any new housing construction by barring the distribution of water meters. But even more noticeable than the anti-building stance was the new attitude to tourism. The picturesque, if slightly shabby, village had been a tea-and-scones stop on the way to Point Reyes National Seashore Park but the flower children ripped the sign down. Even though the California Transport Department has erected 34 replacement signs, the road to Bolinas remains unmarked. When I first visited Bolinas, a decade ago, I was immediately seduced by the potent mixture of liberal thought and creativity. F12 Australian Society 2003 words F12a Australian Society - May 1986 Putting dollars into housing Tony Dalton looks at alternative finance for public housing ADVOCATES OF AN EXPANDED and high quality public housing system have been experiencing a finance crisis for some time. More recently the number of people having problems with housing finance has grown: many prospective owner-occupiers have not been able to get the finance they need at a price they can afford. But instead of working towards fundamental changes in housing finance, which could go some way towards ensuring a steadier supply of finance to both owner-occupied and a public housing, the government has again reacted with in+creased subsidies to home buyers. The prospects for public housing sector are not good. The Minister for Housing and Construction continues to fight for federal budget funds for public housing, but now he openly states that future increases will be modest. Certainly the ALP's policy commitment to double in ten years public housing's share of the total housing stock will not be met. There is also the possibility that the amount that the state governments will allocate from their low interest rate Loan Council borrowings to housing will be limited in the future. Finally it is not generally appreciated that the increasing rebate bill faced by the state housing authorities will have an increasingly profound effect on the amount available for additional public housing. Something like $250 million of untied grant money now goes in de facto social security payments to low income public tenants unable to meet the cost rent. The prospects of owner ocupied housing are also not good. There are indications of a very considerable down turn in the production of new dwellings over the next few years. In 1984-85 the total number of dwellings completed was 152,700; it is expected that this level of activity will decrease*decrase by approximately ten per cent per year over the next two years. By 1986-87 the number of completions will be about 125,000. This will be well below the demand for new housing forecast by bodies such as the Indicative Planning Council for the Housing Industry. The reason for this downturn in the private sector is the reduced availability of finance, a result of market interest rates increasing to very high levels. With the savings banks and the building societies still regulated to charge a lower than market interest rate on housing loans, they have had trouble attracting deposits, causing a diminishing supply of funds being available for lending. Unlike the shortage of funds for public housing, this situation is creating a sharp response in a number of quarters. The odds are that this will produce some form of action at Federal government level and perhaps in the finance sector. As it now stands banks, building societies, housing industry employer bodies and trade unions have been making submissions to government, and it is rumoured that a number of cabinet submissions have sought to identify options for increasing the level of finance available for housing loans. It is difficult to predict the outcome of this process. It is likely that the interest rate ceiling will stay for the present because of the political dangers of increasing the cost of funds for existing owner-occupiers. Every effort will be made not to increase the level of the first home owners' scheme because of the government's determination to restrict expenditure. A likely interim step will be to secure more funds for housing loans through overseas borrowing by the banks supported by the government. Whatever happens it is almost certain that the changes will be interim ones. Eventually the Federal government will deregulate housing finance, removing the ceiling on rates. This is likely to be done when interest rates come down to somewhere near the present ceiling. The only question that remains is that of accompanying measures. The government will have to ensure, if it is to be re-elected, that levels of investment in housing are maintained. This will undoub+tedly be done in consultation with the private building industry. Advocates of public housing must ensure that they are a part of this process of consultation. It is just possible that in the design of these measures the non-profit housing can get one or a number of its proposals up. IN OPPOSITION THE LABOR PARTY SAW the long term solution to housing finance fluctuations as extension of regulation. It planned to require all financial institutions to contribute to a National Housing Fund, in effect, an extension of asset controls over the non-bank finance sector. Not surprisingly this proposal was opposed by the deregulatory Martin Committee, and won little support in the Hawke Labor government. A second proposal that may have a greater chance of success in the continuing deregulatory climate is the introduction of capital indexed bonds. They are a variation on the more traditional bond issues which are already a feature of government borrowing programs. Capital indexed bonds are more suitable to a period of inflation and uncertainty: lenders who buy the bonds are guaranteed a return of, say, two or three per cent over the inflation rate; because there is certainty over the long term rate of return, investors do not seek the higher interest rates that may be available in other parts of the market. Ultimately the borrower pays a lower real rate of interest on the loan. Housing bonds represent a possible mechanism for investment in housing in both the private and non-profit housing sectors. Indeed, the Victorian government has already made an issue of housing bonds. It has used the finance raised in this way for `on-lending' to owner-occupiers under a Ministry of Housing home purchase assistance program. At this stage capital indexed bonds have not been used to finance non-profit housing. However, it remains as a possible mechanism which, if developed and refined, could sustain flows of finance into the non-profit sector. These flows could also come much nearer to satisfying the demand for capital than is presently the case with the budget allocations of the Federal and State governments under the Commonwealth State Housing Agreement. If this method of financing the public sector was adopted there would need to be changes in the way public housing is subsidised through a reduced interest rate and an annual grant. The grant is a relatively recent development. This subsidy then gets passed on to tenants as lower rents through a system of rebates. A better approach is to move towards a situation where the full interest rate is built into the costing of public housing, in order that public housing operates in the same financial condition as the private sector, and does not perform the income security role of the Department of Social Security. Accom+panying this move there would then have to be changes to the income maintenance system. Preferably this change to income maintenance would result in the income levels of all statutory income beneficiaries being raised in a way that recognises the contribution that housing costs make to poverty. However, a more limited program and perhaps more feasible in the present economic context would be to have the social security system meet the rent rebate bill incurred by state housing authorities and the other providers of public housing. THE OPPORTUNITY FOR considering these issues on a regular basis is now provided for in the Commonwealth State Housing Agreement. As renegotiated in 1984 it states that "the operation of the Agreement is to be evaluated trienially". It would not be stretching this provision too far to advance the argument that the financial provisions of the agreement are inadequate. The triennial evaluation should consider how the financial provisions could be improved. In particular there should be investigation and develop+ment of the use of capital indexed bonds for investment in both the public sector and owner-occupied housing. In the current context investment in housing is falling sharply. Arrangements established in the 1920s and 1940s are not appropriate to a deregulated finance market and high interest rates. An initiative is required which will facilitate continued investment in housing in a way that ensures better access to housing finance across a range of income groups. Tony Dalton is chairperson of National Shelter and lecturer in social policy at the Phillip Institute of Technology. F12b Australian Society - May 1986 Mixed messages on migration Two recent government decisions raise questions about Australia's policy A migration smokescreen Renata Singer THERE ARE SO MANY LARGE AND difficult issues facing this country at the present time, it is puzzling that the Federal government is investing time and funds in running a campaign on the relatively insignificant problem of illegal immigration. For a campaign is certainly being waged. A ministerial statement on illegal immigrants in October 1985 announced, unheralded and undebated, tough new measures against those not legally in Australia. Readers of newspaper reports on this issue in recent months might imagine that Australia has a serious problem. The Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs (DIEA) quotes a figure of 50,000 people living in Australia without legal authority. Where does the figure come from? The department itself concedes that it is an estimate, not calculated on the basis of numbers of arrivals and departures, visas issued or other substantive data. Roughly the same figure has been used in the past whenever the department has focussed on the issue of illegal migration. Before the amnesty of 1977 the claim was that at least 40,000*40,00 people were in Australia illegally. But only 7207 came forward and applied for amnesty. At the time the Regularisation of Status Program in 1980, it was claimed there were 60,000-70,000 illegals. When the amnesty ended in December of that year, about 11,000 applications had been made representing approximately 14,000 people. In 1982 the department announced a `crackdown' on illegal immigrants, and this time it claimed 100,000 as the likely figure. Since then, without any campaign, 50,000 illegal immigrants must have disappeared of their own accord! Who then are the prohibited non-citizens? No one can say with any certainty who they are, or why they came and stayed in Australia, but some data is available for those who apply for, and are granted, change of status to become permanent residents. Prior to October 1985 anyone could apply to change their status who had strong and compassionate grounds, whether they had current `legal' status or not. Since October 1985, only those who are considered `legal' in Australia can apply, no matter how strong, humane or compassionate their case might be. In 1984-85 9898 people applied to change their status. Of the 6014 granted residence status, 69 per cent of approvals were for spouses, children and aged parents of Australian residents and citizens. They were eligible to stay under the family reunion aspect of our immigration program. In many cases they tired of waiting for the departmental process, which can take years. In some cases a disaster had occurred which made it imperative for them to leave immediately, or they were given incorrect advice by friends, relatives or immigration officials. MRS Z IS JUST SUCH A CASE. Born in Spain in 1925, she married at 18, and conceived 18 children of whom eight sur+vived. Five of these children, themselves married, are now resident in Australia, the first having migrated twenty years ago. Mrs Z's husband died in 1965. Of her three daughters married and living in Spain two live far away from the city where she had lived her whole life, and the third could not accommodate her mother in already cramped housing. The well-established and flourishing part of the family applied under family reunion for their mother to join them in Australia. After the usual delays of many months, permission was refused because Mrs Z was deemed by the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs not to be a 'dependent parent' as she was not yet 60 and had other children living in Spain who could support her. In 1985 the daughter who lived near Mrs Z, and to whom she was most attached and dependent on, received permission to migrate to Australia and Mrs Z came with her. F15 The Bulletin 2011 words F15a The Bulletin - 25 April 1986 Gentlemen versus players in union struggle By Tony Abbott TEACHER unionism in private schools is celebrating its coming of age with an old-style bunfight between dif+ferent factions of the New South Wales Independent Teachers' Association.(ITA). Elections last November produced a lurch to the left and the narrow defeat of president Peter Ofner. Now Ofner and his supporters are seeking to over+turn the result, claiming that ITA offi+cials used union resources to sway the poll. Shenanigans of this sort are as old as unionism, but this is the first time the sordid reality of power politics has penetrated the politically virgin ITA. Unionism came late to private school teachers, whose dedication long resem+bled that of the religious brothers and nuns whose places they largely filled. However, in the past 10 years union membership has increased from around 10 percent to nearly 80 percent of New South Wales' private school teachers. Increased militancy, at least among union officials, has wrung great+ly improved conditions from school authorities. At the same time, the union's grow+ing power and influence has attracted the sort of ambitious activist who has long flourished in the state school teacher unions. Ofner predicts that serious industrial relations problems will pose a threat to the future of private schools. Ofner's involvement with the ITA began in 1977 when it was a fledgling lobby more concerned with getting or+ganised than pressurising schools. Ofner blames the constitution for many of his problems. The then general-secretary*general-secratary, Zyg Gardon, wanted to avoid the factional+ism and political in-fighting which, he believed, marred most unions. Conse+quently, under the ITA constitution, candidates for election to the union executive had first to be approved by local branches. Gardon said the aim was to keep out cranks and zealots. Instead, it has meant that the union establishment is almost impossible to challenge because many of the branch+es are under the influence of the estab+lishment. Moreover, because the elected representatives are full-time teachers and only part-time union offi+cials, the union has come to be domin+ated by slicker and more professional full-time officials who are appointed by the executive rather than elected by members. It is a quirk of Australian industrial law that state-registered trade unions, such as the ITA, are able to concentrate power in officials who never have to face a membership ballot. Ofner says that his uneasiness with policy developments crystallised after general-secretary Michael Raper and two other full-time officials saw him late in 1984 to warn him about views he was expressing to other executive mem+bers. He says that he then became con+scious that Raper's full-time position and access to information gave him the upper hand in dealings with elected but part-time officials. Simmering conflict between the amateurs and professionals burst into the open at a council meeting last June when Ofner alleged that Raper had aligned the union with the left-wing steering committee of the New South Wales ALP. At the August council meeting no+tice was given of a no-confidence motion to be moved against Ofner. At the September meeting, Ofner, as pres+ident, ruled the motion out of order on the basis of a legal opinion which he read to the council. However, the coun+cil overruled him and dismissed him. Ofner saw his sacking as evidence of the left's ability to manipulate the union structure. He successfully ap+pealed to the New South Wales Indus+trial Commission for reinstatement on the ground that he had been denied nat+ural justice. But this was not before Raper had written to all members, saying that Ofner had been sacked for making serious allegations against the union which he could not substantiate. It was this letter which Ofner claims unfairly influenced the result of last November's poll. In the meantime, progressive can+didates were claiming that Ofner's cam+paign was backed by the National Civic Council, a conservative union lobby. Ofner says that his claim is absurd, since he had been heavily criticised by the NCC in 1984, but that the charge damaged his credibility as a politically non-aligned candidate. So far, Ofner's attempts to have the result overturned have been bogged down in argument over the Industrial Commission's jurisdiction. Another option open to him is a claim in the Su+preme Court that the election involved a breach of the common law rule that union resources should not be used in election campaigns. But Ofner's room for legal man+oeuvre is limited by the expense of liti+gation. A spokesman for the ITA, which has already spent more than $29,000 on legal fees, said he hoped that Ofner and his friends "haven't had to put second mortgages on their homes in this climate of high interest rates". Ofner is aware of the risks he is run+ning but says he considers that the battle for justice in the union and for the preservation of viable private schools is worth the sacrifice. F15b The Bulletin - 3 June 1986 Education Schoolchildren fodder in a feminist war By Geoffrey Partington FEW CLAIMS are heard more often about Australian education than that it systematically disadvantages girls and women. People paid high salaries for running school systems shout the bad news from the rooftops, although they never offer to resign. John Steinle, for example, Director-General of Educa+tion in South Australia recently wrote in a booklet distributed by the tens of thousands: "The department recog+nises that particular groups are disad+vantaged by our present education sys+tem. The largest of these groups is girls." But the cry of unfair discrimina+tion is most often bruited from the ser+ried ranks of women's advisers, equal opportunity officers and various other shes who must be obeyed. How true are their accusations? Even the more ardent feminists do not claim that there is overt discrimina+tion against girls in schools. Boys and girls are subject to the same attendance laws and the amount of money spent on schooling is little affected, if at all, by gender. On the whole, being more do+cile and sociable, girls take to school more readily than boys, are quicker to master skills prized in schools - being in particular notably neater and better co-ordinated on average - and gain higher average levels of achievement in primary schools. Most primary teach+ers, especially in the junior grades, are women so that suitable "role models", to use the trendy phrase, are more abundant for girls than for boys. Curricula have not been highly dif+ferentiated by gender in the past, but until very recently feminists latched on to every form of differentiation as evi+dence of unfair discrimination against girls. The biggest feminist hate until as recently as 1980 was single-sex schools because, as English feminist Madeleine Arnot put it, "the dominant form of re+production of bourgeois gender rela+tions (until recently when it has been modified) has been that of single-sex schools" and "the use of single-sex schooling has been the major form of reproduction of gender relations - re+lations that constituted the bourgeois ideal of the family form of male hier+archy and female dependency and sub+ordination". Bourgeois ideals are, of course, known by fem+inists (nearly all highly bour+geois themselves), to be very wicked indeed. For nearly 20 years Aus+tralian governments have been following feminist ad+vice to abolish single-sex schools and to make the cur+riculum of boys and girls identical in mixed schools. In high schools there was an as+sault on woodwork and metalwork for boys as against cookery and needlework for girls; in the junior primary schools, boys were encouraged to play more in the Wendy House and girls to engage in more boisterous pursuits (no pretend guns though, please). Child-centred feminist teach+ers found their underwear in a constant twist because they believed with one part of their minds in letting children follow their own interests, but with the other they felt it necessary to prevent children, also victims of our disgusting bourgeois society, from choosing "traditionally sex-related" interests. On the playing fields the cry is still for identity of treatment. Federal Edu+cation Minister Susan Ryan, the Com+monwealth Schools Commission's Commissar for Girls, Eileen Duhs, and an army of female jocks continue to de+mand uniformity in sport. In South Australia in 1986 Equal Opportunities Commissar Josephine Tiddy has suc+ceeded in producing an outstanding feminist blueprint for equality: school+girls must be permitted to participate in traditionally boys-only sports, but boys will be banned from messing up tradi+tionally girls-only sports. Sex differ+ences in sport, so many feminists be+lieve, are merely "socially-constructed" and not based on real, objective differ+ences in average height, weight, speed or aggressiveness. Just as victory seemed nigh in the feminist fight against single-sex schools and against sex-based differentiations in mixed schools, along came Dale Spender and a new wave of feminists. Spender is a luminary in the London University Institute of Education, but she and her equally militant sister Lynn, still in Australia, are female scions of the famous Spender family of which Sir Percy was merely one of the most prominent in the Australian upper crust. Dale Spender's great contri+bution to the gender debate is the claim that in mixed class+rooms teachers, women just as much as men, unfairly dis+criminate against girls by con+centrating more on the boys. In so far as this claim is really true, it relates only to the tendency for boys to misbe+have more than girls and for teachers therefore to spend more time on correcting and censuring the boys. This does not seem to be evidence for unfair discrimination, but Spender's disciples repeat the claim with enthusiasm. Judith Whyte, a science educator, writes that "boys initiate more contacts with teachers, are more successful in gaining teacher time and attention and are perceived by teachers to be more rewarding and reponsible pupils". Whyte fears, too, that "the possibilities for equalising male and female participation are very limited". Another science educator, Jan Hard+ing, told South Australian feminist teachers last month that giving more time and attention in mixed classes to girls is no good either, because "what often happens is that teachers instinc+tively go and help girls in science and technology classes and in doing so often confirm their helplessness". Feminists often try to have it both ways. Until the late 1970s a larger pro+portion of boys than of girls stayed on at school after the age of 15. Feminists cited that as evidence of "unequal par+ticipation of girls in education". In re+cent years a larger proportion of girls than boys have stayed on at school after 15. Feminists hold this proves "the un+equal participation of girls in the work force". Similarly feminists allege unfair discrimination because girls, if given the choice, opt for mathematics and physical sciences less frequently than do boys but, despite lip service to bi+lingualism, no feminist claims that the smaller proportion of boys choosing a foreign language to an advanced level shows unfair discrimination against them. Heads the feminists win, tails they sure don't lose. It is strange that feminists, despite frequent rhetoric about the uniqueness or even the superiority of women's in+sights, invariably regard patterns of choice by women as worse than those made by men. Traditional areas of women's work are automatically deni+grated by feminists yet they claim that non-traditional areas in which women come to predominate, as with medicine in the Soviet Union, are only conceded because they are trivial and unimport+ant. As Marx (Groucho) put it: "If it's a club that will let me join it, it's not worth joining". It's what the American anti-feminist Midge Decter calls the "shit-work" thesis: whatever women do in larger numbers than men is defined by feminists as low in worth. For Australian politicians the im+mediate problem is that, after reducing and well nigh abolishing single-sex education in every government school system in the commonwealth in re+sponse to feminist demands, they must now go back over the course and separ+ate the boys from the girls again, at the behest of new feminist demands. For feminists the problem is that bourgeois ideals are generated both by single-sex and by co-educational schools. The Partington 1986 Award, of too hand+some a value, will be presented to the feminist theoretician who finds a third way, so that we can both avoid having the girls together with the boys, or sep+arate from them. F16 Classrooms a world apart 2011 words By Phyllis Gibbs Chapter 3 The School The school was a wooden building - less primitive than my boarding place, but nonetheless a very basic structure. I was rather shattered to discover that I had thirty-six child+ren on the roll; this was very large for a one-teacher school. They ranged in age from five to fifteen years, and from Kindergarten to Second Year High School. There was definitely not seating accommodation for thirty-six pupils in the classroom and so, in fine weather, Kindergarten children sat on mats on the verandah. This made teaching extremely difficult, for discipline was a problem. The previous teacher had left me no information about the ability of any of the children, and she obviously had not given the High School Entrance Examination, with the result that I didn't even know if any children were entitled to commence High School work that year. On my first morning, I decided to try and gain some idea of the standard of work of the children to enable me to place them in classes. Arriving at school early, I put graded sums on the blackboard. After our formal introduction, greetings and a friendly chat, I said, "I want you to start on the sums on the board and go as far as you can." Immediately a hefty lad, aged about fifteen, stood up and yelled, "We don't do sums at this time in the morning!" I explained that I was the one who decided what subjects they did, and when. "Today," I announced firmly, "it is arithmetic - right now." There followed a most unpleasant argument, but it was one I had to win, and eventually I was at my wit's end. What form of punishment could I employ? This great lout was taller than I and seemingly quite fearless. Grabbing the cane, which I had seen in the drawer, I advanced threatingly towards him. This fortunately had the desired effect. I don't know who was the most startled - the boy or the other pupils - but I do know who was the most scared. Had I known what I learnt a few days later, I would have been even more frigh+tened. The previous year, this same boy used to grab the teacher, bundle her outside, barricade the door, and then the pupils had a merry time. Luckily for me, my bluff worked and we did the subjects I chose. However, as time progressed, discipline became almost impossible. The two ringleaders were utterly in+corrigible. They were past the legal school leaving age and had absolutely no desire to learn, but by coming to school avoided working at home on the farm. It would have helped considerably had I been able to discuss the possibility of expelling them, with my Headmaster friend or the Inspector, but how could this be done on a party line? Finally it became too much for me and I did expel them. I wrote to the Inspec+tor, telling him of my action. He wrote back, saying the step I had taken was a very drastic one and he would visit me as soon as possible. I called on both sets of parents. One family was extremely rude, but the other informed me that their son had been expelled from a number of boarding schools, including one in Sydney, so it was no wonder I had problems with him. But now the trouble really began. The school settled down to work, but every day the two expelled pupils pulled up outside on horseback, screaming obscenities. Of course, once again, had I been more experienced, I would have written to the policeman in the nearest town. There were no panes of glass in the windows, and no locks on any cupboards or drawers. I decided to remedy this. My landlord agreed to purchase the necessary requirements in town for me and then lend me the appropriate tools. Any hope that he would offer to assist me was dashed, when he presented me with the tools and proceeded to explain their usage. The following Saturday I spent the whole day at school, in an effort to make it secure. The picture of my putting in panes of glass, using the handle of a spoon to get the putty in smoothly, must have been an amusing sight. Finally I went home well satisfied. Imagine my dismay, when I arrived at school on Monday morning, to see all panes of glass piled up on the top step and all the locks beside them. There was no doubt this was the work of my two tormentors. The weather was extremely*extemely hot in February and as there wasn't a single tree in the school playground I decided to try and procure some to plant. These were available in the nearest town and Wally collected them for me; so another Saturday was spent planting trees. Alas, these shared the same fate as the panes of glass. It was disheartening to say the least. Things quietened down for a week or two. However, I was concerned by the fact that many pupils came to school quite late and absenteeism was rife. As pupils never brought notes to explain this, I decided to visit the parents and find out the reasons. Some of the children lived miles from school and rode in each day. (We had a small yard for the horses.) How was I to reach these farms? The crossbred draught horse seemed to be the only answer - not the most comfortable horse to ride, but he got me there. The parents mostly resented my coming. They said the children were needed to help with the milking, because they couldn't afford to pay for labour. There was very little I could do except appeal to them. By this time the weather had cooled down slightly, and as the school looked so bare and unkempt I suggested to the children that we grow some plants. Perhaps if they did the gardening, the two terrors may not destroy their labours, but alas, that was wishful thinking. The pupils were excited and worked enthusiastically, digging and planting, but on Monday we arrived at school to find all the plants dead on the doorstep. The situation was becoming quite desperate. The following week brought an even more disturbing incident. Walking across the paddocks one morning, I was confronted by several girl pupils screaming hysterically. A large black red-bellied snake was coiled up on the seat of the girls' lavatory. Whatever was I to do? As a city girl, I was terrified of snakes and the very thought of trying to kill one - especially shut up with it in a confined space - appalled me. One glimpse of the reptile was enough to convince me that I should wait until one of the older boys came to school. There was one particularly nice lad, who was anxious to learn and who helped me wherever possible. Arming himself with a suitable weapon, he went off to kill the offender, but arrived back a few minutes later, laughing uproariously - the snake was already dead! To me it was no laughing matter and I could not help wondering what would happen next. About this time the rainy season set in, and within a few days the river came down and the creek flooded - making crossing over the log impossible. For a few days I rode to school on the `all-purpose' horse, but then the current became too strong too for that. Nothing daunted, I decided to swim across, with my clothes in a waterproof pack strapped to my shoulders. As the creek was well out of sight of any farmhouse, I was able to dress on the other side. Swimming a flooded creek is no pleasant experience, as a great collection of rubbish is swept down and had to be dodged, so I was very pleased on the Friday, when the water level began to drop and the log became visible. By the following Monday it would be possible to try crossing that way again. Normally, because I was unable to lock up the school building or anything in it, I had to carry all school records back and forth with me each day. I wasn't prepared to risk anything that first morning - I'd be lucky to get myself safely across. With no handrail, and only a long stick with which to balance myself, crossing the log at any time was hazardous. As the water level was still quite high, I was feeling some+what apprehensive about the crossing, and when I reached the creek I stood for a few moments, plucking up courage to start. Suddenly I realised someone was calling me. Turning, I saw the father of one of my pupils beckoning to me from behind a clump of bushes. Completely perplexed, and some+what alarmed by this unusual behaviour, I decided reluc+tantly to go over and confront him. The man was very embarrassed, but finally explained, "I've often thought the tricks those two boys played on you were quite funny, but I don't think what they have done this morning is funny. Actually, it could be very dangerous." He then informed me that a thin wire had been attached around the centre of the log, with the idea that it would trip me and I'd be thrown into the swirling water. "So I've come to warn you," con+tinued my would-be-rescuer, "but for God's sake don't ever tell anyone who told you." Thanking him gratefully, I promised to keep quiet as to why I had changed plans and returned home. For me, undoubtedly, this was the climax and I was not prepared to tolerate further trouble. I sat down immediately and wrote to the Inspector, telling him that I could not remain at that school any longer, unless something were done to improve the situation. I also stated that I was not prepared to return to school until my landlord had cleared the log, and the flood waters were lower and less frightening. At the same time I wrote and reported the incident to the policeman in the town twenty miles away. The following week, the Priest arrived from town to conduct Mass at one of the farmhouses, with the result that all the pupils, except my landlord's two children, stayed away from school to attend Mass. The school was on the main road, but the only motor vehicles to ever pass by belonged to the butcher and the baker, who called once a week. I was therefore amazed to hear a car coming up the road that morning , as it wasn't the day for either tradesman. I was simply horrified when the car pulled up at the school and a very portly gentleman climbed through the fence. (We had no gate.) He reached the door, introduced himself as the School Inspector and then looked in astonishment at the empty classroom. "The children are all at Mass," I hastened to explain. "The teacher isn't at Mass?" he queried. I informed him that I was not a Catholic and even*ever if I were, I would be at school on a school day. Really, it was fortunate the children were absent because it enabled me to relate to him the whole story from the day I'd arrived. He was most upset about the refusal of the locals to board me and said he would certainly tell the Priest the story. My action in expelling the two troublemakers fortunately re+ceived his support. He explained that for the past two or three years the school had been going through a difficult period, but little did he realise just how difficult that period had been. What I knew - and he didn't - was that the previous teacher frequently went to town with the butcher on Thurs+day afternoon and returned with the baker at lunchtime on Monday. None of the locals ever reported her, as they were only too glad to have their children at home to help on the farm. F18 Wild - July/August 1986 2020 words Australlian outdoor education course A unique survey of leadership and instruction qualifications, by Sandra Bardwell • AN IMPORTANT FEATURE OF THE RAPID growth of the Australian recreation and leisure industry during recent years has been the proliferation of related courses at universities and colleges. These are intended to equip students to gain employment in the industry by qualifying them, among other things, to lead and/or instruct groups in outdoor recreation activities. There is no single source of information about courses likely to interest Wild readers - those with practical rather than theoretical orientation, for doers rather than planners. This survey aims to fill the gap. It also draws attention to the sometimes vexed question of the value of certification, such as provided by the Bushwalking and Mountaincraft Leadership courses. As their content shows, such certificates signify that skills have been tested fairly thoroughly, and that awareness of the potential hazards and problems (especially those to do with human relations) has been instilled. Participants are left in no doubt that there is more to leading a trip into the wild than just bashing about in the bush and trusting that everything will be all right. This national survey covers full-time courses at tertiary institutions and shorter, non-institutional, non-profit-making courses, in which training in outdoor recreation activities, and in the skills of leadership and/or instruction, is offered as the major component of the course. The activities concerned are bush+walking, ski touring and canoeing; no such courses in caving and rockclimbing have been discovered, although both activities might be covered in one of the tertiary courses listed. Students in these courses are required, to varying degrees, to do these activities and to acquire a reasonable level of skill, as well as to study theoretical subjects. Thus the survey does not cover the many courses which, by their titles, may seem to meet these criteria. These include leisure studies, recreation courses focusing on sport or activities such as dancing and drama, studies in recreation planning and pro+gramming, and park management, and natural resources or `facility' management. In Victoria, at least, some technical schools offer outdoor recreation subjects at HSC level - no attempt has been made to identify them in this survey. It is worth noting here that the Outdoor Guides Course at Katoomba Technical College, mentioned in Wild Information, no 20, will be offered as a part-time course in 1987; inquiries should be directed to the Course Co+ordinator, Jim Smith, Katoomba Technical College, Parke Street, Katoomba, NSW 2780; telephone (047) 82 1099. All the information in this survey is derived from the literature published by the institutions and organizations concerned, and from further inquiries - very few, if any, of the brochures contain all the information an intending student may need to know. Many of them are overloaded with almost meaningless waffle about the courses - skill in reading between the lines is handy. No specific dates have been given for terms or semesters for the tertiary courses. Most of the institutions covered operate two semesters during the year, the first beginning late in February or early in March. The crucial dates are those on which applications for enrolment close. For tertiary institutions, applications for acceptance into a course are made through a separate State authority - a Universities Admissions Centre, or equivalent. The university or college subsequently handles enrolments. No information about the costs of the tertiary courses has been given. Normal union (or equivalent) fees are generally levied; wide variations in the requirements for books and equipment make any attempt to estimate costs meaningless. Because of the practical nature of the courses concerned, they are generally not available to external students. People wishing to apply for acceptance into a course conducted in a State different from that in which they completed secondary education should check acceptance of their qualifications before lodging a formal application. Status is an elusive but important factor. The Australian Council on Tertiary Awards (an official body) administers, by independent panels, the accreditation of all courses in advanced education in Australia, a procedure which takes place, for each course, every five years. Accreditation is on an academic basis, but appropriateness or demand is taken into account. The procedure is also designed to ensure reasonable consistency between the courses offered in each State. Federal Government funding is only given to accredited courses. Thus it is unlikely that a course will be offered which will not be accredited. Apart from this, an assessment can be made by finding out whether a course is a prerequisite for or part of teacher or other professional training, and by the number of years it has been in existence. Almost any training at a reputable institution will enhance, but not guarantee, chances of gaining employment in a chosen field. Ultimately, however, the value or success of a course depends on the quality and ability of individual graduates. Similarly, short courses may be judged by the number of years they have been in existence - they would not have continued if demand was not sustained. It is also worth checking whether a course is required or preferred by government agencies for undertaking specific activities, especially with school groups. For short courses, do not neglect finding out whether you need to arrange insurance or whether you will be covered while on the course, and if so, to what extent. This vital subject is not mentioned in much detail in the available literature. It is noteworthy that canoeing, in particular, is highly organized and standardized, and that there is strong emphasis on acquisition of skills and on leadership training in bushwalking, a trend gathering momentum for ski touring. Such formal training and organization for rock+climbing is apparently absent. Although leadership skills are less relevant to this activity, technical skills and measures of ability, especially in teaching, are important. Thus, Mountaincraft Pty Ltd believes that a `most unsatisfactory' situation exists concerning climbing instructors. One `accreditation' system is based on the fairly low level of climbing ability of the person who runs it. Mountaincraft is trying to devise a standard for instruction, but believes that `maturity and instructional ability are more important than climbing skill' - which applies equally to instruction in the other rucksack sports. Among the courses offered by Mountaincraft are Abseil Instructors (five days, technical and climbing skills, written and practical examinations) and Advanced Rock+climbing (full week, `to achieve an instructor level for which there is no agreed civil standards in this country'). Address: PO Box 582, Camberwell, Victoria 3124; telephone (03) 817 4802. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, two questions should be answered: `What type of career do you want to follow?', and `Which course will best lead you towards this?'- Further reading list omitted • MITTAGUNDI, ABORIGINAL FOR `campsite next to the Mitta', is located near the old gold-mining township of Glen Valley, on the upper Mitta Mitta River, in north-east Victoria. Lying just east of the Bogong High Plains, and surrounded by the mountains of the Great Dividing Range, it is a remote and beautiful place. The camp, on a 200 hectare property, is simple and old-fashioned, designed to be built, maintained and operated by the young people who come to it. It is a place where people matter, where co-operation is stressed, and competition played down. It represents the realization of a dream for its founder, Ian Stapleton. Ian worked with Outward Bound before spending seven years as the Director of Outdoor Education at Timbertop, the `bush arm' of one of Australia's most prestigious schools, Geelong Grammar. It was during this time that Ian came to believe that all young people should have the opportunity to experience our mountain country, its challenges and rewards, not just those lucky enough to go to schools that could provide such opportunities. He had always been a great believer of the levelling quality of the bush - the way it can bring together all sorts of people from all walks of life and situations, on an equal footing, and demand co-operation from everyone. Initially, Mittagundi operated from temporary bases. Because of the many problems, mostly financial, it frequently looked like it would founder before it was properly started. However, it is now firmly established on a permanent site and is able to run nine-day courses all year round. The camp is spacious, and set in a clearing of about two hectares. Old renovated Melbourne Tramways buses are used for bunk-rooms, stores and an office. Gradually these are being replaced by permanent mud-brick and timber buildings built by the people on courses, using local materials and traditional methods. The buses, although somewhat out of place in such surroundings, played an essential part in the establishment of Mittagundi. In order to get the camp started, and as cheaply as possible, Ian bought a fleet of old buses from the Tramways Board. The one catch was that he had to remove the engines and transmissions from them, so that he could afford what was left. With a wry smile he admits that was a mistake. It would have been much easier if he had left the engines alone. Ian laughs now when he tells the story of how it took him 18 months to tow all the buses to Omeo with his old worn-out Land Rover. It involved him in countless `unfortunate incidents', took over 40 Land Rover clutches, and brought him into conflict with seemingly every government department! The camp now boasts several permanent buildings - store-rooms, stable with fenced yard, equipment shed, even a `bush shower'. (Let your imagination run wild here!) The building programme is now centred on a new kitchen/dining room. The ground has been levelled, the stump holes dug, and the enthusiasm for the project rising. Partially funded by a grant from the Menzies Foundation, the new building will have a huge stone fireplace - to be built by a stonemason - timber floor, and various other luxuries. The temporary kitchen/dining room, which is open-sided, with a dirt floor and a leaky roof, will then be demolished, although not without some regrets, I suspect. Wood-fired boilers, of considerable age, provide hot water, massive old wood stoves are used for cooking, and lighting is by gas and kerosene. Needless to say, collecting and cutting wood is an important part of everyday life at Mittagundi. All the courses at Mittagundi take roughly the same form, varying slightly according to the season, weather and people attending. The maximum age for participants is 18, and the courses are not co-educational. Each group, of about 20 people, hike into Mittagundi over two days. Watches, radios and money are not allowed into Mittagundi, and are left in a safety deposit box before the start of the hike. The route, over the Bogong High Plains, is an old miners' bridle-track. Unused for almost 50 years, it has been one of Mittagundi's achievements to clear it. The group carries some gear in rucksacks, and two pack horses carry the heavy stuff. Bloggs and Kate, the half-draught horses, know the track and are used to being led by different people. They help to set the scene of what to expect at Mittagundi. This method of reaching Mittagundi provides a way of combining hiking, high+lighting the remoteness of Mittagundi, and saving enormously on transport costs. After two days on the track the basic facilities at Mittagundi seem quite luxurious! The group spends four days at Mittagundi itself. Divided into two, each half runs the base for two days. This means being heavily involved in the building, running and maintenance of the old-style farm and village. The other two days are spent on activities such as rafting, ski touring, climbing and abseiling. The trip out takes a day longer than the trip in, partly because of the 1,000 metre climb out of the valley, but also because time is taken to climb a few peaks of the Bogong High Plains. Ian Stapleton firmly believes in having the right `mix' of people at Mittagundi. He says that is essential for the achievement of its aims, and is the basis of his philosophy in setting up such a camp. F19 2006 Succession: handing over the reins of power Transferring control of a family business can be fraught with problems, especially if there is a clash of personalities. Mike Dobbie investigates the best ways to handle a difficult time Nothing fails like succession when it comes to handing down the family business. The problems of transferring control are sometimes so great that the business goes to the pack while the family feuds. Comments Ron Flavel, of the Small Business Corporation of South Aus+tralia (probably joking): "Some children use the banana-skin approach - lay a banana skin at the top of the stairs and call dad over for a chat. The problem ends up flat on his back." But advisers stress the need to seek the advice of experts. Says one Sydney consultant: "The tragedy of family in-fighting can be prevented if people get help. Other+wise, everyone loses out and the taxman is the only real winner." How should the family business be passed on? What conflicts arise between parents and their heirs when family succession becomes an issue? Hugh Reid, of accountants Touche Ross, says small clients often sell the business if no suitable family member can be found to take over or, when the father reaches retirement, he looks, for personal reasons, for an outsider in preference to his children. Reid says a frequent cause of conflict is when the father does not want to let go his hold on the firm but the son wishes to introduce new ideas. Another problem is the age-old story of the "three-ring circus", where the first generation makes the business, the second builds it and the third wrecks it. Says Keith James, another Touche Ross partner, "If the son has been involved in dad's business for some time, the son is more inclined to continue to build the business up and maintain a high standard. But the danger lies in the grandson who has not seen the struggle to establish the firm. He sees the business as a casual thing and a source of steady income from little effort. With such a lack of commitment, the grandson erodes all the effort of his father and grandad." Even where a family is sensible about the business, problems keep arising. Wills are becoming more complex as families battle with the capital gains tax, which seems to be all-encompassing in terms of estate assets. "We can't warn people enough just how careful they must be," says a Sydney consultant. "The tax gives no quarter." His opinion is shared by many other business advisers. But Gary Higgins, a partner with Arthur Young accountants, says: "Owning your business through a family trust can still have capital gains tax advantages by deferring any tax liability until the business is sold outside the family." Another problem in family succes+sions is the control-from-the-grave factor. This arises when a will is finely detailed, covering every imprudency an heir is presumed capable of. Lawyer Norm O'Bryan, of Melbourne solicitors Gillotts, agrees that the best method to pass on an estate quickly to the various members of a family is through shares in a company or through a unit trust. O'Bryan says: "If the parent is a sole trader or in a partnership it is more difficult to pass down the assets. For certainty of devolution on death, you need a trust that cannot be inhibited by the people who will not inherit the assets. It must be transferred readily and that is easiest with shares or units." O'Bryan warns that discretionary trusts permit the distribution of owner+ship to be determined by someone else against the original intention of the testator, "A unit trust is fixed - you know precisely who gets what; it is the same with shares because the proportion of ownership remains the same. But with a discretionary trust the trustee acts as legal owner and he can determine the control of the income stream to the children independent of the original owner's wishes. He may decide John should get all of the estate despite the fact that John's dad hoped it would be shared between John and his sister. It may be that with shares or a unit trust one or more children may decide to sell but the decision is theirs, not someone else's." But capital gains tax will always cause problems and O'Bryan recom+mends that people should seek advice. "Unit trusts are in a sense companies and under the new legislation they have lost their tax minimisation advantages," he says. "People should plan carefully before they decide in what fashion they will pass on the family firm inheritance." How can the family business be structured to ease tensions caused by transition from parent to progeny? It is a time fraught with danger, say the specialists. Jealousies can arise when the boss's son moves up the ladder ahead of employees competing for the top job. Says Albert Nelson, general manager of the Small Business Develop+ment Corporation: "The situation is delicate. Senior people need to be brought into the picture. A personnel-management exercise is required to involve top-level employees in the process of transition. You can't just solve it by offering more money. For these people, their job is their lifestyle as well as their source of income. If you actively include staff in the changes and keep them in the picture, then everything should work out." Higgins warns that the fur can fly and the morale of employees can be crippled by nepotism. Staff see the boss's son or daughter as competition and lose interest if their prospects are threatened. He says it is essential to keep staff happy by ensuring they can see a career path ahead of them. Squabbles within families can also spill over into a com+pany and it may be necessary to recruit a professional manager to keep relatives at a distance. Flavel knows of a managing director who felt his family was getting too much of a say. "It was all getting a bit incestuous," says Flavel. "So he brought in two outside professionals. One was an accountant and the other a legal expert. With the injection of new blood and fresh ideas the business got a view of the real world. They helped to pull the company back into a business orientation." Higgins says: "A buffer zone is needed, particularly in battles among the children themselves; someone to stand in the middle and keep the com+pany on track." Higgins warns that old people often take too narrow an outlook towards a firm and this can be a formula for disaster. "In a changing climate with new legislation the heirs are more in touch with commercial reality," he says. "We advise that it is best to find a middle line if the father won't budge." There are other ways. Says Flavel: "If the son has to play tough, there are two options open to him. If he is a director and his father is also on the board, the son can invoke section 320 of the Com+panies' Code, which gives a minority shareholder the right to take part in the decision-making. This forces the father into acknowledging the son's position." Flavel cites one case where the antag+onism was resolved in another way: "There was a business where the son, who was in his fifties and was managing director, found that his 80-year-old father was still countermanding his decisions. One day the son got so fed up with the old man's interference that he sold the company. From that day on the son has not spoken to his father, who is now 84." Steven Kunstler, a senior associate with solicitors Corrs Pavey Whiting and Byrne, says that smoothe continuity in the family business is more difficult if children have been kept in a subordinate role by a forceful father. Kunstler says: "The mistake lies in not involving the children in the management structure. The two most popular ways of intro+ducing siblings to the business are through shareholdings or giving the son managerial responsibility, by possibly heading a division within the firm, to prove himself." For example, he says, in a building construction firm, the father can place his sons in control of supply procurement, the construction of a development itself or the fitting-out. Kunstler warns that if families have reached the stage of using section 320 the situation is breaking down. "We're talking about personalities here and the different business factors make every case different," he says. "You can't give blanket advice because the factors vary. We find that nine out of ten cases are resolved before they get too serious. People apply common sense and know where the best interests of the family lie." Generally, European and Asian fami+lies are more successful than Australian families at maintaining family businesses for generations. They are more closely bonded and to them the business and family are one. "The close ties they have allow them to co-operate," says Warren Porter, a partner in the small business section of Deloitte Haskins and Sells in Sydney. "Traditionally, the father is the head of the household and he dictates what the children do. You find that if a member of the family gets into trouble, everyone pitches in to help. Australian families are less inclined to help each other in times of strife. We tend to look after number one. The close bond that ethnic families have contribute to the success they enjoy during the transition from father to children." Albert Nelson, of the Small Business Development Corporation, says there are generally three scenarios for family succession, each with a difficult trans+ition phase. The most obvious is when the heir has been working in the firm for some years. Nelson says: "The important thing is for there to be an exchange of views so that mutual goals can be realised. We advise that the parties involved first describe the company as they see it and what they want for it in the future. You will often find the son has a different picture from his father. These views need to be analysed and eventually, a common plan agreed upon." A frank exchange of views is also essential if the son comes from the academic world. "There is a danger with the son wanting to implement all the new ideas he has learned," says Nelson. "The transition period must be treated carefully as an on-going phase to introduce the two parties to each other in terms of what they want for the firm. The idea of new technology can be used as a threatening device. The father often cannot accept the need in the business he established for the fast pro+cessing of material. He is unable to make hard decisions aided by the hi-tech of the modern business. He is scared and uncertain. The youngster feels con+fined by his father's thinking. He sees the old guard as retarding progress. Violent personality clashes often occur in this scenario. Our advice is for both to go and get involved in the new tech+nology and in shop-floor activities. This kind of external training together is the best way to resolve the lack of under+standing and appreciation they have for each other." The most sudden and debilitating event in family transition is when the son must take over due to illness, but Nelson says this is usually the most successful. "In this situation, the respon+sibility is suddenly thrust upon the heir. The survival instinct becomes para+mount because this is not a takeover; it requires total application from the heir when he is thrown into that kind of thing. He is often fortunate in that he has inherited an interest in the firm and is familiar with it. That conditioning makes the family more comfortable. We usually see kids from the country cope well in this situation as they have a better understanding for their dad's farm than city kids who are less certain when caught in the business cross-section." What should dad do to prepare him+self to let go of the reins? F20 Australian Penthouse - November 1986 2013 words Terms of embitterment By Frank Robson What would you do if the Family Law Court forbade you to see your children? It's almost midnight when Steve, a labourer*laborer, gets on the phone to the crowd he's read about in the Sunday papers: Fathers Against Discrimin+ation in Childcare. "I can't get in my own house!" he cries. "The bitch reckons I beat her up ... so I get home and she's got a bit of paper say+ing I can't come in my own house ..." "Whoa!" pleads FADIC organiser Dean Weily. "Start at the beginning." He lights a cigarette, dreading what will follow. Steve groans as though his search for the "be+ginning" is causing him physical pain. "Look, I just want to know what law says I can't go in my own house! You tell me what fucking law stops a man ... Jeez, I been making payments on the bastard for six years! So where's the justice, eh? Where's it say I can't ..." Weily grips his hair (Steve's voice con+veys an infectious sense of desperation). Slowly, carefully, Weily explains that a magistrate or a judge can make any rul+ing concerning property that he or she sees fit. It's known as an ex parte ruling and is intended to protect the applicant from ... "But where's the law!" Steve demands. "Where's it written that a man can be kicked out of his own fucking house? I've called the cops, my local member, now you. No-one can show me the bloody law that says it!" Dean Weily hangs up half an hour later with a familiar feeling of futility: Steve has not understood. He will probably spend weeks looking for a law that doesn't exist. In the end he might go over the edge and take out his fury on his wife, or his children ... or even on the magistrate who made the ex parte order. Not for the first time, Weily - self-appointed adviser to thousands of Aus+tralian men caught up in the grim complex+ities of divorce, child custody and access - sees the enemy face-to-face. It is con+fusion ... the kind of confusion that spawns despair. Weily thinks of the in+numerable "Steves" out there, each trapped in the quagmire of his own befud+dled anguish. Since he launched FADIC only a couple of months earlier, the young Brisbane businessman had listened to hundreds of them. Despite FADIC's avowed purpose (to change percep+tions of men as solitary parents and to fo+cus attention or perceived flaws in the Family Court system) Weily, 27, can't dis+guise early misgivings. A few days before, he'd told me: "I just want to find out why so many apparently rational individuals go into the [Family] Court system and emerge as lunatics who do desperate things ..." But tonight he wonders: is it possible to achieve anything amidst so much mental chaos? "Help me! Help me! moan the voices on his phone. "I'm going to waste myself!" the voices scream, or more alarmingly: "Nothing matters now." Each caller has a separate story of trage+dy and injustice, against a background of legal battles of astonishing vindictiveness and torturous complexity. Who's sane and who's crazy? Who's lying and who isn't? Who's seeking attention and who's a bona fide psychotic? Dean Weily smokes another cigarette, staring from his window at the lights of the city. "Jesus," he whispers. "This is a bloody nightmare ..." News Report - 19.12.85 ... A Cairns man who abducted his daughter from her mother's custody and made her live as a fugitive for 18 months was jailed for 15 months. Mr Justice Simpson in the Brisbane Fa+mily Court sentenced Allan Lindsay Sealey, 38, to 15 months jail from the time of his arrest in Perth on November 27, to be released after 10 months subject to a $1000 bond relating to certain conditions. The conditions obliged Sealy to seek a fresh application for access to his daugh+ter and restrained him from entering or loitering near his wife's premises. Sealey pleaded guilty to contempt of an access order following a "bitterly contested" four-day custody hearing in March last year be+fore Mr Justice Simpson. Mrs Rhonda Sealey, 34, said in Cairns yesterday she feared her husband would try again to take their daughter Jayde, 7, when he was released from jail. "He told me he would never give her up," she said. "But I don't know whether prison is the right place for him. He needs psychiatric help." Alan Sealey is slight and sandy-haired; he stands waiting in the prison visiting area with a big plastic bag full of newspaper and magazine articles, sworn affidavits, legal transcripts and letters. He puts the bag be+tween us on the table and watches me at+tentively, his eyes red-rimmed and his skin pallid. I ask if he is ill. Sealey shakes his head. "Prison is terrible," he says softly, almost apologetically. He smiles and rests a hand on the plastic bag, staring down the long table where men with tattooed arms sit opposite exhausted-looking women in cheap clothes. For 90 minutes we discuss what Sealey did on the run with his daughter ... how they lived for nine months in a religious community in Western Australia and how, on November 27 last year, the forlorn esca+pade ended when Jayde was recognised in a small WA town by an off-duty police+man who'd seen pictures of her in New Idea and on TV. ("Sweetheart, please tell someone who you are - maybe your teacher or a policeman. Don't be afraid my darling; Mummy is waiting for you and I love you with all my heart." - Rhonda Sealey, New Idea, 2.2.85) Why did Sealey run? Why did he fail to return Jayde to her mother after a normal access outing on May 5, 1984? He told me his reason many times, but because of res+trictions imposed by the Family Law Act, I cannot quote him. I can quote a letter written by Sealey and read to the court after he was sentenced on the contempt charge: "I honestly be+lieved, and still do believe very strongly, that Jayde is in very real moral danger by her continual exposure to the letter named one of the child's maternal relatives and the home environment of my former wife," he wrote. "I am remorseful for having been in con+tempt, however my mind was in such a state of mental exhaustion, having the con+tinuing worry of my child's safety and hav+ing been involved in many court battles, that I took steps that perhaps only I under+stand as the father of Jayde." In other court reports, Sealey's barrister Leo White says his client's fight was trig+gered by claims by Jayde that she had been sexually molested. Barrister Graeme Page, for Mrs Sealey, told the court the sex+ual incidents Allan Sealey complained of had been raised in earlier court hearings and had been "explained as not in any way sexually abusive or arousing." But Mr Page's next reported assertion - that Sealey had not raised the "inci+dents" until interviewed on the radio on the run in October last year and that he had not attempted to "engage in the legal processes open to him" - seems to con+tradict his statement that the incidents had been raised during earlier court hearings. In fact, a sworn affidavit exists in which a close relative of Rhonda Sealey raises these sexual indidents in support of Allan Sealey's bid for custody of Jayde. Accord+ing to transcripts from the Sealeys' custo+dy hearing - also before Mr Justice Simpson in Brisbane - an attempt by Sealey's barrister to introduce this affidavit as evidence was rejected by the judge, who described it as "character assassi+nation." Before "stealing" his daughter and hit+ting the road in his Kombi van, the ex-photographer had discussed his concern over the sexual incidents with the Bishop of Cairns, a Member of Parliament and others. Apparently, their advice was unani+mous: Sealey could not hope to win a crimi+nal case. At the prison, Sealey tells me he intend+ed to hide from the world with Jayde until she was 11 - an age, he believes, when she would be able to make her own judge+ments about what would be best for her future. "Yesterday," he says, looking at the big plastic bag, "I got a letter from Rhonda. She told me Jayde would not be writing to me anymore ... or seeing me." He looks away. "Jayde's welfare was always my main concern ... When I get out, I will apply for access to visit her. I would not take her away again - that was a mistake. But be+cause of the conditions of my early release, it'll probably be at least a year after I get out [in September this year] before I can even see her." ("I just don't believe the sentence is se+vere enough. He said on television he would do it again. How safe is Jayde once he gets out? He could come up here and take her out again and the whole nightmare would start all over. If the sentence had been five years, it would have given her time to grow up. Ten months is nothing." - Rhonda Sealey, New Idea, 1.2.86) I ask Sealey how much time he spends thinking about his problems. "All of it," he says. He picks up his plas+tic bag and walks off toward the cell block ... a small man with red eyes, the sub+ject of just one of about 400 warrants for child abduction sworn out yearly in this country. Since it replaced the nasty old Matrimoni+al Causes Act in 1975, the Family Law Act has been hailed as a brilliant piece of refor+mist legislation and damned as the cause of untold misery, violence and tragedy. It's made divorce more "civilised" by do+ing away with the need for tacky accusa+tions of adultery and cruelty and the use of private investigators, but - critics say - it's done nothing to improve the three worst problem areas: custody, main+tenance payments and property division. Conciliate, don't litigate - the Family Law catchphrase - has worked to the ex+tent that 90 percent of Australian divorces are now settled outside the courtroom ... with the divorce rate now running at about one in three. Yet, although Family Court rul+ings on custody squabbles involve only a tiny percentage of separating couples, the aftermath of those decisions has some+times been horrendous. In NSW, particularly, there's been a wave of terror directed at the Family Court system, with five attacks on judges since 1980. These include the shooting of Mr Justice David Opas in Sydney and the bombing of the home of Mr Justice Wat+son in 1984, a tragedy that took the life of the Judge's wife, Pearl. In October 1985 a Perth father, dis+traught over a Family Court ruling giving custody of their three children to his wife, drove to an isolated area with the young+sters and took his and their lives by feed+ing a hosepipe from the exhaust to its interior. Another West Australian, Terry Douglas, became what single fathers' groups call a "runner" after a Family Court awarded custody to his ex-wife. Captured with his abducted kids in Queensland, Douglas was returned to Melbourne and jailed for 18 months for contempt. Near death after a 52-day hunger strike, Douglas was released from Pentridge prison - winning the battle but, so far, not the war: he has had no access to his children since 1980. Right across the nation, thousands of dis+gruntled men (and even a few women) have banded together under various names - Divorce Law Reform, Men's Confraternity, Lone Fathers, Families Against Unnecessary Legal Trauma, etc - to proclaim their outrage against the "sys+tem" and to try to change it. Their main grievance, hotly denied by Family Court judges and their backup net+work of social workers, counsellors and Le+gal Aid solicitors, is that the system favors women ... and that statistics used by the Family Court (especially the oft-quoted claim that fathers get custody of at least one child in 41 percent of contested cases) do not accurately portray the situation. F24 Drought or Deluge: Man in the Cooper's Creek Region - 1986 2038 words Cultures in conflict Charles Sturt, the first European to see the tribesmen of the Cooper, found them an attractive people: `The men of this tribe were, without exception, the finest I had seen on the Australian continent ... a well-made race.' This opinion was repeated by both Alfred Howitt and John McKinlay of the Burke and Wills relief expeditions, who com+mented favourably on their physical appearance, apparent health and physical prowess, Sturt also admired their temperament, commenting that they were in his opinion `naturally a mild and inoffensive people', although remarkably brave when faced with exotic beasts and strange men. Wills however thought them `easily frightened, and, although fine-looking men, decidedly not of warlike disposition ... They appear to be meanspirited and contemptible in every respect'. How+ever, returned from the journey to the Gulf, starving and ill, Wills could refer to them as `our friends the blacks', and gratefully accept the shelter, food and friendship they offered. Howitt rewarded the Cooper people for their kindness to King and left the Cooper confi+dent that he had ensured a friendly reception for any future white travellers in the region. As inhabitants of an environment possessing resources adequate for their own use but rarely allowing abundance over a long period, the Aborigines had shown themselves willing to extend limited hospitality to small parties of strangers passing through their country. Settlers, however, building huts on the best campsites and herding cattle over their hunting range, were recognized as intruders who threatened the finely balanced existence of the local people. Once the initial awe abated and the white man was seen to be a vulnerable human being, attempts were made to eject him. There was only one organized attempt to resist the alienation of the Cooper tribal territories. In April 1867 the Sub-Protector of Abori+gines in the Far North, John Buttfield, reported to the South Austra+lian Aborigines' Office: I have the honor to inform you that having accompanied Sergeant Wauchop and eight Troopers to Lake Hope, Kopperamana, Killalpaninna and Lake Gregory I am now on my way south to Headquarters. The Natives that had collected in large numbers at Perigundi, including the Deerea [Dieri], Koonaree, Ominee [Ngameni] Yarrawarraka [Yaura+worka], Cuddibirie, Yandrawandra [Yantruwanta] and Pilladappa tribes have dispersed. It appeared from information I gathered that an unusually large concourse assembled at Perigundi - had a very grand Corroboree in the month of March and then there devised a plan for exterminating the whole of the Settlers as far south as Blanchewater. It was their inten+tion to murder the Missionaries first of all. The timely and unexpected arrival of three Police Troopers from Lake Hope prevented the execution of their diabolical intention. Anthropologists have suggested that sorcery was possibly the means intended to be used to expel the settlers, but in fact the Mission Station was in a state of physical siege by the end of march. The list of tribes given by Buttfield suggests that the people who had seen most of the white man on the Cooper - those in the Innamincka region - recognized him as a threat to their lands and lent at least moral support to the resistance movement. Individuals met with local resistance to their settlement along the river. John Conrick, left alone at Goonbabinna for two months, was aware that he was in some danger and slept armed, with his dogs guarding the door of his hut. The Cooper people watched from a distance as he weeded and watered his vegetable garden, milked his cows, and rode with his dogs among the cattle. As the days went by and no other white man appeared, they resolved to rid themselves of the intruder. One morning, just before first light, about two hundred of the Wongkumara people surrounded the hut. Conrick wrote later: Suddenly my dogs charged out and attacked something which I at first thought was a dingo, but when it yelled I knew at once that it was a black+fellow and that an attack had been planned. I looked at my two revolvers, which were always in the belt around my waist day and night, and then hurriedly inspected the gun and rifle and found all the weapons ready. Meanwhile the nigger who had been seized by the dogs was having a bad time, and I determined to save his life, although I knew he was after mine. I put my head out cautiously and whistled the dogs off ... the black+fellow ... was badly bitten and torn, but I saw that he would recover ... I made him understand that I did not intend to kill him and that if he crawled to an old wurley about 400 yards away his friends would find him .. That night the whole story travelled far, and it was known that I had savage dogs and that I had spared the life of the man who had gone to kill me. I never again had any trouble with the blacks, and could do almost anything with them ... While this is the only detailed account of such an encounter remain+ing, there were probably other similar occurrences; the possibility is implicit in the comments of an unidentified Cooper pioneer who in 1878 wrote to a friend, refering to the Aborigines: They are very harmless fellows when kept in their place, but treacherous if too well treated; they have a great respect for me, the reason of which is that I keep a good supply of physic such as Holloway's pills and ointment, pain-killer, chlorodyne, salts, etc., and never go about without a revolver in my belt - just that they may see it. On the whole the Aboriginal inhabitants allowed themselves to be dispossessed of their waterholes and hunting grounds with no more than token protest. As Conrick found, a show of strength won their respect and, while the white man remained for many years wary of the Aborigines along the Cooper, there were only isolated examples of confrontation. The differences between the two cultures were most easily comprehended at the superficial level. In 1881 an observer at Elder's Perricherrie Station on the Cooper described the Aborigines: They are even too lazy to get food, although they occasionally go out on hunting expeditions. They are disgusting and beastly filthy in their habits. Cleanliness is studiously avoided even in their eating, sand, charcoal and ashes all helping to fill up. They also eat fleas and lice, with which they abound. Their ceremonies - making wind, rain, rats, etc., are simply orgies for the display of disgusting vices. Their corroborees, too, are mostly a combination of obscene expressions. There is not one redeeming trait in their character, and it is only fear of the whites which keeps them in subjection ... These were the attitudes of the white population generally and not confined to the settlers around Cooper Creek. There was no under+standing on the white man's part of the culture of the people - worse, there was no awareness of its existence. The visible manifestations of his complex and intensely satisfying spiritual life were dismissed as loathesome superstition, his social customs as incomprehensible oddities, his nakedness and his dances labelled obscene. His inability to care adequately for the clothes the white man insisted that he wear resulted in a litter of filthy rags which further prejudiced the white community against him. There was however an even deeper gulf between the cultures which was then, as now, the least understood of all the many differ+ences between the races. This was the concept of land ownership. To the Aborigine, the idea that a man could own the earth from which he came was unthinkable. Man was an integral part of the land, from which his spirit emanated and to which it returned, so that man could no more be separated from his country than the rocks and earth which formed its physical being. The spiritual bond between land and man gave him the right to range over his country at will during his life+time, the benefits of its fruitfulness, and a resting place for his soul after his death. Land and Man were one, in perpetuity. In European eyes, land is a commodity to be owned or traded as circumstances dictate; that ownership precludes the free movement of others over the land, and the products of that land become the sole property of the owner. The two philosophies are totally incompatible, and it was the mutual inability to understand that any viewpoint other than one's own existed that caused the most anger and bewilderment on both sides. The Aborigines did not recognize that the building of a hut and the introduction of strange animals could prevent them from ranging freely over their own country; the white man could not under+stand why the Aborigine persistently trespassed on private property and speared animals which did not belong to him. Nevertheless, although the presence of the white man disrupted the Aborigine's way of life and required him to adapt his material culture to fit the new circumstances, it in no way altered his philos+ophy. He remained confidently at one with his country, knowing his true place in the cosmos and continuing the ceremonies which he believed maintained that cosmos until well into the twentieth century. The friction which arose between the races was not therefore over land ownership - both races being equally secure on that point - but over the use of the land. An example of the conflict caused by restrictions on Aboriginal freedom of movement occurred in the early days on Haddon Downs. Haddon was situated on the traditional route between the Cooper and the pituri country of western Queensland, along which passed a heavy traffic with parties of men loaded down with blankets and clothing to barter for pituri. Overseer John Howe claimed to have had trouble with the Aborigines in the early days when the station was first occupied, and interference with this important traditional trade was probably the cause. The wanderings of the Aborigines were usually accepted as an unavoidable evil by the settlers, but their presence near water needed for stock was undesirable. Everywhere, the Aborigine was driven away in dry seasons from the good waterholes to make room for the cattle, and if he returned he was harassed, somtimes shot at, and moved on again until the lesson was learned. Having accepted the white man, however reluctantly, as a perman+ent fact of life, the Aborigines made the best of things. For the white man's tomahawk, cast-off clothes, kerosene tins and tobacco they acted as guides through the country they knew so intimately; for rations and a little money to exchange for clay pipes, moleskin trousers and bright bandanas they learned to ride the horses which had so terrified their fathers, and became shepherds and stockmen among the beasts which had ousted them from their waterholes. They exchanged the freedom to wander for a wide-brimmed hat, the hurly-burly of the muster and a permanent camp near the homestead with a regular supply of beef offal. The men made themselves indispensable to the settlers with their seemingly instinctive skill with horses, intimate knowledge of the seasons and the waters, and ability to track straying stock and lost white men over difficult terrain. The stations remained predominantly male communities, so Abori+ginal women too had their uses; if this was ever the cause of conflict between the races, no record remains even in local folklore. When white women did come, like Mrs Colless on Innamincka and Mrs Burkitt on Tinga Tingana in the 1870s, a few Aboriginal women could be trained to housework. Aboriginal women were also used as messengers, carrying papers and goods to the construction camps on Cordillo Downs, and carrying the mail from Cordillo to Haddon Downs. They also worked as shepherds and at the woolscours at shearing time. One settler was grateful for the Aboriginal women's ability to forage: I am not altogether without vegetable food, as I get the blacks to bring me a lot of `yougher', a small root about the size of a large pea, which has the appearance of a small onion, with a taste, when cooked, between a raw potato and a dried pea. F27 Uluru, An Aboriginal History of Ayers Rock 2015 words Living off the land Aboriginal people have probably lived aound Uluru for over 10 000 years. Excavations in the James Range, 80 kilometres east of Alice Springs, produced material more than 10 000 years old (Gould, n.d., p.8), and the more recent excavation at Puntutjarpa, 400 kilometres west of Uluru, in Western Australia, uncovered camp debris shown by radiocarbon dating to be about 10 200 years old (Gould, 1971, p.165). Richard Gould found that, despite small changes in the stone tools of different ages in Puntutjarpa rockshelter, the evidence was generally of `a stable hunting and foraging way of life which can be regarded as the Australian desert culture' (Gould 1971, p.174). The culture was a subsistence one; that is, the people produced all they needed locally and, unlike the Europeans who brought the pastoral economy to central Australia, did not specialise in the production of single foods. The only things traded were ceremonial items, such as pearl shell from Australia's north coast. To supply all their needs from the semi-desert in which they live, people must know where to look for many different animals and plants, and where water, scarce as it is, can be found. Pitjantjatjara dialects recognise at least four distinct types of country: the mulga flats, open sand dunes, rocky hills and the encircling trees around rock faces such as those at Uluru. Each must be visited from time to time to obtain vital resources - different parts of the bush favour different plant species and animals also have their favoured habitats. Water is never present in large quantities. Rain falls irregularly to fill rock holes among the hills and replenish soaks in dry creek beds, where the sand can be dug away until water seeps into the hole. The Aborigines moved opportunistically, retiring to base camps in drought, spreading out after rain. Useful plants The semi-desert country around Uluru is a varied one. In open country, sandhills alternate with low-lying flats, and many useful plants grow in each environment. Spinifex, desert oaks and light scrub grow on the windblown sand of the dunes, and mulga grows on the intervening flats. According to Peter Latz (1978, p.81), the largest variety of food plants is found on the sandhills, yet this is also the habitat where drinking water is most scarce. Mulga seeds were ground for flour. Mulga wood is used to make spear-throwers, throwing sticks and coolamons (wooden bowls). The Ayers Rock mulga grows long, straight branches, which are shaped into heavy stabbing spears called winta. The roots of the witchetty bush, which also grows on mulga flats, are dug up and broken open to take out the witchetty grubs: one side of the bush growing less well than the other is a sign that grubs are in the roots. Another clue is the presence of discarded skins of adult insects that have emerged. The seeds of woolly-butt grass and `native millet', which also grow in mulga country, were harvested and ground to make flour, from which unleavened bread was baked in the ashes of a fire. The red flowers of the Eremophila bush are filled with a sugary nectar, which can be sucked from the base of the flower. In the sandhills, different types of plant can be found growing on the ridges and in the hollows. On the ridges grow a grevillea with nectar-filled flowers, and also wild `plum' trees. The Gyrostemon tree provides lightweight timber for carving carrying dishes. Emu-poison bush provided poison which was put in water where emus came to drink; the leaves of ilpara, waterbush, were burnt to an ash and mixed with the `chewing tobacco' picked from the base of rock faces at Uluru. In the hollows, at the foot of desert oaks, grows a solanum with an edible fruit, sometimes called a wild tomato, which is considered to taste like a grape. Spinifex grass provides natural gum, which was used to mount the stone blade on the end of a spear-thrower. The desert `poplar', a botanical relative of Gyrostemon, also grows in the sandhills, and its soft wood is sometimes used for animal carvings. The steep rock faces of Uluru and Katatjuta harbour different species: Ilyi, the rock fig and a wild `plum', which, although classed botanically with the sandhill species, is given a different name by the Pitjantjatjara. The tumbled boulders at the foot of rock faces are the source of `chewing tobacco', and light hunting spears are made from the spear bush, urtjanpa. In the Petermanns and Musgraves, more gentle hill slopes predominate. Here distinctive species of acacia grow, including utjalpara, a source of witchetty grubs and a sweet gum exuded by insects which Aboriginal children liked to suck. One middle-aged man explained, `I often got a lolly from that one when I was a little boy.' Rain falling on the vast expanses of bare rock at Uluru, Katatjuta and smaller outcrops flows out across the surrounding soil before soaking away. These sheet-flooding zones harbour flourishing colonies of bloodwood trees. Bloodwood provides timber for making several types of coolamon, including the deep bowls called piti, the scoops called wirra, and spear-throwers. Between the bloodwoods can be found a low, crawling plant with a red, fleshy stem called wakati, which bears a seed that was ground to make flour. The grass kunakanti, which also has edible seeds, grows here, as does an edible solanum. Different species of eucalypt grow beside creeks: Apara, river red gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis), grows along Britten-Jones Creek and gives its name to the soak, creek and country, Aparanya; in the vicinity of Docker River, the ghost gum (Eucalyptus papuana) also occurs. River red gum and ghost gum provide wood for coolamons and other artefacts. Animal habitats Many animals tend to live in only one of these plant habitats. The red kangaroo is restricted to level grassland and is mainly found on the mulga flats; the euro feeds in spinifex on hill and rock slopes (Frith 1973, pp.273 and 281). Although the emu lives in sandhill country, it was often caught near water, either by covering the main rock hole with stones and poisoning smaller pools, or by spearing the birds as they came to drink. Men hid behind artificial stone hides or natural boulders, because emus which drank poisoned water would try to regurgitate and the hunters had to rush out to wrestle with the birds, keeping their beaks shut. Change in subsistence activities Some plants, such as spinifex and the wild plum, grow in more than one habitat, and resources such as nectar or wood for coolamons and spear-throwers can be obtained from more than one species, but each habitat must have been regularly exploited for its unique resources. The disappearance of traditional subsistence activities would have as big an impact on the region's ecology as the extinction of one of the main animal species, but Aboriginal people still rely on the bush for many things. Kangaroo and euro meat are preferred to beef; so is rabbit. Artefacts for sale are still made from traditional materials. Withetty grubs are enjoyed. At Kikingkura outstation we saw edible berries harvested. Although this was not done regularly by the people living at Uluru, children were quick to pick wild `plums' and `tomatoes' when they could, during expeditions to the sandhills. One of the biggest changes since White contact has been the disappearance of controlled burning of the bush. Peter Latz (1978) writes that many of the most important food plants appear during the early stages of regrowth after minor fires, and that controlled burning of small patches of bush was an everyday part of foraging expeditions. Early explorers repeatedly found parties of Aboriginal people firing the land. Since people have been gathered into missions or settled around station homesteads, regular burning has largely ceased. In the 1970s several years of good rainfall caused a build up of inflammable scrub, grass and branches, resulting in disastrous wildfires that swept over wide areas in the Uluru National Park during 1976. Aboriginal diet has also changed since contact. It is thought that when people were entirely dependent on the bush for food, meat made up only 20 to 30 per cent of the diet (see Gould 1969a). With traditional weapons, animals such as kangaroo or euro were hard to catch. Paddy Uluru once recalled how as a young man he had killed a kangaroo at Tjulu (now the site of Curtin Springs homestead) and carried it back to Uluru, a distance of 80 kilometres. Richard Gould, living with people in the bush in Western Australia during 1966 to 1967, found that the women produced an average of 4.5 kilograms of vegetable food each day, devoting 4 1/2 hours to collection and 2 1/2 hours to preparation, while the men found only lizards. Although reliable, collecting vegetable foods could be hard work. Peter Brokensha asked Pitjantjatjara women living at an outstation from Amata to make damper from wild millet, kaltu kaltu (Brokensha 1975, p.25). He found that to gather less than 2 kilograms of seed from an area within 1 kilometre of their camp took three women 3 hours. To grind, winnow and cook the seed took another 2 hours. Although, as he says, there was a mad scramble among the camp's children for a piece of the cooking, it is not surprising that purchased flour has almost completely replaced indigenous sources. At Yuendumu in the mid-1970s, almost 30 per cent by weight of purchased food was flour; at Yalata a family of five would buy 11 kilograms of white flour a week (figures cited in Peterson 1978, p.32; see also Rose 1965,pp.31-2; Cutter 1978, p.67 and Brokensha 1975, p.25). The amount of meat obtained from the bush has, on the other hand, probably increased, not only because guns are more effective than spears, but also because cattle grazing and bore water help kangaroos to flourish (Frith 1978, p.90). The introduced rabbit has also become a major source of meat. At Brokensha's outstation, rabbits were eaten practically all the time (1975). W.V. MacFarlane, who briefly visited two outstations in Western Australia during the 1960s, records that at Kutjuntari seven euros were shot in eight days, and at Warawiya the men, using .22 rifles `brought in a kangaroo almost every day' (1978, pp.51 and 54). Appendix C lists the observed hunting trips made by people at Uluru during the period of my fieldwork. There is no reason to think the euro or the kangaroo, let alone the rabbit, is threatened, because people's subsistence needs limit the amount of hunting. The only threat to natural resources seems to be that of commercial exploitation. D. Roff suggests that the brushtail possum became locally extinct during early contact times because too many were killed to sell their skins to White men (1976, p.15). Sedentary life also exacerbates the local depletion of resources around camps, which is one of the reasons people in settlements rely more on purchased foods. N.B Tindale's comments on traditional camps (quoted below) suggest that this may always have been a problem. Traditional artefacts Traditional Western Desert tools and implements have been described by Brokensha (1975) and B. Hayden (1979). Brokensha describes how the spear-thrower is made from a slab of wood split from a mulga tree using metal tools; Hayden described how stone tools were used for the same purpose. The same technique is used to obtain wood for wooden bowls, throwing sticks and other implements. Paddy Uluru used axe blades as far as possible as wedges rather than cutting tools, paralleling the way in which Hayden shows stone wedges and axes to have been used. This technique does not kill the tree from which the wood is obtained. Both Hayden and Brokensha describe how digging sticks and spears are made. Only the straightest of urtjanpa limbs are suitable for making spears. They are cut at the base and pulled downwards out of the tangled mass of intertwined branches. Twigs must be trimmed off, traditionally with a stone adze, like those mounted on spear-throwers, and the stem straightened by warming it in a fire. F30 A history of bush nursing in Victoria - 1986 2014 words CHAPTER 3 The Nurses In March 1912 Victoria had a mere half dozen bush nursing centres, New South Wales had four and Tasmania just one. South Australia was still considering whether to send district nurses north into the outback, although five country towns in the south-east were already served. A Melbourne Herald writer felt bound to trumpet the virtues of this hand+ful of women: Of all women workers, perhaps the Australian bush nurse stands highest ... A nurse with a heart, brain and education can tell the young mother just what she should know, just what the State school utterly failed to teach her ... if she happens to be a woman fit for the position, (she) is the true missionary ... (bush nurses) often do the work of doctor, servant and nurse combined. More than that ... they think healthy thoughts ... and inspire their patients with something of their own feelings. Such fulsome praise could have rebounded against the fledgling move+ment. Other branches of the nursing profession were as dedicated to ideals which were given lofty expression in the first issue of Una, the Victorian Trained Nurses Association journal, in 1903. Its summary concluded: Nursing is today an Art and a Science; Art is as wide as Truth itself, and Science to quote the admirable dictum of Huxley is `nothing more than trained and organized common sense'. Besides ignoring the work of other nurses, the Herald's portrait of a paragon slighted doctors, educationists, missionaries and servants. Nev+ertheless, the bush nurse did stand somewhat apart, even in the climate of rising professionalism among nurses. In the first two decades of the twentieth century few nurses were employed in public hospitals once they were through their training. Those who were commer missing battled to improve nursing conditions such as the poor quality of hospital food and working longer than their rostered shift. They were often on duty for ten or twelve hours. Their last resort was resignation, sometimes en masse as happened at the Women's Hospital in April 1912. The RVTNA, however, was loath to sanction public nego+tiation on hospital salaries, fearing that it would be likened to a trade union or accused of overburdening a charity. Some certificated nurses worked in private hospitals, especially the newer ones which accepted only trained staff. But generally they took on private cases, working from a `home' run by an experienced nurse who acted as manager, taking calls and alotting jobs. In this private area the RVTNA was keen to set fee levels which were not to be undercut. The daily rate was 10s 6d for twelve hours and double that for twenty-four hours. When a nurse was engaged on a weekly basis and lived in the patient's house the fee was 2£s; 7s 6d for ordinary cases, 2£s; 18s for midwifery and 3£s; 8s 6d for serious cases. These included fevers and infections, mental and alcoholic conditions, the first week of pneumonia and care after major operations. In these cases the nurse was to be allowed, `if possible', two hours for outside exercise each day and at least six consecutive hours for sleep. Although private nurses' weekly earnings might be twice or even three times more than those of hospital nurses, their board and lodging had to be paid between `home' cases as well as during longer leave. The RVTNA was careful to see that the principles underlying these fees and conditions were not infringed by the bush nursing scheme. The Association similarly scrutinized the formation in June 1910 of a visiting nurses scheme, whereby a private nurse took on a number of patients, visiting them once or twice a day while instructing relatives or friends in their full-time care. The scheme was aimed at those who could not afford a resident nurse. By 1919 the Visiting Nurses Association was operating in many Melbourne suburbs including Coburg and in provin+cial cities like Bendigo. To encourage expansion, the Association then adopted `the co-operative principle', meaning that annual subscribers could call on the nurses free of charge. It was the isolation of the bush nurse from medical and hospital support which made her role distinct from that of hospital, visiting, private or district nurse. She was called on to exercise high levels of intiative, independence and often ingenuity. There was also her work with school children and their parents in promoting health care and preventive medicine. This was well received from the outset and often surprisingly productive. Following the pattern established at Beech Forest, Education depart+ment subsidies were granted to new centres according to the number of isolated schools the nurse was able to visit. By 1917 this grant amounted to 250£s; a year but that total remained the same while new centres were constantly being created, so some received no subsidy at all. Almost without exception these centres encouraged their nurses to do school visiting and bore the full cost of her salary unassisted. Local committees had often been stirred by the talk, illustrated by a set of lantern slides prepared in 1914, which the Association's travelling superintendent Miss E.M. Greer gave in districts which registered interest in obtaining a bush nurse. The school visits always prompted the most questions from the audience and swung many who had been undecided into support for the scheme. In outlining the duties and responsibilities of the nurse to schools the Education department asked in 1911 that suggestions and criticisms to help develop the usefulness of the work be added to the monthly report of the school visits. The nurse could instruct parents how to deal with minor ailments such as sores, cuts and chilblains. Printed instructions were issued on steps to be taken when hair, skin or clothing was unclean, usually vermin-infested. By promptly recognizing infectious diseases and fevers, and skin conditions such as scabies or ringworm, treatment including the child's exclusion from school could be arranged. Parents were to be instructed about chronic conditions such as discharg+ing ears and conjunctivitis, and encouraged to get medical attention for any serious condition. Where there was evidence that children were seriously neglected or overworked the matter was to be reported to the department's medical officers. Children who were repeatedly absent from school through illness could be visited at home to try to identify any contributing cause. By 1918 superintendent Greer claimed noticeable improvements in the health and cleanliness of children in out-of-the-way places where the nurse visited. This was confirmed by the laconic report of one local committee that parents always knew when the nurse's visit was due because their children paid extraordinary attention to soap and water that morning. Small measures such as a water mug for each child and separate pegs for hats and coats lessened cross-infection. Poor diet was still a handicap to better health. An intake of little besides corned beef, white bread and sugary tea was identified by Greer as the cause of teeth decaying before they were through the gums, two and three-year-olds unable to walk because of undeveloped limbs, and backwardness in education levels by up to two years. The same diet meant that men at fifty or even forty were no longer fit for work. Milk was seldom used by households, even in dairying districts, and fruit and vegetables were even more uncommon. In response the nurses invited mothers to come after school on visiting days to talk about food values, infant feeding and the care of sickly or delicate children. In 1919 the Bush Nursing Association sent a submission to the Education minister, stressing the importance of cookery and food value lectures and lessons. This `health missioner' role of the nurse was later extended through the infant welfare movement. Bush nurses were among the first students at the infant welfare training school which opened at South Melbourne in October 1920. After Mary Thompson's appointment early in 1911 Edith Barrett and Mrs Lang, the Melbourne District Nursing Society's representatives on Council, organized the purchase of the nurse's outfit which included a uniform and bag of equipment. The dress was pale grey with a white apron, collar and cuffs, and the only adornment was the badge pre+sented to each nurse at her installation. Lady Dudley donated the cost of the badges, which had been designed at her request by Miss Officer of the Arts and Crafts society. They featured an enamelled green beech leaf recalling Beech Forest, and the motto `By love serve one another'. When Lady Dudley died in July 1920 the presentation of badges ceased. A typical nurse's cap and veil of the period may have been issued for indoor use, but riding habit and oilskins were usual wear during much of the nurse's time on duty. Stout boots were essential. Nurse Tucker, who succeeded Mary Thompson at Beech Forest, once walked eight kilo+metres in three quarters of an hour on a call to a seriously ill patient in the bush. After 1913 novices were given rudimentary instruction at a Melbourne riding school on how to handle a horse. Advanced skills in riding or driving a gig, however, came only from hard experience. At first most nurses carried their equipment in a portmanteau, al+though Gunbower's nurse in 1913, Ida Crook, slung a kit-bag across her shoulders and rode a pony called Natty. From the end of that year the kit included two black leather saddlebags with VBNA stamped in letters half an inch high. Packed in these or the portmanteau were waterproof sheeting, buttercloth, absorbent wool, calico and strapping (which seems to have replaced formal leg and arm splints). There were also rubber gloves, douche, enema, catheter, bedpan, kidney dish, measure, invalid feeding equipment, lysol and sterilizing tablets, eye dropper and drops, surgical needles, scissors, thread and forceps, a thermometer, hot water bag, tongue depressor and simple ointments and medicaments such as Vaseline, tannic and boracic acids, and castor and olive oils. A medical relic of bygone days was the half pint pot of Prunier's brandy. A hypodermic syringe with morphia and strychnine tablets was added in 1913 but the brandy stayed on the list. It was occasionally used as a stimulant. A nail-brush and soft soap for cleansing, and an exercise book and temperature charts for recording case histories completed the equipment. An order for sheets, pillow-cases, towels and a blanket was put through in February 1911 but this seems to have been unique to Beech Forest and was perhaps meant for use in the ambulance. Each nurse's outfit originally cost about 12£s;, and replacement of stores and chemist supplies quickly mounted to more than 10£s; a year. In May 1913 local committees were made responsible for replacements of drugs, follow+ing, where possible, the advice of the doctor whose help the nurse was likely to call on in serious cases. The local `drug safe' administered by the bush nurse was to prove of great benefit in isolated districts. The cost of the original kit items, supplied out of central funds, rose by fifty per cent between 1913 and 1919. The nurse's salary remained at 135£s; a year until late in 1919. Out of this she paid her own board. The rise to 150£s; was granted partly because New South Wales bush nurses were being offered 170£s;. However, even before 1919 local committees in Victoria were asked to refund the nurse any board costs over 35£s; so that she could clear at least 100£s;. Further adjustments came in September 1921 when the salary for a nurse with just a midwifery certificate was set at 150£s;, and for a double certificated nurse 175£s;. Centres with nurses in the latter category were offered the alternative of providing free board and a 150£s; salary. Three weeks annual leave on full pay was standard from the beginning. Costs of travel to and from a posting, and of all travel on duty were paid by the local centre and were minimized by free passes for railway travel. For the first year or two recruitment of nurses was fairly easy but their resignation rate was high. Most often the reason was marriage, as zest, competence and compassion were undoubtedly attractive qualities. F31 Nature & Health 2027 words F31a Nature & Health - Spring 1986 Sensitive massage - PART 4 NECK AND SHOULDER MASSAGE By Ralph Hadden What with driving cars, long hours at an office desk and all the slings and arrows of daily life, we all know neck and shoulder tension. As a professional masseur I find that every one of my clients has experienced tension there, and needs the relief of massage - massage to undo the knots, relieve the tightness and pain, and loosen the locks. The Neck, Shoulders and Upper Back The neck and shoulder region is vital and central to the body's functioning. The neck is the all-important link between the head and the body, mind and feelings, major sense receptors and means of locomotion. We turn around on our neck and upper back to point our major sense receptors towards what interests us or, if we feel over-stimulated or overstressed, we create muscle tension to resist move+ment and prevent ourselves from turning. The configuration of this region reflects our life history. Hunched shoulders, for example, may indicate that this person, as a child, was frequently hit by a parent and they may be hunched as if anticipat+ing the next blow. If our life was very frightening we may pull the head back in fear, using chronic tension in the neck to maintain our `safer' position, or we may compensate by thrusting the head aggressively forwards. Someone who is figuratively a `pain in the neck' - a nag+ging nuisance - may, if we look into it, become literally a pain in the neck. Our shoulders and upper back are where we `shoulder our responsibilities' and we may droop or sag or stiffen under these. Unexpressed anger and frustration can also store in this region. When the area is functioning properly it is fully mobile, enabling full expression of ourselves and flexible response to the world. Massage to this area will help it to become free. The Massage This massage will follow the three-level pattern, as mentioned in the first article in this series (Nature & Health, Vol. 6, no.4). As I explained then, massage is best done working progressively through three different levels of pressure - surface stroking, intermediate level kneading, and deep pressure - and should then be completed with soothing stroking again. We'll also add some other strokes to round out the massage. In the other articles in the series I've described massage with the recipient lying down, but this time we'll do it a different way - sitting up. Though the recipient is not as relaxed in sitting as he or she might be lying down, there are advantages to this sitting massage: •It's easy to do in everyday situations - office, living room or bus stop(!) - and no special equipment or setting up is required, just a chair •No oil is required •For someone not used to massage this is an easy way to introduce them to the experience - they don't have to undress or lie down, and it's very satisfying Before you try the techniques described below, first of all try massaging your own neck and shoulder region - feel into the muscles and notice where you feel tight and notice what feels good to do to yourself. This self-massage is not only good for you, it also gives you an under+standing of what your partner will feel when you apply massage. Remember that this part of the body can carry a lot of tension, so don't aggra+vate that by massaging in an agitated or rushed manner. Take it slow and steady. Preparation As usual with massage it is best, if possi+ble, to be in a quiet place without distrac+tions, though this is not so crucial with the sitting massage. Have your partner sitting comfortably on a straight backed chair, without arms (they get in the way) and with a firm seat (you don't want your partner sagging as you press). Check whether your partner has any recent injuries or problems that require careful attention. Beginning Consciously relax and settle yourself. Rest your hands on your partner's shoul+ders (a good neutral point for making initial contact) and be still, being aware of how your partner feels. Give a soothing stroking to the whole area - upper back, shoulders, neck, head. Kneading Knead and squeeze the neck, shoulders and upper back with both hands. Aim to grip a broad area of muscle each time, and apply the squeeze firmly and slowly, and release it slowly. The area between the neck and shoul+der (the trapezius muscle) feels great with this stroke, so give it a good squeeze, using two hands on the one side (see fig.1). Now give a squeeze to the `shoulder pad' (deltoid muscle). On the upper back you can't grip much flesh, but just knead as much as you can. Now work on the muscles at the back of the neck (again a much appreciated stroke) by tilting the head slightly forward, steadying the forehead with one hand and squeezing as if gripping the scruff of the neck (as you would pick up a puppy). (see fig. 2). Check that your partner feels comfortable with this stroke. Deep Pressure With the thumb, or tips of the fingers, press into the soft tissue just below the bony occipital ridge (base of skull) at the top of the spine, and one or two inches either side (fig 3). Work only on the back of the head and neck, not to the sides which are more vulnerable. On each point press in slowly, hold, then slowly release - this should take about the same amount of time as an out-breath. Con+tinue with deep pressure to work on the muscles running beside the spine in the neck and upper back. Press down on the muscles between neck and shoulder and into any other muscle areas of the upper back as needed. SENSITIVE MASSAGE Be careful. The deep pressure work is most effective, but can also cause harm if used inappropriately: • press only on soft tissue, not bone • press and release slowly and steadily • use a strong pressure, but only as strong as your partner is able to comfortably receive and stay relaxed with. If you feel your partner tensing up, ease off the pressure • don't press on the sides of the neck, only on the muscles at the back running alongside the spine • keep the head and neck alligned in a normal, straight alignment. Apart from letting the head drop slightly forward while working on the base of the skull, do not twist, bend side+ways or rotate the head and neck Breathing Encourage your partner to breathe freely while you use the deep pressure. If a point that you're pressing on feels sore, your partner can help to release this by brea+thing out as you press, feeling that they're releasing the tension as they do so. Soothing After the strong work you've just done, now we do some soothing massage - some `sugar with the medicine' (but better for you than sugar!) Work your fingers in under the hair and massage the scalp, getting the scalp to slide around slightly. Give a gentle upwards tug to the hair. (fig. 4). Move to one arm, wrap your hands around the uppermost part of it, give a slow firm squeeze, release, move down a few inches, squeeze and release again, and so on, slowly squeezing and releasing down the arm, all the way to the fingertips. Shake your hands loose, and repeat with the other arm. Finishing Stand in front of your partner and rest your hands lightly on his or her head. Lightly and slowly brush your fingertips down the sides of the head, onto the neck, shoulders, arms and hands, and sweep off the fingertips. Shake your hands loose. Tell your partner to rest awhile. When to use this Massage Everybody will appreciate this massage but particularly those who are feeling stressed in some way - frazzled by a hard day in the office, weary and tense after many hours driving, or a parent who's fed up with the kids, for example. Headaches can often be soothed away with this massage but be careful. If the massage is done too strongly, too quickly or too roughly you can make the headache worse. Check as you go along whether what you're doing feels OK, and go slowly and calmly. When this massage is done well your friends will feel marvellous - it's a great relief to have that tension massaged away, and the freedom of movement and ease that results brings a contented smile to everyone's face. F31b Nature & Health - Spring 1986 The Magnetic Factor, Christobel Munson What on earth has mag+netism to do with health? One concerns the physical, fleshly body, nutrition, caring - the other is to do with iron, steel, electric currents and magnetic fields. The two seem diametrically opposed, or so I thought until I investigated further. For it seems that for centuries man has observed a distinct reaction in the body to the pull of magnetism: be it to the turning of the tides affected by the moon's magnetic pull or simply the placing of magnets directly on injured parts of the body to speed up healing. It turns out that the entire planet is under the influence of magnetism - and we're all included in that. We talk of someone having `animal magnetism' or charm, or `magnetic appeal' - a type of personal charisma. But there's more to it than just a lure-of-the jungle vibra+tion. Doctors these days are saying that some period problems in women may be caused by magnetic field problems: apparently women with menstruation problems emit a highter electric charge than others. With simple protoplasmic bodies, the immediate effects as a result of contact with magnets are astounding and profound. And with our bodies, the effects can be just as amazing. Considerable research has been done in the East, especially in Japan and China, and also throughout Europe - especially in Austria, Ger+many and the Scandinavian countries - concerning the effects of magnetic power on the body. In the United States, orthopaedic surgeons have been experimenting with inserting magnets into plaster casts to aid heal+ing. Here in Australia, the biggest impact regarding health and mag+netism has, to date, been with horses. Local trainers know well the extraordi+nary results of electro-magnetic blan+kets on injured horses; electro-magne+tic paddles are held over fracture sites to considerably aid healing and the union of bones. A magneto-pulse is directed to the injured area at regular intervals and the horse can be back in action in three weeks, not six, this way. This has been common knowledge in the horse-training world for at least ten years. So if it works for horses - why not us? It does work. And it has been doing so all along. We just haven't been into it for a few centuries. In prehistoric times in China, lode stones made of magnetic material were used on acupuncture point sites, before there was acapunc+ture. This aided the healing process. Egyptian priests investigated and used magnetic fields for therapeutic use and other ancient physicians such as Hip+pocrates, Paracelsus and Galen all in+vestigated the use of magnetic energy in healing. According to one Sydney medical doctor specialising in acupuncture, the power of magnetic fields was 're-disco+vered' by space scientists, both Russian and American, when the first men in space suffered from the weightlessness and the lack of gravity. What worked best to set them straight, as it were, was magnetic-field therapy. This oriental doctor's main practice is dealing with people with chronic degenerative heart disease, and people often come to him when they've exhausted all other avenues of healing. `Many people come to me with low energy,' he told me. `They are depleted, with chronic illness, post-glandular fever, post-hepatitis, and their healing power is poor. And for them I use magnetic-field therapy. It's an ancient treatment. Today, like many medical doctors, I investigate all kinds of wholistic ways to heal.' Acupuncture and magnetic-field therapy are intertwined, he explained as magnetic-field therapy centres on stimulating the acupuncture points and meridians around the body to accelerate healing or pain relief. F32 A home guide to diagnosing illness - women 2014 words The female body A woman is female from the moment she is conceived. This is determined by the pattern of chromosomes (thread-like structures within each living cell that contain genetic information) in the fertilized egg. Every woman has 23 pairs of chromosomes, 22 are the same as for men, but the 23rd pair is different. It consists of two X-chromosomes. Men have one X- and one Y-chromosome. The two X-chromosomes are responsible for ensuring the development of internal and external genitals such as ovaries, fallopian tubes, womb and vagina. Hormones secreted by the ovaries and other glands during fetal growth are thought to affect the development of the brain and its sense of being female. The feminine body shape is largely the result of the action of the sex hormones oestrogen and progesterone, which are responsible for the development of features known as secondary sexual characteristics - full, round and mature breasts; rounded swelling hips; thighs well padded with fat; a well-defined, curved waistline; absence of hair on the torso and face. Other distinctly female characteristics include a relatively high-pitched voice and a higher proportion of body fat. The rising and falling levels at which oestrogen and progesterone are secreted by the ovaries, are also responsible for the regular monthly changes that are known as the menstrual cycle (see p.117). Because of differences between the physical and hormonal make-up of men and women, there are small but important differences in the susceptibility of each sex to certain disorders. The monthly bleeding experienced by women means they suffer more often than men from anaemia (lack of sufficient red blood cells). For reasons not yet understood fully, women seem to more susceptible to liver damage from alcohol and so should drink less. On the positive side, the female sex hormones may well provide extra protection against coronary heart disease up until the menopause. Women generally live longer than men; average life expectation is 76 for women, 70 for men. Some of these additional years can be attributed to the fact that fewer women have traditionally been smokers. The gap now seems to be narrowing - perhaps as a result of the changes in women's lifestyle over the past few decades. The changing body Most body systems lose some efficiency as a result of the ageing process, partly because specialist cells die and are not replaced, and partly because tissues become less elastic and more fibrous. Loss of elasticity due to age is most obvious in the skin, and this process may be accelerated by excessive exposure to sunlight and by smoking. By the time a woman approaches middle-age she tends to gain weight, and muscle tone may become more lax, especially if she has not taken regular exercise. An unhealthy life style - particularly lack of exercise and a poor diet - may exaggerate the physical effects of ageing. The most significant milestone of the middle years is the menapause (see p. 116), when a woman ceases to be fertile and menstruation no longer occurs. Following the menopause the ageing process continues. One possible development is a thinning of the bones, which may become brittle and easily broken by minor falls. In later years, compression of the bones of the spine can lead to loss of height, and there may be loss of weight due to wasting of muscle. As the body ages it has fewer resources with which to withstand periods of ill health, and the healing process of minor injuries slows down considerably. Even so, if you take regular, vigorous exercise throughout your life, you will be likely to have much the same body shape at 60 as you have had at 30. Skeleton The bony skeleton provides the rigid structure that supports the muscles and provides a protective framework for the organs. Female bones are generally slightly lighter than a male's, and the pelvis wider in order to allow a baby's head and body to pass during childbirth. Bone itself is made up of a protein hardened with calcium salts. It is living material with cells that are constantly replacing old bone with new material. To maintain healthy bones, you need adequate amounts of protein, calcium and vitamins in your diet. Muscles Movement of the body and its internal organs is carried out by the muscles. These are made up of a soft tissue arranged in fibres which can contract and relax to produce movement. There are two distinct types of muscle: voluntary muscles, which control body movement, and involuntary muscles, which are responsible for movement within the body - for example, the womb, which expands to an enormous extent during pregnancy. Muscles normally remain in good condition if used regularly. Vigorous exercise increases the size of muscles and improves the circulation of blood to them, thereby increasing their capacity for still more strenuous activity. Conversely, inactivity can soon lead to muscle-wasting and weakness. Respiratory system Respiration - inhaling (breathing in) and exhaling (breathing out) air - allows the blood to absorb oxygen essential for the production of energy. As the blood passes through the lungs it gives off carbon dioxide and water as waste products. The respiratory system consists of the lungs and tubes through which air passes on its way to and from the lungs. Air is breathed in through the nose and mouth, passes down the trachea (windpipe) and enters the lungs through a branching tree of tubes - the bronchi and bronchioles. The respiratory system normally remains in good health unless damaged by repeated exposure to pollutants in the atmosphere, including dust from industrial or agricultural processes and tobacco smoke, or by repeated infection. Fat distribution Fat is deposited in a layer under the skin and within the tissues in other parts of the body including the buttocks, breasts and inside the abdominal cavity. It makes up 20 to 25 per cent of a woman's weight (compared with 15 per cent of a man's) and is distributed in such a way as to give a woman's body its characteristic contours. Fat is laid down when food intake is greater than is needed to fuel the body's energy requirements. It is burnt up when food intake fails to meet the body's need. It also acts as insulation against cold. Both too much and too little fat in the body can be unhealthy. Being too fat can lead to heart and circulation problems. Being too thin is less of a health risk, but may be a sign of undernourishment and can lead to reduced resistance to a variety of diseases. Fluctuations in the level of fat deposits is almost always the result of an imbalance between food intake and energy output. Heart and circulation The heart is a muscular pump with four chambers into which enter the major blood vessels carrying blood to and from the rest of the body. As the heart rhythmically squeezes the chambers, making them expand and contract, blood flows in the correct direction. Blood transports oxygen and nutrients (see Blood analysis, p. 22) to all parts of the body and carries away waste products. It circulates via the arteries, which carry "used" blood. Good blood circulation, essential for the health of every organ in the body, depends on the efficient functioning of the heart muscle and partly on the ease of blood flow through the arteries. It also depends on the blood vessels remaining free from any obstruction, such as fatty deposits*desposits or blood clots. High blood pressure (hypertension) may damage the blood vessels or increase the risk of blockage of the blood vessels. For advice on reducing the risks of diseases of the heart and circulation, see Coronary heart disease, p. 100. Women under the age of 50 are relatively free from coronary heart disease. This is thought to be partly due to larger amounts of the hormones progesterone and oestrogen being present in the body. The circulatory system The circulatory system carries blood to and from every part of the body. The centre of the system is the heart. Arteries carry blood away from the heart; veins return blood to the heart. Arteries and veins The walls of arteries need to be strong, because blood is forced along them under high pressure, so they are made of four layers. Arteries and their various branches (arterioles) are surrounded by muscle which allows them to dilate or contract to regulate the body temperature. Veins have less elastic, less muscular walls. Valves in the veins stop blood from flowing in the wrong direction. Heart vessels The heart is divided into two by the septa. Each side has two chambers - an atrium, and a ventricle - linked by a one-way valve. The left atrium and ventricle control oxygenated blood, and those on the right de-oxygenated ("used") blood. The septa prevents the two types of blood from mixing. Brain and nervous system The brain and nervous system together provide the control mechanism for both conscious activities, such as thought and movement, and for unconscious body functions such as breathing and digestion. Nerves also provide the means by which we register sensations such as pain and temperature. The brain and nervous system require a constant supply of oxygenated blood. Disruption of the blood flow to any part of the system is one of the most common causes of malfunctioning of the brain and nervous system. Therefore, the prevention of circulatory trouble (see left) is important. Injury, infection, degeneration, tumours and diseases of unknown cause may also affect the brain and nervous system. Certain disorders may arise out of abnormal electrical activity or chemical imbalances in the brain. The nervous system The brain and the nerve tracts of the spinal cord together make up the central nervous system. A network of peripheral nerves, which are named after the four regions of the spine, link the central system with other parts of the body. The brain The brain itself is the most complex organ in the body; many aspects of its structure and function are not yet fully understood. Different parts of the brain seem to control different activities. The two cerebral hemispheres control conscious thought and movement, and interpret signals from the sensory organs. The cerebellum regulates some subconscious activities such as coordination of movement and balance. The brain stem governs vital body functions such as heartbeat and breathing. The senses The senses are the means by which we monitor the different aspects of our environment. Five separate systems respond to different types of physical stimuli: the eyes enable us to interpret visual information; the ears monitor sound and control balance; the nose and tongue respond to different smells and tastes respectively; and the sensory neves in the skin allow us to feel physical contact (touch), changes in temperature, and pain. Smell Smells are detected by the olfactory nerves. These hair-like organs project into the top of the nasal cavity and absorb and analyse molecules from the breathed-in air. The sense of smell may be damaged by smoking and may temporarily be impaired by a common cold or hayfever. Permanent loss of the sense of smell may occur following damage to the nerves, perhaps as a result of a skull injury, or it may be caused by a disorder affecting the part of the brain responsible for interpreting smell sensations. Taste The main taste organs are the taste buds. These are located in hair-like papillae that project from the upper surface of the tongue. They can distinguish only four basic tastes: sweet, sour, salt and bitter. The taste buds for each taste are located in a different area of the tongue. The sense of taste is closely allied to the sense of smell, which helps us to differentiate a greater range of flavours. Loss of the sense of smell is the usual cause of impairment to the sense of taste, but certain drugs and occasionally zinc deficiency may also have the same effect. Touch The sense of touch, which includes all skin sensations, is conveyed through the nerves from the sense receptors that lie under the surface of the skin. F33 Health and Healing - September - November, 1986 2035 words Nutritious foods and drinks By Demeter Hillman Travel in the past used to be an experience with stimulating, surprising experiences of distinctive archi+tecture, customs, food and drink. Travel in our modern age, with mass transport, to well advertised destina+tions, either on holiday or to cities, means experiencing the uniformity of western civilisation in its various forms and climates, depending upon the Continent. We are then persuaded that mass catering and processed foods and drinks are to our benefit. Distinctions and distinctiveness have almost totally been sacrificed to ambitions that serve a mass market. Many traditional foods and drinks with valuable health properties are now almost unobtainable and finding an unpolluted area that has not been saturated with mass travel, a beauty spot not spoilt, can be a problem unless one is prepared to go some distance to maintain individuality. Growing economic problems for rural populations and the increasing influence of technology have for many areas increased the plight of how to remain self sufficient. Changing world influence, world markets and world tension have created new population pat+terns, but in most instances a flight from the land for an uprooted and unprotected rural population is a common fate. With such uprooting much simple, but valuable knowledge and practices, traditional food preparation, are lost. Such sad patterns have been experienced for hundreds of years, but our age has accelerated this destructive process and put nothing in its place. Creating Tranquility The only compensation would be to once again create conditions favourable towards a return of an unhurried, unstressed way of life, in chosen rural areas with pro+grams for their restoration, without pollution and any violent technology with an emphhasis on biological needs first, and in housing, to be able to build bio+houses without health hazards. Creating tranquil, unpolluted islands where the health of future generations may be safeguarded is a priority in all countries because of the encroaching adverse effects of what a violent technology already has created, threatening the very existence of life on this planet. That is why the study of a non-violent, advan+ced biology and ecology with a new awareness of past and present should be a new priority. Also biological clothing is important in order to over+come the ever increasing allergies and multiple allergies caused by many thousands of chemicals everywhere in our environment near and far. Study of traditional food and drinks that have pro+phylactic properties can be rewarding, also when it can be combined with reading books on travel in the past, when it was still adventurous and hazardous and took perhaps many weeks or even months to make progress across one Continent. Handing On Traditions In remote areas of various countries one can still be assured of traditional customs having kept their place, where people in rural areas are still able to follow their natural life styles. Although in many areas in remote country regions the diet may have been rather monotonous, in order to ensure survival, traditional knowledge on how to pre+pare fermented foods would be passed on to the next generation without question. Fermented foods ensured immunity against some illnesses that threatened because of an absence of hygiene, but fermented foods and drinks also ensured that hardships resulting from weather changes and exposure to the elements need not be injurious to health. Plain foods were made piquant by means of the micro-organisms developing in fermented foods and drinks, thereby enhancing or ennobling the foods by increasing their food value. In recent centuries meat consumption has increased five fold and it has become a symbol of affluence; its modern production has caused many new health hazards, from hormones, antibiotics, implants of peni+cillin and so on. In past centuries in some remote areas, potatoes and grains accounted for 60%-80% of food by weight. This meant that ingenious preparation and methods of serving, additions of herbs and spices, would provide stimulation, together with the addition of some other vegetables. Until about 300 years ago, bread was baked by the sourdough fermentation method and provided some of the necessary lactic acid, as did the traditional drinks with health giving properties. In our modern foods we may find many new ingredients that render the food sterile instead of keeping it full of living micro-organ+isms to enhance the body's resistance to ill health. However, not all travellers in the past were prepared for what they found, nor did they appreciate it. "The bread was normally black rye bread", an English writer, travelling in Russia in the 1840s complained: "They ferment their bread to the third or acetous degree; the black bread, unlike that of all other coun+tries, is bitter and sour, and as nauseous in the mouth as alum." Others argued that Russian workers showed sound nutritional judgment in preferring a bread that was well fermented and as heavy as possible, the lactic acid which made bread sour was a vital dietary supplement and its heaviness was also valued. Solid Food "Solid" (Prochnyi) food is food which is both nour+ishing and slow to digest, which remains in the stomach for a long time, for once your belly is empty you can no longer do heavy work until you eat again. As black rye bread is the main component of the diet, it is important that the bread should be thick, not light, not doughy, and made well, out of fresh flour. A worker pays great attention to bread. Good bread is the most important thing. More observations about Russian food are that mushrooms and sorrel may also be "soured in", like white cabbage. "Pickled cabbage (Parkinson's `saurk+raut') was a universal staple in Great Russia. "Pick+led vegetables may have provided a valuable anti+scorbutic. Certainly peasants generally attributed great importance to the presence of something sour in the diet." "For the peasants, something acidic (kislota) is an essential part of any diet." The rural population in Russia in particular relies on having for their meals regular supplies of pickled cabbage, pickled beetroot, mushrooms, gherkins, or, in the absence of such soured vegetables, whey or butter+milk to add to soups made with fresh vegetables. Also the best known Russian drink, Kvass, may be added to soup, or fermented dough, in order to supply the acidity that is appreciated for its energy giving qualities. Kvass was an essential for preventing infectious diseases and epidemics also an antidote to scurvy in country regions where hygienic arrangements were absent. Kvass or quass was also a nutritious drink, however, and making Kvass was a basic skill acquired that was as important as making bread, as both were equally important in daily life. Kvass could be made with barley, rye, wheat, buckwheat or oats, to which fruit juices were added. Among the fruit Kvasses there could be additions of pears, cherries, lemons, berries, herbs, apples, etc., whatever could be found in the countryside and was easily available from the natural environment. Another traditional drink is Kaffir beer, the national beverage of the Bantu tribes of South Africa. Kaffir beer is characterised by the fermenting of previously soured gruel, generally prepared from ground malted and unmalted Sorghum. "A great variety of similar beverages is still prepared today by the natives through+out Africa from indigenous cereals, and Kaffir beer from Southern Africa is quite comparable with `mer+issa' from the Sudan, `bouza' from Ethiopia and `pombe' from East Africa," writes J.P. Van der Walt in Kaffircorn Malting and Brewing Studies II. Studies on the Microbiology of Kaffir Beer. The Kaffir beer is rich in lactic acid and vitamins such as Thiamine, Ribo+flavin, Nicotinic acid, also in fibre and protein, etc., provided the original fermenting process is retained, home brewing guarantees high nutritional value. Modern Diet Deficient Our present "civilisation diet" which has relied more and more on convenience foods and luxury foods from supermarkets during past decades is sadly lacking in enzymes, as fresh vegetables are almost unobtainable to the city dwellers, as it may take two days for them to be delivered from the country through the commercial channels. Also the contamination of many foods with PCP and PCB has caused many new outbreaks of "allergy" diseases as well as multiple allergies. Coeliac disease, caused by malfunction or breakdown of the pancreas gland, is a frequent and growing complaint now. Dr. A. Vogel, the famous Swiss Nature Doctor, who also produces more than 3,000 homoeopathic medi+cines in his Bioforce Laboratory, mentions that there are dozens of Lady's Bedstraw plants and that all of them have the strange property of coagulating milk, like rennet obtained from calf's stomachs. This juice in the plant makes it suitable for producing cheeses. (Lab-Labferment). It is in particular this biological combination, besides other mineral constituents that are in the Lady's Bedstraw plants, that has an excellent effect upon the pancreas gland. It is known that the pancreas gland has a double function. The external secretion excretes enzymes, amylase in particular. This has the effect in the small intestine of changing carbohydrate into sugar, i.e. digesting cereals, potatoes or any other starch; it is this starch that is digested by the enzyme, provided the cereal grains have been broken down first. Hence, if there are problems with the digestion of carbohydrate, if fermentations and flatulence become a problem in that the transformation of the starch into a sugar form is not working properly, then Lady's Bed+straw is the correct treatment in order to stimulate and support the malfunctioning of the pancreas gland. It ought to be used freshly gathered when blooming between June and August, otherwise dried as infusion, to make a tea. Two teaspoons fresh or one teaspoon dried herbs are enough for half a litre. Lady's Bedstraw also has an intensely stimulating effect upon the kidneys, this can be further enhanced by adding Solidago, about 30-50 drops. It is best drunk in the morning. One will be able to observe that this has a diuretic effect during the day. Drinking this tea during the afternoon would tend to disturb the night's rest. Lady's Bedstraw also contains bitter substances that provide a supporting effect in every cancer therapy. Anti-cancerous Effect "Whether it is the bitter substances that aid cancer therapies it is difficult to say," says Dr. Vogel. It has been observed, however, that there are surprising experiences when Lady's Bedstraw is employed in cancer therapy. Mrs. Marie Treben has reported that Lady's Bed+straw may produce surprising results when used in cancer therapy, as this plant has made a considerable contribution during external as well as internal applica+tions or administrations, i.e. during treatment of various cancer tumours, as well as during treatment of cancer-like skin diseases. "One should, of course, not merely rely on the effects of one single plant but ought to observe the principles of holistic therapy when there are serious diseases to be treated, such as the pancreas gland or cancer," says Dr. Vogel. Nutritional principles as well as all other healing factors that support, which strengthen and re-activate the regeneration powers of the body and support it, are to be considered. "If Lady's Bedstraw was taken as a prophylactic, this too, would not ignore the many sided good properties of this healing plant, and could prevent many unnecessary illnesses." When foods are fermented they unlock additional nutritional factors that have health enhancing proper+ties. This is the case also for ancient, traditional drinks, many of which have been sacrificed to the development of civilisation and have been forced to make way for more artificial drinks produced commercially that do not have these prophylactic and nutritious properties. Wherever the natural rural life has had to make way for industrial life with all its disadvantages and commer+cialisation, the enslaving of women into factory work and the displacement of a rural natural rhythm for a stress filled life, there the natural raw materials are less easily accessible and home brewing is displaced by the commercial brewing of traditional nutritious drinks. Where traditional drinks were based upon a thick gruel that was fermented into an opaque drink with suspended particles, where this drink acted not merely as an energy drink but also as a food, supplying many nutriments, we find that some adulteration or mass-production without basic ingredients may lead to mal+nutrition as a natural outcome in the native population. F34 Heritage Australia - Autumn 1986 2011 words The villa in Australia By Clive Lucas Clive Lucas OBE, FRAIA, is principal of Clive Lucas & Partners, architects, Sydney, and has been responsible for the restoration of a number of the villas discussed in this article `Villa', to most readers, probably con+jures up the suburban detached or semi-detached houses of late Victorian and Edwardian Australian cities. But this ar+ticle deals with the period before c1860, before the eighteenth century sense of the word, villa, `was vulgarised' to quote Dr Mark Girouard. In 1827 James Elmes in his Metropolitan Improvements described the villa thus: The Villa (as distinct from the mansion), is the mere personal property and residence of the owner, where he retires to enjoy himself without state. It is superior to the ornamented cottage, standing, as it were between the cottage ornee of the French, and the mansion or hall of the English. The term is never more properly applied than when given to such suburban structures as those that are rising around us, serving as they may well do from situation as to the town, and from position as to rural beauty. Later in 1833 the influential architec+tural writer J.C. Loudon defined it in his Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture as `a gentleman's residence in the country ... a place of agreeable re+tirement', a house to `be situated if pos+sible, in a beautiful country, within reach of a public road, and at an easy distance from the metropolis ... the principal front as to be seen from the public road, and to command a beautiful and exten+sive prospect over a fertile country; hav+ing in the middle distance a town or village, with its "heaven-direct spire". It was, as Elmes said, a house which stood somewhere between the cottage and the mansion. It was the abode, es+sentially, of someone who made his liveli+hood elsewhere and, in the nineteenth century, someone who made his living in the town, a member of the growing professional and mercantile classes who proliferated in the nineteenth century. Loudon suggested such a house as a retreat and recommended it being `about ninety miles, or a day's journey, from the metropolis', but it was also suburban, a place where the merchant or professional lived outside the immediate town, a house set in its own grounds of several acres with pleasure garden, vegetable garden, orchard and stabling. The other thing that the villa had was style or, if you like, architectural preten+tiousness, as a glance through the many architectural pattern books, which abounded in early nineteenth century England, or in Loudon's Encyclopaedia it+self, will prove. London's book has, amongst others, designs for a: •Grecian Villa of a medium size, for a Gentleman of Fortune •Suburban Villa of Two Acres and a half •Villa in the Anglo-Italian Style •A Cottage Villa in the Gothic Style •A Villa in the Old English Manner •A small Villa, in the Italian Style •A cottage Villa •A double suburban Villa •A Villa in the Old Scotch Style. Similarly, many of the pattern books included designs for villas. Examples are - Designs for Elegant Cottages and Small Villas, 1806, by Edward Gyfford Hints for Dwellings consisting of Original Designs for Cottages, Farm Houses and Villas, 1800, by David Laing Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, Picturesque Dwellings, Villas &c., 1807 by William Pocock Rural Residences consisting of a Series of Designs for Cottages, Decorated Cottages, Small Villas and Other Ornamental Buildings, 1818, by John B. Papworth Sketches in Architecture containing Plans and Elevations of Cottages and Villas, 1798, by John Soane or Designs from the Simple Cottage to the Decorated Villa, 1802, by John Plaw. The prerequisites of a villa were that it be elegant, have style and be an orna+ment to the landscape. In early nineteenth century Australia all houses with pretensions to style were, in effect, villas whether they be subur+ban, in reach of the town, or well into the country as homesteads on stations of thousands of acres. In this sense they were quite unlike English villas which were rural retreats rather than the prin+cipal seat of a landed proprietor. The decorated villa was the best the colonial gentlemanly settler could aspire to as, de+spite the rural wealth of the place, noth+ing was built which can be described as a mansion or hall in the English sense of the word. Gentlemen here either lived in bungalows as the vernacular verandahed cottage really was, or in villas. It was a matter of style. Wherever such houses were built, their designs were either taken from pattern books or were de+signed by local architects. The beau ideal of a villa in Australia, to use Loudon's term, is perhaps Rosedale in Tasmania, named for the Yorkshire valley from whence its proprietor came. The house has style (Italian), and it ornaments the landscape set against hills with the view from its terrace over fertile country and river. As a contemporary traveller noted `Mr. Blackburn (an architect of this Colony) has from a plain cottage converted it into a beautiful villa in the Italian style'. James Blackburn designed this villa in 1847. On the Goulburn Plains, in the Country of Argyle in NSW - again on a large sheep station - landed proprietor William Faithfull, built a villa in 1858. `A suburban villa, with the House in the Italian Style' taken from Loudon's The Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion, 1838. This design had first appeared in Loudon's Architectural Magazine in 1836. By 1860 `villas' were in effect scattered across the settled areas of Australia. Notable examples are Aberglasslyn at Maitland with its contained villa plan; Panshanger in northern Tasmania with its chaste Grecian facade; Killymoon, Fingal, Tasmania, with its geometrical preoccupation and its basement offices is the contained villa in the round, as is Clarendon and this makes them more in the mode of the English suburban villa than remote country houses. The villa probably made its first ap+pearance with the appointment of Gover+nor Lachlan Macquarie in 1809. The first houses with architectural preten+sions were built at the instigation of the Governor and his wife. Mrs Macquarie, who considered herself an architectural patron, brought with her a library of books including the 1806 Gyfford's Hints for Elegant Cottages and Small Villas from which she chose `Design the First' and `Design the Second' for two ornamental civil servants' houses built in 1813 in Bridge Street, Sydney, just outside the gates to Government House. These were probably Australia's first villas. Other designs influenced by pattern books were John Macarthur's proposals for his Pyrmont estate. Here the design, a Grecian villa, is Plate XXIV from Soane's Sketches in Architecture of 1798. The colonial estate agents soon took up the term `villa' and, then as now, probably incorrectly applied it. In June 1815 we read `to be let ... the beautiful Villa and Demesne of Vaucluse' adver+tised in the Sydney Gazette. This was well before W.C. Wentworth had given that house style and created the gothic en+semble we know today. Vaucluse was, in 1837, correctly described as `Mr. Went+worth's charming villa, of classic nomen+clature', whereas in 1815 it was probably only a cottage, perhaps a deco+rated one, overlooking Sydney harbour. The agent was perhaps correct in other respects; Vaucluse was the residence of a gentleman (it had been let to Colonel O'Connell, later Sir Maurice O'Connell, as a country retreat); it was beautifully sited in its own domain and was within reach of the town. Sydney Harbour was a splendid place for building villas for gentlemen. Its many inlets provided wonderful sites within reach of Sydney for the merchants and professional men of the town. Henrietta Villa, an early substantial villa which adorned the harbourscape, built in 1819 in the neoclassical style, was decribed as both a naval and a marine villa. Further up the harbour on Darling Point was a Gothic villa - our first in this style - built in 1834 for the colonial treasurer, a Scotsman of aristocratic lin+eage and connection. It was a villa in the round, with basement offices, con+structed by local architects but, most scholars claim, heavily influenced by a Loudon design `A villa in the Old Scotch Style'. Agents must again take criticism for their imprecise terminology, for in June 1841, when Lindesay was first up for sale, it was described as a `Mansion, built substantially of stone in the Gothic style with grounds attached ...' Perhaps largest of all colonial houses, but contemporanously with its construc+tion described as a villa, was the colonial secretary's house at Elizabeth Bay `the place is now granted to Mr. Macleay who has converted it into an excellent garden with a prospect of creating a Grecian Villa contiguous'. As well as the harbour itself, there are numerous inlets along the coast that provide suitable sites for villas. One such site was at Nelson's Bay overlooking the sea where, in the early 1840s, an intellec+tual barrister and his singular wife built a villa in the cottage style. Robert Lowe was Oxford educated and his wife, Georgiana, came of an English landed family, so it is perhaps not surprising that they created one of the most pic+turesque and Elysian of all retreats. A villa needed educated and informed taste. The 1820s, 1830s and 1840s were the heyday of the villa. Several of the subur+ban villas of Woolloomooloo Hill were designed by local architect John Verge; one, Rockwall, the agents described in 1837 as `that splendid Italian Villa' and at Harrington Park, Glenlee, and Wiven+hoe houses which relate closely to the concept of a villa are to be found. Cam+den Park itself, with its extensive pros+pect over a fertile country, and in the middle distance a town with its `heaven-directing spire' must in NSW come closest to the Loudon beau ideal laid down in his Encyclopaedia - except in the mat+ter of style. Loudon felt the old English style was right `in that ornate manner of it called the Elizabethan'. Camden was classical, but then it was New South Wales. However, other proprietors, who did not have the wherewithall to create a set+ting like the Macarthurs at Camden, took Loudon's advice on style more lit+erally. One such man was the surveyor-general, Sir Thomas Mitchell, who selected a `villa in the Old English man+ner' from Loudon as the design for his harbourside villa, Carthona. For his country retreat within ninety miles of Sydney, in 1847 he chose a `Villa in the Cottage Style', a Gothic design from an 1835 pattern book of Rural Architecture by Francis Goodwin. From the late 1840s the idea of the villa seemed to wane, the term became vulgarised as Girouard has said, and was not used by gentlemen. The term con+tinued to be used by agents, but it was applied to town cottages, farm houses and buildings which had no pretensions to style, nor as the residences of gentle+men. Richmond Villa, Rosa Villa, Pen+rose Villa, Hampton Villa and such names proliferated right through Vic+toria's reign and into the Edwardian period. It is interesting to note that Verge, who of all colonial architects is respon+sible for so many `villa designs', never seems to have used the term. His ledger contains references to houses and cot+tages, but not villas, even though many of his cottage designs were for gentlemen and were highly finished and well placed. Houses like Bedervale, Wyoming and Rose Bay were, to Verge, cottages. Even the highly decorated Tempe, which can surely be termed a `Villa in the Cottage Style', Verge simply called `a cottage at Tempe'. In the Australasian Sporting Magazine of November 1850 the following, which is an interesting closing note to the story of the villa in Australia, appeared: Tempe this delightful*delightfull villa residence ... the seat of A.B. Sparke, Esq., is situated on the western bank of the river named after the immortal martyr of Ohwiee, Captain Cook. Selected originally as a retreat from the cares of business, yet, within easy distance of the town, the spot formerly displayed all those wild features of the unbroken interior, which yielded indescribable charms to the seeker after the tranquility of romantic retirement. F35 A Country Practice: quality soap 2015 words 1. How It Began: In General Practice The town of Burraga will face epidemics, bushfires, floods, visits by bikies and exploitation by land developers. The farms around will be attacked by disease, the animals savaged by wild dogs, the crops fail in the drought. There will be football matches, cricket matches, `Burraga Show', fashion parades and the Annual Ball. Romances will form, marriages will break up, babies will be born and old people die. Some young people will die too, by disease, by accident, by their own hand. Our cast will be heavily involved in this cycle of life, with the town and with each other. The audience will be involved along with them. James Davern's note to In General Practice By July 1986, when this book appears, 420 episodes of A Country Practice will have gone to air since it began in 1981. The program is the most popular drama serial on Australian television, and is seen on nearly a hundred stations across the country. Its ratings in Sydney and elsewhere are consistently in the 30s, a figure that indicates in Sydney alone an audience of over a million people. The marriage in 1983 of two of the central characters, Vicky and Simon, drew a rating of 45 in Sydney (about one and a half million people), and then a 46 rating in Brisbane (half a million people) for the same episode. On the estimate that in 1982 each Sydney rating point was worth about $2 million to Channel 7 over the year, ACP, `consistently rating over 30 in Sydney' for all of that year, was a valuable product for its host company. ACP receives over a thousand fan letters a week; the one quoted below is typical. My most deliberate and hearty congratulations for a powerful two nights' entertainment ... I have been meaning to write to you from the first time that I viewed A Country Practice. Last night forced me to. Fan-bloody-tastic. The whole production side and scripts, acting and directing is of the highest excellence. For the first time whilst watching an Australian show I was moved from anger through fright to near tears for the fate of the Matron and the outcome of Gus' situation. Brilliance and many more words for this man's performance. And also for everyone else in the principal cast ... No longer need Australian audiences have their intelligence insulted. For this I thank all involved in and with JNP. The show has a national fan club. One of its animal characters, Molly Jones' pig Doris, was a guest of honour at Sydney and Adelaide agricultural shows, and Simon's pet wombat Fatso has appeared on a children's calendar. Newspapers and magazines run features on the program - on the cast, sometimes on the crew, and on what may happen in future episodes. TV current affairs host, Mike Willesee, produced a documentary feature which was shown in prime time to excellent ratings. A record of Vicky's and Simon's wedding vows went into the Top Twenty. ACP is also shown outside Australia. In Britain it is shown on the ITV network, and in London, playing on Wednesday afternoons, it has healthy ratings of 16. An English fan writes: `The folk in Country Practice seem more English than we are.' Today 458 episodes have been sold to Italy. It is seen in Eire, on West German cable television, on the European satellite system Sky TV, and in the USA. It is also seen in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malta and Hong Kong. James Davern, the executive producer, estimates that ACP's worldwide audience is probably between five and six million people. ACP has become such an institution in Australian TV drama, that it's hard to remember life before ACP began. Yet in tracing its history, we discover how much its originality is a negotiation of past histories - of soap opera, past program successes and failures, past station policies and past work histories. Soap Opera Soap opera, or `women's weepies' began in the 1930s on American radio. The form was both new and old. The serials were commissioned by radio stations keen to fill daytime hours with material that would attract audiences, and therefore advertisers. Large soap powder manufacturers were eager and willing to pay to reach housewives, and romantic drama, drama of the `heart' and the `emotions' was the dramatic vehicle chosen. Thus soap opera was born. Despite its poor critical reputation - one, incidentally, with which we would not necessarily agree - soap opera obviously offers its audiences considerable pleasure. They get to `know' the characters, the kinds of stories, and issues that will develop. The regular viewer builds up a bank of information in relation to a serial and the producers can take this for granted. Thus a soap opera works in terms of an aesthetic shorthand, where past events are briefly summarised, where a character can be recalled in a word or sentence and the audience knows what is being alluded to. As one of the writers on A Country Practice, David Boutland, put it: Television isolates people from each other. These characters become their friends. A lot of people are a lot happier watching Vicky be Vicky, Simon be Simon and predictably Dr Elliott being Dr Elliott, than having to deal with real people who are an unknown quantity. It's an easier thing. There's certainly something to be said for characters acting the way we know they'll act. At the same time the soap opera, with its cliff-hanging endings, obviously seeks to develop viewing habits. One episode sets up the need to find out what happens next. The audience regards the main characters as friends, and wants to go on meeting them. The satisfaction of curiosity in one episode and the expectation of pleasure in succeeding ones leads the audience to watch night after night, from one week to the next. The casual viewer becomes a regular, and a fan is born. The Australian Soap The drama serial, soap opera, has been around in Australian broadcasting for a very long time. One of the most durable radio examples, The Lawsons, began on the ABC in 1944 and, changing its title to Blue Hills in 1949, continued on air until 1976. Like ACP, Blue Hills was set in the country and also contained an educational edge, although, like The Archers in Britain, agricultural rather than medical or social. Although Blue Hills had a large following in the city, the program was broadcast at 1 pm each day, to coincide with rural audiences' lunch hour, and repeated early in the evening. Serial drama has been a feature of Australian television almost since TV was established in 1956. Until the 1970s there was a good deal of uncertainty about the audiences and timeslots for soaps. The history of Australian television serials falls into three phases. The first, part of an era often called `radio with pictures', was a direct attempt to transfer the form from radio to television. The first actual serial, Autumn Affair (1959), was produced by ATN Channel 7 in Sydney as a series of quarter-hour episodes, intended mainly for women. It went to air each morning, immediately after a breakfast show. However it had no luck, finding neither a sponsor nor an audience. The second effort was directly instigated by the success of both Granada's Coronation Street and Associated Television's Crossroads on British commercial television in the early 1960s. The ABC's Bellbird, which was to run for ten years, began in 1967. Like Coronation Street, Bellbird emphasised the social interaction of a group of ordinary people. James Davern, who directed the pilot episode, described the characters as `normal Australians living in a country town'. Like Blue Hills, Bellbird was broadcast in quarter-hour episodes at tea time each week day evening. It was very successful and built up a solid audience. Crossroads had an Australian imitator in ATN 7's Motel. In a setting on the road between Canberra and Sydney, Motel was directed mainly toward women at home. It was thought, however, that in due course it might attract a night time male audience as well; it was shown both at lunchtime and in a late evening timeslot. Motel, however, failed to attract that larger audience, and ceased production after more than 150 episodes. Australian commercial television drama at this time was dominated by the Crawford police series. It was only with the 1972 success of Number 96 on the 0-10 network that the drama serial became a viable programming form. Number 96 chronicled the bawdy, comic and melodramatic lives of an amorphous group of people sharing an apartment block in an inner Sydney suburb. Shown in half-hour episodes five evenings a week in an adult time slot, 8.30 p.m., the program was enormously popular for much of its six years on air. Number 96 made the breakthrough. With the single exception of the Grundy Organization's serial Until Tomorrow (1974/75) all Australian TV serials produced since then have been designed to capture the large prime time evening audience. Since the early 1970s the soaps have proliferated: Certain Women, The Box, The Sullivans, The Young Doctors, Cop Shop, The Restless Years, Prisoner, Skyways, A Country Practice, Sons and Daughters, Carson's Law and Prime Time. Other dramatic forms, like the play and the single-episode series, have almost disappeared from commercial television. But it is important to distinguish, within this successful group, between those that are strictly continuous (The Young Doctors, The Sullivans and Sons and Daughters, for instance) and those which are organised on the principle of the two-episode block (Cop Shop, A Country Practice and Carson's Law). In the former time is continuous from one episode to the next. In the latter group, time between blocks is usually unspecified. This has consequences for showing repeats of the two kinds of serials. Blocks can be repeated out of strict sequence. Thus, past blocks, certain highlights of A Country Practice, have played in the Christmas/New Year non-rating season. Such programming is not possible with A Country Practice's `twin', the continuous serial, Sons and Daughters, produced in Channel 7 studios in Sydney across the corridor from ACP. While the success rate in the last ten years has been striking, the soap opera is not invariably successful. There has been a string of rating casualties: Arcade, Punishment, Holiday Island, Taurus Rising, Waterloo Station, Kings and Starting Out. Which means that when James Davern in 1979 put papers in his typewriter to start work on what would ultimately become A Country Practice he had no way of knowing whether his ideas would reach production, or whether the program would succeed in finding an audience. Another Soap Davern had had a long and varied career in television. Beginning as an engineer with ABC radio in Melbourne in the early 1950s, he had become a pool director in television. In that capacity he directed the pilot episode of Bellbird in 1966. Subsequently on Bellbird, over the next seven years or so, he was a script writer, script editor, director, producer and executive producer. At the same time Davern wrote scripts for the Crawford police dramas and it was on one such script that he met Lynn Bayonas, then a script editor on Homicide. Subsequently their paths crossed again. Lynn Bayonas moved to the ABC,and they worked together on Rush as script editor and producer. Davern came to Sydney as head of ABC TV Drama in 1975, and remained in that position until he resigned in 1977. He did not immediately sever his links with the ABC. JNP, a company he had formed, was commissioned to produce scripts for the ABC series, Patrol Boat; Davern wrote six of its first 13 episodes and acted as script editor on the other seven. Meanwhile, Lynn Bayonas had moved to Sydney where she worked for the ABC for three years before going freelance as a writer. She wrote for The Box, Skyways and Holiday Island and was `thinking of cutting my throat' after that experience when Davern approached her with the outline of what was to become A Country Practice. F36 Craft Australia 2002 words F36a Craft Australia - Autumn 1986 Australian pub signs By Linde McPherson Have you ever been curious about the old beer and stout advertisements featuring sporting heroes that recently adorned the outer walls of most Sydney pubs? The few surviving today are quaint reminders of a lost art. The tradition of displaying pictorial signs on the exterior of hotels has a long history and it is to the old English pub that one looks to find direct antecedents for our pub sign. In 18th and 19th century, the British developed the association of sport with alcoholic beverages. Inn keepers often organised boxing and snooker competitions on the premises; steeplechase meetings in the fields attached to their public houses. Archery was often practised in inn gardens. In Sydney, Tooth and Co. adapted the British tavern pictorial signs to local socio-economic conditions. The Tooth pub signs you see featured here reveal an innovative and creative approach to brewery advertising of the 1930s and represent a highly successful advertising formula which continued until well into the 1960s. Despite their initial similarities, Tooth pub signs developed a character quite different to their English predecessors. This was partly due to the fact that they served another function. That is, they advertised brands of beer, not the existence of a specific hotel. The signs also looked different due to the 'transfer process' technique used in their production. This technique is similar to the manner used to apply registration labels to car windows. The layout is first marked out in pencil on litho paper. The design is then traced onto medium weight porous transfer paper, coated with glue and undercoated in readiness for the design's completion in oil-based paint. Once the painting is finished it is coated lightly with a pale varnish. When dry a second coat is applied and left tacky. The paper is then submerged into a tray of water to loosen the glue size, lifted out, and positioned paint surface forward onto the sheet of plate glass. A roller is then used to remove all air bubbles and the transfer paper soaked off gently with a sponge. The glue is washed away and excess water removed. The glass pictorial is allowed to dry for twenty-four hours before the entire design is coated with a heavy bodied paint to seal and protect it. When completed the signs were distributed to hotels in the Sydney metropolitan area as well as NSW country towns. Subjects usually related to the area. For instance, coastal hotels featured beach scenes with lifesavers, bathers and divers. Football pictorials showed players dressed in the local team's colours. Between 1930-1939, relentless pressure was directed towards the liquor industry by the Prohibitionists. Tooth and Co. was concerned to enhance its public image, deflate the 'wowsers' and gain publicity. Therefore, the choice of subject matter was fundamental. Subjects were highly idealized. The sportsmen always looked well-groomed despite the characteristic vigour of the activity. Looking at the impeccably turned-out footballers in the Tooth's Ale ad one is struck by the message that football is a 'good, clean sport' which is enhanced by a beer for a 'real man', an upright citizen, neither a loafer nor a misfit. In the 1930s women were not admitted into saloon bars: it was not considered ladylike. The exclusion of women from hotels is reflected in the substantially male-dominated imagery of the signs. Women are, however, found in some of the pub signs although they are never seen competing in any sense. They ride or sit beside their man as equals in the cause of promoting the health-giving properties of barley and hops. They are seen diving, swimming and riding thus giving their tacit approval to the product. They help to counter arguments put forward by the 'wowsers' relating to the harmful effects of alcohol. With the passing of time, Tooth's pub signs became 'old fashioned' and no longer economically viable. A more sophisticated approach to advertising adopted by Tooths in the late 1960s meant that the pictorials became redundant. Today, a growing interest in popular culture means that such advertising signs now have another function and potential value as 'social documents'. In recognition of their importance the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (The Power House Museum) in Sydney obtained the entire collection of Tooth pub signs as well as historical material relating to the company's brewing interests. The pub signs form an important link with social history, with advertising techniques before the age of television and the present calculated psychological advertising warfare. There is much to be gleaned from the collection. Linde McPherson has a B.A. from Sydney University majoring in the history of art. She has researched pub signs extensively. F36b Craft Australia - Autumn 1986 What's in a name? The Art/Craft Debate Again Julie Ewington The art-craft debate is rather like the poor relation of aesthetics: thin, unwanted and thoroughly exhausted. In fact, everyone seems to find the whole question a bit of an embarrassment. Craftspeople resent feeling like the lesser cousins of artists. Artists, for their part dislike being tagged as culturally `superior'. Robert Rooney's evident impatience in his recent contribution to the debate in Craft Australia (85/3) is a case in point. It is evident that re-circulating the old hierarchical distinctions so familiar in the art/craft debate won't help us out of this slough of despond. Better ways of talking about relationships between the arts and crafts are needed and are at hand in new perspectives brought to bear on craft practice by several recent publications on women's traditional arts, assisted by handy ideas borrowed from the sociology of cultural occupations. For questions of the production of artistic, and therefore social, value merit serious attention, no more so than when older cultural forms are being radically re-thought through the impact of the mass media. Gender is the most under-employed factor in the analysis of the arts and crafts. The classic concerns of the debate have been with the nature of craft artefacts and how they relate to the culturally privileged practices of `Art'. Only rarely has the question been asked: `Who is making these things?' Robin Morgan's acid one-liner has surfaced before in this journal: `What men do is art - what women do is craft'. Like most half-truths, this crack succeeds because of what it conceals as much as what it reveals. For Morgan neglects to mention that `art' and `craft' are quite distinct signifying practices in our culture now and have long histories of drawing on different creative traditions; what women and men tend, as professionals, to cluster in either one or the other; and that non-professional work in the visual arts is almost invariably organized along gender lines that amount to social norms. In Australia the creation of the state Crafts Council and The Crafts Council of Australia , with all their functions including this journal, has been the work of women. This was unique among the new arts organizations that blossomed during the 1970s. The crafts sector is still dominated by women: David Throsby's Australia Council report, The Artist in Australia To-day, reveals that 61 percent of craftspeople are women, whereas in the visual arts situation is almost the reverse, 62 percent of the artist population surveyed is male. (The only other arts industry in which women outnumber men is dance. See Table 3.4, Artists' Demographic Characteristics: Sex.) So the question of gender should shed some light on the vexed art-craft debate. Several recent publications have been crucial to my thinking along these lines: the second volume of All Her Labours, the Women and Labour Conference Papers, entitled Embroidering the Framework (Hale and Iremonger, 1984, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock's Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) and Rozsika Parker's The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (The Women's Press, 1984). The Australian collection, Embroidering the Framework, is as interesting as it is diverse with articles on subjects ranging from the deliciously seductive novels published by Mills and Boon, to the fascinating account of why, after the Second World War, the Federal government of the day declined to establish community and child-care*chld-care services. But one contribution is of particular interest here: Patricia Crawford's `The Only Ornament in a Woman: Needlework in early modern England'. This consideration of needlework from the 16th to the 18th centuries does not attempt an assessment of the objects themselves or the themes of the work, but offers a sociological account of needlework as a socially sanctioned strategy for keeping women busy. Crawford is careful to point out though, that the only women with time on their hands (literally) were gentlewomen, and that the poorer women were obliged to sew for their lives. The `craft' of needlework is revealed not as one unified practice but several, pursued for different reasons and with different results. Apart from women condemned to what has been called `the slavery of the needle', what did the highly-skilled creators of richly decorated household treasures think of their labours? Patricia Crawford suggests some enjoyed it, some accepted that it was a virtue to be kept busy, and some positively hated the needle. Her own view is that the second response most closely represents the contemporary social use of all this wonderful work, and it must be recognised that Crawford is writing about one of the most glorious chapters in the golden history of English needlework. She gives the final word to a (male) commentator of the 1630s, John Taylor, whose view of the matter was that the needle was entirely beneficial for all concerned: It will increase their peace, enlarge their store, To use their tongues less, and their Needles more. In Crawford's account the wealth all this industry represented is barely mentioned, nor the great status women acquired by their labours. For Crawford needlework represented an elaborate form of servitude, but servitude nevertheless. Her assessment that `... it gave a woman neither an economic reward nor any kind of power' (p.12) perpetuates a denial of domestic work in all its forms that was one part of the feminism of the 1970s. A very different value is seen for the needle arts in the approach adopted by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock. Old Mistresses (1981) is a key text in the reappraisal of art history's treatment of visual work by women. Its great contribution is precisely to refuse to see women's art, crafts and culture as evidence of unrelieved and unilateral oppression. As the authors summed up the work: We have tried to establish that women have always been present as artists, but that a variety of positions have been ascribed to them at different periods, and their ways of getting into art practice have varied and been affected by different historical factors ... Women artists have never been excluded from culture, but they have occupied and spoken from a different place within it. That place can be recognised as essential to the meanings dominant in our culture, for the insistent stereotyping of women's work as `feminine' makes women's art a kind of opposition, a structuring category constructed to ensure never-acknowledged masculine meanings and masculine dominance. Such a position is for women themselves problematic and contradictory, but also potentially radical. Griselda Pollock, `Feminism, Femininity and the Hayward Annual Exhibition 1978'. Feminist Review, 2, 1979, (p.34). Thus women's traditional arts are accorded a new value by the authors. Speaking about quilts Parker and Pollock write: `... they are a distinctive form of art with different kinds of relations between maker and object and between object and viewer and user which, as William Morris foresaw, are in some ways richer than the relations of making, using and reception customary in high art.' (p.78). Morris was one of the first modern artists to realise the rich possibilities of needlework and its historic importance in English culture. Rozsika Parker's interest in it has flowered in The Subversive Stitch. It is an account of English needlecraft different from any other, neither endlessly descriptive, nor dismissive, nor a `Song of the Shirt' whose only tune is complaint. F37 Demystifying The Museum 2003 words Demystifying The Museum Donald Horne The Language of Museums I hope you will forgive me if I begin with some theoretical speculation. I am doing this to make sense of what follows. The basic idea I should like to put forward is that, as humans, we create 'realities' of various kinds which enable us to think and act. We simplify existence. We construct, if you like, hypothetical models, which become 'reality' for us. Existence itself is so diverse that there is no general agreement about what is going on, but in any particular society there are likely to be particular prevailing agreements about 'reality'. So, in a way, one can speak of the 'language' of a society and see that 'language' expressed not only in words, and visual images, but in institutions, in gestures, in clothes, in buildings, in food and in a great number of other ways, including museums, (which have been described as the cathedrals of modern society). As have suggested in my book, The Public Culture, in modern industrial societies one might speak of a 'public culture', of a kind that didn't exist in earlier societies. This 'public culture' purports to be 'the national life'. One might see it connected with affairs of state and ceremonies of civil religion; in the activities and values of the great bureaucracies of government, of business and of trade unions; in public propaganda (including, in capitalist societies, advertising), in what we describe as 'the news', in the entertainment, education and culture industries, in sport and tourism, in public art and architecture, in the way we spend our leisure, even in shopping. And in museums. It is from this perspective - their place in a public culture - that we might look at museums, because museums also have, as it were, a 'language'. Museums are 'saying' something to us ('saying' some things, not 'saying' other things) and it is important to ask what is is that the museums are 'saying'. In raising such a question I am not just talking about the intentions of the people who run museums, but about the way museums actually operate, the objective consequences of their existence, what they can actually mean to us. I will give a few examples. The first is that of the art museum. If you ask people running an art museum what they think they are doing they are likely to give two kinds of answer. One will be connected with the storage and conservation of art objects; the other will be an educational objective. But we also know from surveys that one of the 'functions' (objective consequences) of art museums has also been to put the ordinary people in their place - to make them realise that they know nothing about art. Surveys have been done in the past which suggested that the majority of working class people who went to an art museum, could come away with a principal impression of it as a cathedral. I am not suggesting this is always or even usually the effect of art museums. One can recognise, for example, that the use of special exhibitions is one way of overcoming the awesomeness of an art museum. But often when people go to an art museum they see a whole lot of pictures put out like a child's stamp collection, with no coherent meaning - without any of the intellectual coherence, for example, that might be found in a book. And this can assist them in believing that they 'know nothing about art'. Also worth noting is the way art museums can give an impression of 'art' that is a historical. They can sometimes lump together all kinds of products, some of which were produced by people who saw them as 'art' and others by people who didn't know the concept of 'art' in its present meaning. It has only been in modern industrial societies, with their secularism and their distinction between art and life, that the very idea of 'art' as we know it has been developed, yet one can go into, say, the first gallery of the Australian National Gallery and see lumped together in that room objects all of which are described as 'art', yet most of which, when they were first produced, were not produced as 'art' at all. An African mask, which was made for special ritual purposes, is presented as exactly the same kind of thing as a Monet water lilies study, which was produced for hanging in a museum. So another 'function' of a museum can be to project an idea of a universally acknowledged 'art' - when in fact there has been no such thing. Another example comes from technology museums. The people who run technology museums can imagine they are giving people information about machinery, about industry, about science. But since machines do not reproduce themselves such museums must also be (whether this is intended or not) social history museums. Yet the people running them may not face up to this responsibility. Take the Science Museum in London, one of the world's greatest collections of technological devices. As soon as you walk into it you see a splendid display of steam engines arranged down the middle of the first hall that would do credit to a sculptures gallery and from this you may get the impression that somehow or other the Industrial Revolution began with steam engines - that steam engines are what most mattered about the Industrial Revolution - and as if to compound this impression, there not far away, is also the workshop of James Watt, presented as the great pioneer of the steam engine, and therefore the Industrial Revolution. There it is, the exact workshop, with five thousand pieces in it, as it was the very day Watt died. Back into your head may even come the schooldays legend of how Watt, the great genius, sat in the kitchen, watching the kettle boil and then invented the Industrial Revolution, the importance of steam engines is just one factor among many others. There is no general account of the Industrial Revolution in the Science Museum, but a particular account is inferred by the selection and arrangement of objects. Upstairs are some of the important factory machines connected with the Industrial Revolution, but even these are not given any social meaning. You learn nothing about the way in which people were already being disciplined to work in factories and in other institutions (arguably one of the important preconditions of the Industrial Revolution); nor do you learn anything about the agricultural revolution, nor about the capital accumulations from the slave trade and other profitable businesses, nor about the secularisation of society, nor about the development of banking nor about any of the other factors also seen as connected with the story of the Industrial Revolution. So if you go into the Science Museum what it is likely to 'say' to you is that technology means machines reproducing machines; one steam engine begat another steam engine, which begat another steam engine, until finally some other machine by some type of mutation begat electricity - as if the machines simply had an internal relationship with each other, reproducing each other without any human agency. This pure emphasis on technology culminates in a space museum (whether it's in Moscow or Washington) in which, with a great sense of technological triumphalism, it looks as if machines now own the universe. A second last example: In the Scandinavian countries in particular, but also in many other places, there are great open air 'folk museums' put together at the time when the peasantry was being destroyed, taken from all kinds of regions and lumped together in typically discordant museum fashion. These are intended to recall peasant life for us, yet many ordinary middle-class persons going to them might not so much consider what peasant life was like, as look for new ideas for redecorating their own converted cottages. The open air museums of Scandinavia became, above all, the apotheosis of the wooden beam, which for several generations of Europeans has meant naturalness, sincerity and good taste. A last example: in turning against some of the rigid discipline of the earlier museums we now have the button-pushing museum. In itself, this can seem an idea founded on very sound principles. But there is, of course, always the difficulty that in the 'fun museum', the only thing the visitor might remember is the 'fun' itself. A visit to a museum becomes an exercise in pushing buttons with the illusion, perhaps, that, somehow, by doing this, one gets the machines under control. The 'Magic' of Museums Not only is it necessary to recognise that museums exist in particular kinds of society and that they have 'languages' which can be examined in terms of what appear to be prevailing 'realities' in these societies; we might also recognise that part of the significance of museums comes from what might be described as their 'magic'. For example, just as medieval pilgrims went to participate in the magic of holy relics in cathedrals some of the objects we see in museums are now secular relics, with an aura of scarcity, costliness and, in particular, 'authenticity'. One of the established forms of this 'magic' comes from what Irving Goffman has described as the ceremonial agenda of obligatory rites. We tend to go to some museums partly because they are on a kind of life agenda: they are something we must go and pay our respects to: they are part of a ceremonial order that has been laid down for us. Going to museums becomes part of growing up. Again a comparison with a cathedral is relevant. Just as in the Middle Ages people might have been taken to a cathedral and shown those comic strip stories up in the windows, or in the mosaics, or in the carvings, describing important events and ideas, people can now be taken to a museum as part of the revelation of life's mysteries. I certainly remember this from my own experience. I can remember periodic trips to museums in Sydney which acted as refresher courses in what it might mean to be human. When we went to the Art Gallery, being a human being meant partly a concern with 'the bush' and its landscapes, but more exactly, as I remember it, it was a concern for displaying reverence for nineteenth century academic art (since the Art Gallery at that stage, being a very modern gallery, was stocked with it). Above all my enormous respect for the Art Gallery came because at our house we had the four fat volumes of The Story of the British Nation, illustrated by all of the famous academy history-paintings of British history, and two of these, 'Rorke's Drift' and 'Chaucer at the Court of Edward III', were in the NSW Art Gallery. I had this feeling that there must be something important about Sydney; it had 'Rorke's Drift' and 'Chaucer at the Court of Edward III'. We would also go to the Australian Museum. This seemed a reminder of the field of knowledge with which I was familiar at school - one studies bones and rocks and zoological classifications and so forth. There it was - knowledge, laid out for inspection in appropriate categories, like an encyclopedia (and I had as much respect for Cassell's Children's Book of Knowledge as I did for The Story of the British Nation). What the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (the old one, of course) really told me was that technology had finished: the whole museum seemed so out-of-date. Technology was something that had existed once: perhaps it reached its apex in the Strasburg Clock. However the most significant visit on our family's ceremonial agenda of obligatory rites was to the war museum (at that period housed in Sydney). When my father, who had been a digger in the Great War, would take me to the war museum, I had a real sense of meaning. F38 Ecos - Winter 1986 2023 words Genetic engineering: the state of the art It is only 43 years since Dr Oswald Avery and his colleagues at Rockefeller University in New York showed that DNA had some role in bacterial genetics and heredity. At the time it seemed a fairly unremarkable discovery, but in the intervening years our knowledge about the pivotal role of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) in the development of all organisms has accelerated relent+lessly. To achieve the current understanding, scientists had to develop techniques for manipulating DNA. In 1958 the first enzyme capable of the test-tube synthesis of DNA was isolated, and in 1967 the enzyme DNA-ligase, capable of joining two DNA chains, was discovered. These 'tools' were soon complemented as scient+ists isolated the first of the 'restriction' enzymes that cut the DNA chain at specific points. With this battery of enzymes it was only a matter of time before a bit of cutting and stitching and tampering with the genetic code occurred and, in 1973, Dr Herbert Boyer, Dr Stanley Cohen, and col+laborators at Stanford University and the University of California reported that they had been able to isolate, and artificially recombine, DNA from one strain of that workhorse of modern molecular biology Escherichia coli and then transfer it into another strain. This opened up the possibility of breach+ing the species barrier and constructing completely new organisms that would never have existed without the intervention of man and his test-tubes. And soon it came about, with E. coli being the recipient of a range of plant, animal, and viral genes. The science of genetic engineering had been born. Announcing the birth, the world's media trumpeted to a bewildered public all the possibilities inherent in the miraculous new technology: super-plants, super-cows, a cure for cancer, vast riches. Very little was left to the imagination. So far the miracle hasn't eventuated. While some animal products have entered the market-place, only one genetically engineered product with a significant impact on human welfare has come onto the market: human insulin, which has an unusual amino acid composition that makes it easy to produce (see the box). Other proteins - and proteins are the major concern of genetic engineers - have more complex structures that are not so amenable to manipulation. The molecular biology of DNA and the way the proteins it codes for are synthesised and packaged within organisms have proved more complicated than those early cuts and stitches in the genetic code suggested. Proteins often need a lot of follow-up work after the DNA specifies their production. They may need to be trimmed to the right size, or their internal structure tightened up by the addition of, for example, a sugar molecule; in some cases they then have to be correctly packaged and presented to the outside world. Scientists within CSIRO have been actively exploring the potential of genetic engineer+ing, and some of their experiences provide insights into the sorts of problems that have to date stymied the full development of the new technology. The problems they have encountered emphasise the complexity of genetic expression and reveal how a better understanding and very clever manipula+tion of the system will be necessary if molecular biology is ever to reach its full commercial potential in, for example, vaccine production. Developing a vaccine Many bacterial and viral pathogens have a protein that they use to attach themselves to the cell of the organism they infect. This protein meshes with a receptor on the host cell and, after attachment, the pathogen brings into operation a fresh battery of proteins - enzymes - that complete the penetration of the cell and produce the full-blown disease. Attachment is of fundamental import+ance to the pathogen's colonisation of the host and continuing survival, but in the never-ending battle between host and pathogen this is often thwarted by the activities of the host's immune system. Circulating white blood cells focus on molecules on the surface of the pathogen, including the attachment protein (im+munologists call these molecules antigens), and this leads to the host synthesising a matching protein (or antibody) that, just like the receptor on a vulnerable cell, binds to the invading protein, effectively immobilising the pathogen. Soon after, the invader is devoured by the scavenging cells that form another part of the immune system's armoury. Vaccination is a way of accelerating the host-pathogen interplay. Killed or attenuated pathogens, incapable of causing a full-blown infection, are introduced into the potential host. The host's immune system responds as if it has been assaulted by the fully infectious pathogen and pro+duces antibodies, which continue circulat+ing in the body, protecting the host from any fresh challenge by the pathogen. The production of vaccines is a sophisti+cated process with high standards that need to be maintained: major public health problems have arisen when people were dosed with `killed' pathogens that still retained their pathogenicity. In addition, the process is often difficult and/or expen+sive. For example, production of the influenza vaccine involves growing the virus in fertilised hen's eggs. Many of these problems could quickly be overcome if the pathogen DNA (or the related ribonucleicacid, RNA) coding for the attachment protein, or other relevant antigens, could be isolated and then synthesised in a friendly bacterium. A new generation of vaccines is being developed for a wide range of human and animal diseases, and one that has reached a fairly advanced stage of development is for footrot - a crippling, debilitating disease of sheep caused by the bacterium bacteroides nodosus. A conventional vac+cine against footrot is available, but its production and quality are beset by the sorts of problems mentioned above, and its high cost - about 80 cents a dose, with two doses being necessary - deters graziers from using it. Fighting footrot Dr David Stewart of the CSIRO Division of Animal Health, Dr John Mattick, Dr Brian Dalrymple, and Ms Margaret Bills, of the CSIRO Division of Molecular Biology, and Dr Tom Elleman, Dr Neil McKern, and Mr Peter Hoyne, of the CSIRO Division of Protein Chemistry, along with Ms Beau Anderson and Professor John Egerton, of the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Sydney, have made consider+able progress in developing a new footrot vaccine through the use of recombinant-DNA technology. Dr Stewart and his colleagues at the Division of Animal Health showed that the important footrot protein occurs in the fine hair-like filaments covering the surface of the B. nodosus cell. Although the exact function of these `hairs', termed fimbriae, in the footrot organism is uncertain, it seems likely that they are involved in attachment to, or colonisation of, the tissues of the hoof by the bacterium. Once attached, the invader then produces an array of enzymes that break down the protein in hoof tissues and produce the footrot syndrome. The fimbrial proteins are built up from protein sub-units, and their production through genetic engineering could simplify vaccine production. The first step in the construction of such a vaccine is the isolation of the genes responsible for the fimbrial protein and its assembly. The scientists achieved this by breaking up the B. nodosus DNA with a restriction enzyme and then placing individual frag+ments into a plasmid - a short piece of bacterial DNA - that also contained a gene coding for antibiotic resistance. After these `recombinant' DNA molecules were transferred into E. coli, they cultured the bacteria on a medium amended with antibiotic. A combination of genetic tricks enabled the scientists to determine which bacterial colonies (or clones) contained the B. nodosus DNA; and to find out which ones contained the fimbrial sub-unit gene, the team challenged the bacteria with antibodies against the fimbrial protein. Out of the two thousand clones prepared, eight were found to be producing the sub-unit. But it's not so simple as that: while these genetically engineered E. coli could be induced to produce copious quantities of the fimbrial protein sub-unit, no mature fimbriae were formed. A closer look at individual bacteria revealed why: the sub-unit protein was embedded in the cell membrane and had gone no further. The group then tried the same trick with a strain of E. coli that possesses fimbriae but, again, mature fimbriae refused to form. From other studies on the fimbriated E. coli, the Australian group knew that a cluster of five or six genes is involved in the construction of fimbriae. One codes for the fimbrial sub-unit, another for a larger protein that anchors the fimbriae to the cell wall, and the remainder are apparently involved in the assembly of the mature fimbriae. A similar assembly system probably operates in B. nodosus; presumably the other genes involved were not transferred to E. coli along with the sub-unit protein gene and this may explain their failure to produce typical fimbriae. However, attempts to transfer a larger party of the B. nodosus genome, or to use E. coli's fimbrial assembly genes, have thus far provided no solution. Evidently there is a basic incompatibility between the fimbrial systems of these two bacteria. However, when Dr McKern sequenced the B. nodosus protein sub-unit it became clear that this had a great many similarities with those occurring in the fimbriae of Neisseria gonorrhoeae (one of the venereal disease organisms), Moraxella bovis (the cause of pink eye in cattle), and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (a common sap+rophyte.) P. aeruginosa, in particular, is easy to grow and its genetics are well understood. More importantly its fimbrial assembly machinery is compatible with that of B. nodosus because, when the scientists trans+ferred the footrot bacterium's protein sub-unit genes into it, the new host produced bulk quantities of intact mature B. nodosus fimbriae. A patent application has been lodged for this process and preliminary tests on the fimbriae suggest that they are at least as good as the conventionally produced vaccine. And, because P. aeruginosa is easier to grow than the footrot bacterium, the protein yield is much higher, suggesting that production may be much simpler. At present the footrot vaccine is being put through further trials involving the various CSIRO Divisions and the University of Sydney, and an agreement between CSIRO and two animal health companies for its commercial production is being negotiated. There are still some technical problems to be overcome - one, a rather common complaint in genetic engineering, is that the recombinant bacteria tend to be unstable in culture - but if all goes well Australian graziers should be able to make use of one of the first genetically engineered vaccines in the near future. Engineering plants and animals Bacteria have made such an enormous contribution to the science of molecular biology because of their simplicity. As members of the group of organisms known as prokaryotes, they lack a membrane-bound nucleus where the DNA is found. The great bulk of the bacterial DNA occurs in a single long chromosome floating around the cell's interior; as such, it is easily accessible compared with the DNA found in the eukaryotic organisms - plants and animals - that have a nucleus. The eukaryotic cells of plants and animals contain much more DNA, packaged away in the nucleus. Any introduced foreign DNA has to traverse the cell membrane (and with plants a substantial cellulose cell wall before the membrane) and then the nuclear membrane, before it can possibly be integrated into the host genome. Such a tortuous path presents problems to biologists attempting to manipulate the genetics of plants and animals. Large numbers of bacteria can easily be grown from a single cell using only rela+tively simple media containing carbon and nitrogen sources, some minerals, and possi+bly some growth factors such as the B-group vitamins; but plant and animal cells are much more demanding and this creates further complications. Individual eukaryotic cells are difficult to manipulate and they demand extra growth factors, such as those found in blood serum or an array of hormones, if they are ever to grow in culture. Even then they are still very refractory. For example, members of the cereal family - including the rice, maize, and wheat that provide the bulk of the world's calories - refuse to form complete plantlets, capable of growing on in the wider world after removal from their test-tube residence. F39 Australian Geographic - January 1986 2000 words Living in the Pilbara When the earth moves, so does the population By Phil Jarratt WHEN my father left the Pil+bara for the last time, 45 years ago, he wasn't leaving much behind. Just a long, long jetty, which was the pride of his town, a failed butcher shop, a few good friends and three streets of slap-up huts which had been knocked down by a blow and slapped up again, all in the space of a decade and a half. When Hitler marched on Poland, my dad and his mates marched - well, drove - on Perth, covering the 1200 corrugated dirt kilometres in just 26 hours in my father's '34 Chevy. They had the world in front of them and the rock-hard, heartbreak dust of the Pil+bara behind them, and in those days there was a reason to be cheerful at every milepost south. In the early part of this century the north-west of our country was as inhospitable as it was in 1688 when William Dampier had noted sourly on disembarkation at Shark Bay: "The land is of a dry sandy soil, destitute of water, except you make Wells ... the Inhabitants of this Country are the Miserablest People in the world." It was a place where men came to make fortunes and then got the hell out. It was not a place that inspired new beginnings and yet many of those lured by its mineral potential stayed on - more often out of financial necessity than desire. My grandfather, Walter Oswald Jarratt, was one who stayed. Lured from the Victorian farm+lands by the prospect of riches, he worked in the huge Whim Creek cop+per mine at the turn of the century and stayed on to watch it become the biggest and most profitable in the Southern Hemisphere. When its German owners were in+terned during World War I, however, the mine fell on hard times and my grandfather was retrenched. In 1916, the year my father was born, Walter Oswald was hustling a buck the best way he could, odd-jobbing around the big stations of the North West, hunting camels and sinking fence posts. But the work became scarce in the 1920s and, with a wife and four children to support, my grand+father drifted south in search of new opportunities. In 1925, he heard about the exciting developments at the town of Onslow at the mouth of the Ashburton River. A major jetty was under construction at nearby Beadon Point and the entire town of some 150 residents was to be relocated. There were construction jobs aplenty, so Walter Oswald loaded his family and all his worldly goods into the back of his Willys Overland, threw a tarp over the perishables and hit the dusty track. The new town of Onslow was noth+ing more than a half-finished hotel and some hastily-built shacks dotted along the beachfront between the jetty and the creek, but he was able to rent two rooms from the mailman and the family established itself amidst the sand and the sawdust. By the time the construction work was finished the Jarratts had come to re+gard Onslow as home. Searching for a permanent niche, Walter Oswald returned to his original trade and opened a butcher shop. He supplied meat to the townsfolk and visiting pearlers, whose luggers made use of the new jetty at the southernmost point of their sweeps out of Broome. When Walter Oswald died unexpec+tedly in 1931, my father left school and donned the apron. His three sis+ters took turns behind the counter and their mother, Jesse, smartly ac+quainted herself with the noble art of bookkeeping. But my father was not cut out for cutting up carcasses. At night in his bachelor pad near the Beadon Hotel he studied the radio operators' manual and dreamed of a life at sea in the radio room of a grand ship, far away from the choking dust of the Pilbara and the depressing salt+pans of the Ashburton. Among my earliest memories are faded photographs of a great twisting jetty - the pride of Onslow - and the homely old Beadon Hotel with its vast verandahs, the luggers in port and the fine-chiselled features of the Malays and Japanese who manned the pearl-diving bells. Accompanying these photos was a wealth of bedtime stories about the characters of the old North West and the harsh, honest lives they endured. The Pilbara seemed to me then such a romantic last frontier, full of the sights and sensations a city boy could never know. By the time I left school, the Pilbara had come to mean something quite different. It was the heart of the fabulous mining boom, wherein raced the pulse of the State of Excitement in those heady days of the late 1960s. It was big red moun+tains of iron ore, the deafening roar of heavy machinery and a place where towns sprang up out of the desert almost overnight. It was, we were told, Australia's future, but it was Newman and Tom Price, not Cossack or Roe+bourne, and my father was the only person who ever spoke of Onslow. ENTER AN ARMY OF MEN AND MACHINES Seen from the air, the new towns of the Pilbara look like the cross+hatching on an artist's unfinished landscape. They are orderly, like tiny pieces of Canberra hurled across the map. They are green on a canvas of brown, the result of years of hard work with the watering can. On closer inspection the towns are uniformly neat (`Tom Price is a tidy town' proclaims the sign) and seemingly soulless. Shopping centres point inwards, as though ashamed of their enterprise, and pubs are brick cells attached to drive-in bottle shops. The rows of houses remind me, as do those of the Woden and Belconnen valleys and the new suburbs of Dar+win, of nothing so much as the facades of sweet-smelling suburbia knocked up on Hollywood back-lots for the filming of situation comedies - so normal they become surreal. It is as if the building code was devised by an automaton. In stark contrast to the orderly streets is the backdrop of spinifex and wild mountain ranges. From the Tropic of Capricorn north to the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, there is not a Pilbara township out of sight of the great prehistoric escarpments of the Hamersley and Chichester Ranges. Over 2000 million years old, these mountains are scarred with fault lines and lava flows, and give way to deep and terrifying gorges. It is dramatic country in every way, but no less dra+matic has been its development over the past two decades. The mineral wealth of the Pilbara has been known and exploited for almost a century, but the booms in gold, copper, manganese, tin, lead and silver have come and gone, leaving ghost towns and shattered dreams in their wake. Since 1960, however, when the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies repealed the embargo on the export of iron ore, that metal has ruled the region. Getting it out of the ground and onto huge ships has become the lifeblood of the Pilbara's growing population. At the 1961 census there were 4000 residents in the four shires of the Pilbara; by 1981 the population was almost 50,000, and one company alone - the giant Hamersley Iron - had invested more than $1.2 billion in plants, ports, railways and company town dormitories for the workforce. Its mining operation had become so immense that each day nine, mile-long ore trains hauled more than 150,000 tonnes of iron ore from the mines at Tom Price and Paraburdoo to the port of Dampier, where a daily ore carrier was completely loaded and sent on its way to Japan. The mind-boggling enormity of Hamersley Iron's development is dwarfed, however, by the broader consideration of what remains un+touched: some 200 billion tonnes of high-grade (68 per cent or better) iron ore, by one prospector's estimation. "A hell of a bloody lot!" according to Lang Hancock, the rogue bull of the Pilbara. Since his discovery of the Tom Price deposits in 1952, Hancock has fuelled his vision of the Pilbara becoming the `Ruhr of South-East Asia' with the $30,000 a day he re+ceives in prospector's royalties from Hamersley Iron. Hancock, now 76 and without a pilot's license since a heart bypass operation, claims to have found the ore deposits as he flew through a gorge to avoid low cloud on a trip to Perth. He later returned to the spot in a jeep and staked a claim. But he did not go public with his high-grade find until the iron embargo was lifted. He then set about finding a backer who could finance such a giant under+taking. In 1962, Hamersley Iron was born out of an alliance between the British-based Conzinc Riotinto and the American Kaiser Steel. Two years later the company signed contracts with seven major Japanese steel mills and, in 1966, operations began at Tom Price. Into the heat and dust of the Pilbara came an army of men and machines. DESERT SUBURBIA In Paraburdoo on a Sunday night, the hotel (another brick cell) closes at 7 o'clock, but visitors are welcome at the Demons Australian Rules Foot+ball Club, a shed on the edge of town past the drive-in movies. Like all male-dominated mining towns, Paraburdoo is mad about sport and, like all sports-loving miners, the men of Paraburdoo have power+ful thirsts. Thus in the Demons on a Sunday night, after a big weekend of footie, golf, archery and tennis, it is perhaps understandable if the last-drinks bell is roundly ignored and the members and guests continue to slake their thirsts with Emu Bitter. A dozen or so of the town's 344 single men, cleanshaven but tough in sing+lets and shorts, remain in the bar. The conversation is about the need to get involved in as many diversions as possible and the need to get out of town - to Perth or to Asia - as often as possible. "I save up and go to Thailand," says a miner named Andy. "Not just for the women either. I go rafting up near Chiang Mai. That's about as far away from mining as you can get." But even in the very middle of a company town a man can lose him+self in leisure. For this reason Parabur+doo, with fewer than 2500 residents, boasts 29 sporting clubs - includ+ing tae kwon do, pistols, darts, dog breeding, speedway and the Hash House Harriers - and 13 service clubs, including an amateur repertory company. The town's facilities, built by Ham+ersley Iron little more than a decade ago, are superb, although some, such as the 18-hole golf course, have to be viewed within the context of the generally brutish environment. "Iron ore fairways and sand greens," said club champion Bob Pepper, deli+cately chipping onto the oiled green, where the ball came to an abrupt halt. "We tee off on rubber pads and gener+ally don't have any problems on the fairway, unless you hit a chunk of ore and ricochet into the scrub. It's these sand greens that are a bastard to play. We mix oil into the sand to make it stick together, but you really can't putt on it. We've got an Astroturf green on order and I can't wait until we've got 18 of them." Pepper, a 10-handicapper who drives truckloads of ore from the open face to the crusher for seven hours each evening, plays nine holes every morn+ing and 18 on Sunday afternoons. He loves his golf, even on a track of iron. "It's the only thing that keeps me sane," he said with a grin. The mine, tucked behind the hills just a few kilometres out of town, directly employs more than two-thirds of the population. The rest of the workforce looks after the needs of the miners. In other words, despite a process which is quaintly called 'normalisation', if you haven't sold your soul to Hamersley Iron you don't belong in Paraburdoo. F40 In Future - September/October 1986 2003 words Our wealth is our people By Phil Noyce "OUR wealth is our people", proclaimed the tourist poster from Cyprus. "Imagine selling Australia with a line like that", I mused. My cynicism took a more positive turn with the thought, "what a lucky country to be able to talk about its people as a unified group." And as for the notion of people being the source of wealth, it seemed quaint and folksy - good for tourist images of a poor peasant economy, clever propaganda for a country invaded by a foreign power - all up, quite inapplicable to a country like Australia. Comparisons with Australia did however, begin to provoke some important questions, such as: who are our people? With migration upon migration, can we ever become a unified group - Australians? Then there's the wealth side of the equation: our wealth is our natural resources. Our people are our consumers. Agriculture and mining have kept us living in the manner we've become accustomed to. They've provided us with all that goes with being a developed country - high levels of expenditure on education, health and welfare, public transport, social security and so on. Food in our bellies, money in our pockets and a roof over our heads are things we have taken for granted. 1986 has seen that comfortable view take quite a jolt, with the plummeting of the Australian dollar on the world stage. Suddenly, it seems, we're out in the cold; our friends have found others to play with and nobody seems to want what we've got like they used to. It's time to do some very serious stocktaking. What are our assets? How have we got into this mess? What's happening to us and what can we do about it? The history of Australia's sources of wealth seems to go something like this: 1. We have ridden on the sheep's back. We have relied on minerals and natural resources for our source of wealth. We do rely on non-human resources. 2. Because we had the money, we've been able to prop up manufacturing industry via tariffs and other forms of protection whenever it couldn't stand on its own two feet. 3. Services such as education, health and welfare consume huge amounts of the wealth generated from elsewhere. Our people are anything but the source of our wealth. While that may be an over+simplification of our past, it's a recipe for disaster if applied to our future. To underscore my case, let me add a fourth point to this primary/secondary/tertiary sector analysis: `established' Australians - those from between two and eight generations of occupancy of this country - have been subsidised to date by schemes that no longer produce wealth in an internationally competitive way. That is, economic strategies that worked for us forty and more years ago have produced a new Australia, with new problems, new resources, new possibilities but are nonetheless redundant, wornout strategies now. For example, immigration, largely from Southern Europe, provided the immediate workforce for post-war industrial expansion. Migrants came, fundamentally, for better life oppor+tunities for their children. With minor concessions to the influence on cuisine, fashion, design, film and the arts, the chief economic contributions to Australia that have been accorded recognition by Anglo-Australia are muscle power and menial work. Now that the need for this type of work is drying up (and their children growing or grown up) we're faced with new challenges Riding on the sheep's back, living off mineral wealth and leaving the dirty work to others has developed some rather insular, non-productive and ingrained habits in the most urbanised country in the world. Australia's mainstream cultural institutions - the ABC, the VFL, the universities and school systems, to mention a few - reflect prevailing attitudes in Anglocentric Australia that barely recognise the multi+cultural reality of this country. We're now faced with critical choices between continuing along the old "she'll be right" path or beginning to have a long and careful look at just who Australians really are, if we're to make the best of what we've got. Education in an Industrial economy As Industrial tecnology operates on a hierarchy of management/design/assembly-line for production of goods, there has to be a system of sorting out who does what. Given the choice, most of us would prefer to be the supervising engineer rather than the labourer, the chief executive rather than the stenographer, the farmer rather than the farm-hand. For its part, the education system has helped Australia's industrial cogs run smoothly by providing both training in the professions and trades and the selection mechanisms to help sort out who does what. But getting the right balance between the twin, often conflicting functions of selection and skilling is fundamentally an economic, not an educational question. Or, to put it another way, the social and economic requirements for selection are imposed on education, which takes its task as that of minimising the anti-educational imp+act created by the need to sort, stream and classify students for the world outside. Education, after all, is about extending, developing, empowering individuals and inducting them into the culture. Whereas credentialling plays a vital role in deciding and legitimising who gets to do what in the world of work, education is also meant to provide the chance for a better life for individuals and to contribute to the national bank of skills, understanding and knowledge. Proponents of strengthening this latter function of schooling have largely been regarded as on the `soft' side of the education debate, the former being regarded as the economic imperative. Education has a number of instruments to assist in the labour sorting process, including the following: System structures, which confine particular cohorts of students by the way the institutions are set up - technical schools, girls schools, private schools, public schools, TAFE Colleges, the universities and so on. Credentialling structures, which define the currency ratings by which a qualification can be valued and compared with other qualifications. Institutional practices, which refine selection between individuals at the classroom level, using methods such as streaming, ranking and grading. Enter the Information Revolution If robots start replacing assembly-line workers, computers do all the routine calculations and word processors replace typewriters, we find ourselves either with a lot less jobs or a lot of different ones in need of creation. Given that, our only chance to remain internationally compet+itive and with full employment is to look to the creation of new jobs. What might they look like, what skills will they require, are the central questions. Whereas industrial technology required the strict and narrow separation of job functions, of clear divisions of labour, information technology requires a convergence of abilities, a fusion of skills and a broader understanding of the purpose of the task. It is the advent of information technology into industry, farms, schools, home and office that has upset the balance not only in education but in all of our institutions. If there's no great call for bank-tellers who are a whizz at add-ups, what does that mean for maths at school? What does it mean for bank-tellers? If I'm working on a machine that performs functions spanning seven industrial areas, what does that mean about my union coverage? Take for example, the way I'm writing this article: a few years ago, it would be written out longhand, edited, re-written, given to a typist, marked up and sent out for typesetting, brought back for proof+reading, corrected, given to a designer and then to a compositor for page makeup. What I'll do when I finish typing now on a personal computer is have a look at it on the screen, make some editorial, typographical and layout decisions and click the printout button. Between the current revolution in desktop publishing and everything in printing since the invention of the linotype machine, clearly then, a lot is happening. For example, WYSIWYG -"What You See Is What You Get", is a name given to computer programs that show you on the screen what your page will look like when it's printed. It means that the author is in control of the product. It means that the divisions of labour created by the technology of the Industrial Age - writer, typist, sub+editor, typesetter, proofreader, designer, compositor, printer - can now be merged (once again) into the labour of one person. At its most profound, the advent of information technology heralds and enables a return to Renaissance values and the indivisibility of thought, creativity, action and work. At its most sinister, (and I would argue, economically foolish) it could simply be used to wipe out jobs. In short, information technology has dramatic implications for work manage+ment, for the structure of the union movement, for the role of education and the content of schooling - everything. The critical thing to understand about the Information Revolution is the concept and practice of technological convergence: the combining of computers, telecommun+ications and information systems to form new tools. To use them well (both in application and in the development of new tools), we need to have general and broad, rather than particular and specialised skills. An international comparison - the Japanese ascendancy The Japanese are in a position of technological and economic ascendancy precisely because they understand this idea of technological convergence best and build their work organisation, union movement, education system and so on around it. People are described as `underskilled', never `unskilled' and it's everybody's responsibility to raise the general skill and competency level. This leads to what seem to Australian eyes as novel approaches to work management and practice. For example, the use of `quality circles' (discussion sessions that include all staff, from apprentices to management), industry-based, rather than craft-based union organisation and their traditions of company loyalty are only three of a whole complex of factors that make the Japanese particularly adept in exploiting the emerging cross-disciplinary technol+ogies, such as `mechatronics': the fusion of mechanics, electronics and robotics, or `optoelectronics': the fusion of optics and electronics. These industries are now providing a wide range of employment in areas such as manufacturing, information processing and alternative energy development. The fact that they have a monocultural society with values that, to a multi+culturalist, would only be described as racist, is a cultural reality which has been put to great economic advantage via their work organisation. When Mr Nakasone makes public statements to the effect that the Japanese are more knowledgeable and perhaps more intelligent than Americans because the US has allowed blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans to settle in America, he is apparently echoing widely held sentiments in Japan. Whether his explanations are correct or appropriate is not important for the point I want to make, which is this: a clear sense of cultural identity is the foundation of a nation's activity and productivity, and in that respect, we have much to learn from others. What does all this mean for Australia? What does all this mean for Australia, a polyglot, multi-lingual nation without a clear sense of its own traditions and a brief history of being wealthy because we were naturally well-endowed. Clearly, it cannot mean that we try to mimic the practices of cultures totally different from our own. Equally clearly, we do need to understand better what makes economic+ally successful countries tick, (partic+ularly where we import holus-bolus the technologies they produce, if only to use them effectively and with understanding). Most important of all, we need to reassess what our people assets are and how we might best develop and exploit those riches - international ties with the non-English speaking world, the language assets of over a hundred ethnic minorities, the cultural links of almost one-third of the population of this country who come from non-English speaking backgrounds, the potential for tourism created by the devaluation of the dollar, to mention a few peculiarly Australian assets, each with massive potentialities for use in conjunction with existing information technologies. We do, in short, have much more to sell the world than Hoges and Fosters. F41 Grass Roots 2025 words F41a Grass Roots - February 1986 Folk flower tonics by Roy Victor Love, Kuraby, Qld. Last issue we looked at how the tonics worked, converting flowers into tonics, making personal mixtures and included instructions and guidelines for making up and dispensing the folk flower tonics. Folk Flower Tonics BANKSIA, Banksia integrifolia (boiling method) The lemon coloured cylindrical shaped flowers of this native occur all year round, but more often during autumn or late winter. The seeds are shed soon after maturity, unlike other banksias which retain their seed until the death of the plant. The Banksia remedy is for a feeling of insecurity or fear of the future, also a slightly wrong approach to life. BLUE BILLY GOAT WEED, Ageratum houstenianum (sun method) The prolific blue pom-pom flower is attractive to some people and not to others. This plant grows wild in many gardens as a weed. It has been effective in cases of loneliness, isolation and introversion. Key words - `lost and lonely'. BLUE PIMPERNEL, Anagallis arvensis (caerulea) (sun method) This plant is poisonous and looks like chick weed. It has a pretty little blue flower and grows in the cooler mountain regions. Only the flower is used, which is not poisonous and is attached to the plant with a very fine stem. For purity of thought and wisdom; when we know we should rise above `angry feelings' even though there may be justification for BLACK-EYED SUSAN, Thunbergia alata (sun method) A dainty flower with yellow petals and a `black eye' in the centre, it secretes a sweet sap which attracts ants. This creeper has also been called `Bright Eyes'. This tonic has been helpful in treating a despondency due to lack of direction in life. For the person who lacks perception and cannot see the real functioning of things - he or she cannot see the wood for the trees. `Bright Eyes' is for insight. BROWN KNAPWEED, Centaurea jacea (sun method) A pink-mauve flower atop a long stem. The leaves are long and narrow. We found this plant growing wild in black soil but it is not a native of Australia. For a complete lack of confidence, for people who are too influenced in times of trouble by other people's criticism of their actions, both past and present. This remedy helps a person to again take charge of their life and decisions. CREEPING LANTANA, Lantana motevidensis (sun method) This creeper has a purple flower, similar to that of the lantana*lantan bush. It grows over fences, ground or shrubs, and is frequently used in gardens and landscaping. This tonic is for thoughts that trouble and preoccupy you before or after friction or conflict with someone, irrespective of who is in the right. It is also for hate and allied thoughts - it promotes love. CREPE MYRTLE, Lagerstroemia indica (boiling method) This shrub bears profuse soft, crinkly flowers which weigh the limbs down. The variety we potentised is of a soft pink colour. This remedy is for disillusionment or disappointment, if one expects people to feel the same about certain subjects or aspects as oneself. This will help to bring about tolerence*tolerance of other people's attitudes and priorities. DAY LILY, Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus (sun method) The variety potentised has individual flowers on strong stems above tall, grassy foliage. When faced with seemingly insurmountable problems or emotional worries, this remedy will allow you to take one day at a time, to break down the large problem into smaller manageable ones. GOLDEN WREATH WATTLE, Acacia saligna (sun method) This native has pom-pom flowers and long narrow leaves. The Golden Wreath Wattle blooms in August or September. This is for people who are worn-out or weak during spring and early summer. IVORY CURL FLOWER, Buckinghamia celsissima (sun method) Bushy evergreen native shrub with masses of sweet-smelling cream flowers in summer. This remedy is for the elusive fear that one cannot fight because its source cannot be pinpointed. It can be for a spiritual fear of something trying to tear one down; or for the nameless terrors than can come upon an individual for no particular reason. MOONLIGHT CACTUS, Hylocereus undatus (sun method) `The Ray of Light' is a big beautiful cactus which blooms at night in late summer. This remedy is for the person who is searching for light in the darkness, and will help them to see which way to go, and to reason out their problems. MORTON BAY CYPRESS/BRIBIE PINE, Callitris columellaris (boiling method) This large tree is a native of the Morton Bay area and is laden with pollen when flowering. It is a soothing remedy for helping to calm a restless, uneasy feeling, and has been used for emergencies and in panic situations. MOSCHOSMA, Iboza riparia (sun method) A deciduous shrub with soft, grey green foliage, bearing small feathery flowers in autumn or winter. When crushed the leaves have a strong smell. For tiredness through being drained by people who need love and understanding. This remedy is invaluable for those people working with patients, eg. social workers, practitioners, healers, who give a lot of themselves, and can therefore become very depleted. NASTURTIUM, Tropaeolum majus (sun method) This ground cover plant is commonly found in gardens and has rounded leaves and red or yellow flowers. This is a soothing remedy for tired people who seem to have small reserves of energy which are often and easily depleted. PINK PERIWINKLE, Catharanthus roseus This appears similar to the pie-eyed periwinkle, but the leaves are bright pink. This is for people who need love, attention or pampering. They feel they have missed out on their share of recognition for their efforts. They feel they deserve more attention. In children this may appear as aggression. PINK SHAMROCK, Oxalis latifolia (sun method) A small plant, this garden weed is very prolific under shady trees. It has a tri-lobed leaf like clover, but much bigger, on a straight stalk of up to 10 to 20 cm. The flower is mauve-pink. It is for acceptance of, or adjustment to, change. PIE-EYED PERIWINKLE, Catharanthus roseus (sun method) This flower has five plain white petals on a plant which grows to 60 cm high. The centre of the flower is pink, thus `pie-eyed'. A remedy for the suppressed spirit which is trying to give expression but cannot because it feels trapped in a situation. This feeling can lead to depression and hopelessness because creative ability is supressed*suppressed. PRIMULA, Primula obconica (sun method) A garden plant with small pink and mauve flowers. This remedy has been helpful for shock eg. accidents, bad news. PURPLE GINGER, Dichorisandra thyrsiflora (sun method) This garden plant has long leaves and beautiful purple flowers growing in clusters on an upright stem. This tonic helps those who have been through a difficult time gather their thoughts and compose themselves. It eases the accompanying mental exhaustion, and may be needed after another remedy or series of remedies has helped the patient. QUEEN OF THE NIGHT CACTUS, Epiphyllum sp. (sun method) This beatiful bloom looks almost the same as Moonlight Cactus. For the person who has made progress but is in danger of slipping back, and who needs strengthening to move on. They may have overcome an illness or crisis, but their health is still hanging on a fine thread. SENSITIVE BUSH, Mimosa pudica A ground creeper with small leaflets which close when disturbed. It has small, fluffy, pale pink flowers. The nature of this plant seems to point to the type of person who closes off to the outside world; loneliness, and to some extent shyness. SMART WEED (PERSICARIA), Polygonum Lathifolium (sun method) When I applied to have this flower and plant identified, Smart Weed was the name that the government botanist gave to it. However, I have since seen a colour sketch of it in a book, labelled Persicaria. This remedy helps to strengthen the mind for good during times of mental conflict. It erases the impulse to do the wrong thing under stress conditions, or indeed at any time. It can help people who, through an impulse that is not their real self, have difficulty in giving up food, alcohol, drug or smoking addictions. Their real self wants to give it up but the impulsive self wants the addiction. In some rare cases a patient will become slightly worse at first when taking Persicaria, but if they are patient and keep trying they will win the battle. SILKY OAK, Grevillea robusta (sun method) A big tree with sticky sweet flowers. This remedy is for nostalgia and for people who have an emptiness in life due to change or loss of someone or something - a bereavement. The positive side is making home in the present with a full heart. TRIGGER PLANT, Stylidium graminifolum (sun method) This plant has dainty pink flowers growing on a long stem. A remedy for temporary frustration because present circumstances prevent the realisation of dreams and ambitions. TANSY, Tanacetum vulgare (sun method) A herb with small yellow button-like flowers, found in many gardens. This is for the very deep depression and despair that one sinks into when feeling cut off from all that one has previously held dear. Doubt of one's faith, chosen path in life, or partner, when previously one had been so sure of following the right way. Very deep despair and doubt. VETCH, Vicia sativa guarangustifolia (sun method) A legume which grows wild in the spring. It grows about 30 cm high and has small pods which are quite edible but too small to be of value for food. This remedy has a soothing effect on a troubled person who does not know what job to do first. If they start one job they feel guilty that they should be doing something else. The vetch remedy will make them happy doing one thing at a time and be more efficient. WHITE GINGER, Hedychium coronarium This grows to approx 2 m high with large, firm, white, very fragrant flowers. This remedy is for the person who is attempting to live a more spiritually oriented or an improved lifestyle where more help can be given to their fellow man. Modern living demands can lock this person's thinking too much into the physical day-to-day life. WHITE PERIWINKLE, Catharanthus roseus c. v. albus (sun method) This flower is similar to the pie-eyed vinca, but has no pink eye. It is sometimes called Madagascar Perrywinkle. Vinca is a common garden plant which comes in many colours. This remedy is soothing and orientating to a troubled, depressed or scattered spirit. WILD CARROT, Daucus carota (sun method) A cluster of white flowers with a small black central spot. This remedy is for the person who suffers from feelings of being a black sheep, and the odd one out in their present company. We have available a comprehensive booklet on the Folk Flower Tonics, containing further detailed information on potentising, plus a full set of colour photographs of all the flowers and plants - price $25. Roy Victor Love, 43 Didcot Street, Kuraby 4112. Ph: 07-341-3592. F41b Grass Roots - February 1986 As We Turned the Soil by Patricia Fisher, Cowra, NSW. We discovered Grass Roots by accident ten years ago. Thank you for changing the direction of our life. Looking back though I realise how innocent we must have seemed to all those well-meaning people who warned us against going to the country. I was city born and bred and knew nothing of the hardships of country life. We were young yes, but with three tiny sons to feed my husband wasn't about to throw a good job in the air and try to eke out a living in the depths of the bush somewhere, however much we longed to. Our babies must come first. We took the only road we felt was open to us. A job in a small country town, sadly six hundred miles away from a much loved family. We bought (or we and the bank bought) a huge old weatherboard house on two blocks of land on the very edge of town. We set to work and dug up most of the back yard only to discover that Glen Innes was in the middle of a severe drought. F42 Wildlife Australia 2012 words F42a Wildlife Australia - March 1986 Of fire, water, earth and air The Writings of Thick+thorn by Glen Ingram Last century, natural history was popular - very popular. In Aus+tralia, like most countries in the west+ern world, the writings of naturalists were in demand and avidly read. But unlike in Europe, very few popular books about the natural world were printed in the Australian colonies. There is, however, a vast endemic literature. Unfortunately, it is hidden from most of us because it is in news+papers. If we are to discover a tra+dition of Australian natural history writing, we must look to those old periodicals. Here lies a paradox. Because news+papers were ephemeral, their contents influenced few. Books would have created a tradition, but their numbers were lacking. It is no accident that a native naturalistic writing, like Aus+tralian science, had to be reinvented in the 1950s. But that is the lot of a country with a colonial past. I would like to introduce you to `Thickthorn', my favourite writer of natural history of yore. He wrote for newspapers in the 1880s. His style was attractive: rich phrases moulded with spirit but marked with the hard edge of empiricism. His description of the nest of the White-throated War+bler, for example: quote `Thickthorn' was the nom-de-plume of Charles Walter Devis. Devis was born in Birmingham, England, in 1829. After completing a Bachelor of Arts at Cambridge, he entered the Church of England and became the Rector of Brecon in Somersetshire. Eventually, he left the church to be+come curator of the Queens Park Mu+seum in Manchester. In 1870, he de+parted England and settled at Rock+hampton in the colony of Queensland. There he wrote his articles as `Thick+thorn' in the tradition of the classic English clergyman-naturalists, a class which flourished in the nineteenth century. One contemporary writer high+lighted the advantages of combining theology with natural history: quote But what attracted clergymen, and indeed what made natural history so popular across all class barriers, was Natural Theology. Its principles were persuasive. Nature was the Creation of God and in Nature one could see His Workings. The living kingdom exhibited His Perfection and His Spirit. By observing Nature and at+tempting to understand the Creation, one came closer to God. The spirit of natural theology per+meated Thickthorn's writing: quote The spirit was in his writings but God wasn't. Thickthorn was a con+vinced Darwinist. Even so, the essays of Thickthorn are a cogent argument against the proposition that Darwin killed spirit. Certainly evolution killed natural theology. Observing nature had led to a theory that seriously chal+lenged the idea of creation. Natural history had become dangerous. It was no longer a respectable pastime. The writings of `Thickthorn' are also a foil against the proposition that to write scientifically as a naturalist one must write coldly. Science, like natural history, is a world of wonder, curiosity, and imagination. Watch `Thickthorn' as he first encounters the burrowing habits of nesting Black+headed Pardolates: quote `Thickthorn' wrote his last natural history article in The Queenslander on 18 March, 1882. But for Charles de Vis at 53, a new career was just be+ginning. He changed his name to de Vis, switched to straight scientific prose, and took the position of Curator at the infant Queensland Museum. In the next thirty years he wrote about 200 papers and described and named several hundred species of vertebrates from Australia and New Guinea. The animals for which he is best remem+bered are Bennett's Tree-Kangaroo, the Golden Bowerbird, McGregor's Bowerbird, the Spiny Rainforest Skink, and the Red-eyed Treefrog. The death of `Thickthorn' and the birth of `de Vis' was a gain for science. But it was a loss for natural history. What is sadder, however, is that you, the reader, have little opportunity to read `Thickthorn's' writings. Perhaps it is best not to lament. The 1880s were very different from the 1980s. You might be annoyed by the misin+formation, stunned by the opinions, and enraged by the shooter-mentality. Try this piece on one of our favour+ite animals! quote F42b Wildlife Australia - March 1986 Telling Tales on Turkeys by Darryl Jones The floor of a rainforest is a fertile and verdant metropolis, a shim+mering world where life teems among layers of decay. It is the largest of the citizens of the rainforest floor that has drawn me into this twilight world, a bird whose method of breeding gives it a particularly intimate link with the riches of the leaf litter: the Australian Brush-turkey. Stalking these sagacious creatures in the quiet of their rainforest home re+quires patience, alertness and one's greatest abilities of observation. More practically, the bed of leaves needs to be damp and an indifference to insect assailants is also essential. Today the leaves are crisp; every twig snaps under the boot. No Pademelon or Pitta will ignore this clumsy intruder this morning. Mostly glimpses are all I see; the scuttle and panic of shy ani+mals in flight, or the momentary stare of some defiant inhabitant outraged at the blatancy of this intrusion. So often our style of inquiry into nature offers only a transitory view, of disturbance and disrupted routines, adequate for a check-list but unsatisfactory for a closer insight into secret lives. A solution to such disruptions is, simply, to hide! And the best way of assuring that there is always a hiding place is to provide your own. A good length of hessian wrapped around three or four saplings serves very well. It's cheap, light and easy to relocate. This one is serving its third (and last) season, judging by the ex+tent of the mildew and rot. Inside I sweep the leaves from the seat, sit and squint through one of the little win+dows. Though my passing has scattered some of the early risers, the disruption is soon forgotten in the urgency of the dawn call to exuberance. My disap+pearance and silence as non-existence is soon evident in the continuity of the life all around me. The slight `crunch ... crunch' of feet on the carpet of leaves causes eye to defer to ear; a regular `thump ...thump ... thump', usually in threes quiet and even, is the Noisy Pitta. A louder, quite abandoned tossing of leaves, this way, then that, relentless, busy and single minded: the Southern Logrunner. Also loud, industrious and even more explosive is the Whipbird, casting aside great feetfuls of leaves. But only one creature has the steady, purposeful stride of that ap+proaching. I sit up and take pencil and notebook to hand, noting time and place and hence return to the practical necessities involved in this type of dis+covery. A large Brush-turkey has stopped on the edge of the area in front of the hide. I silently swat the trio of mos+quitoes sitting on the back of my hand and lean forward to get a better view through the window. I note the bright yellow wattle swinging at the base of his deep red, naked neck (` ... adult male ...'); then read the plastic wing tag. Once white, for males, a year of dust bath+ing in the rich red rainforest soil has stained the tag to a dark maroon. However, I can still read the number: 5 white is Cecil. A little more than a month ago Cecil, along with a small number of the older males of this location began the arduous task of constructing the massive compost heap they have learned to use as an incubator for their eggs. For up to six hours on many days, Cecil raked all of the leaf litter from a wide area towards a growing pile. As the huge pile grew the leaves in the damp interior began to ferment. After about three weeks the internal temperatures had risen to well over 40$degrees;C before slowly declining and eventually stabilising at around 33$degrees;C. From then on, having moved perhaps three tonnes of leaf litter and soil, Cecil's energies were turned to the task of guarding his castle from poss+ible take-overs by other males, and to await the arrival of the females! It was about two weeks ago that all of this labour, this careful and costly investment in his future was lost to Cecil. His closest neighbour, the se+cretive and despotic Wallace, having chosen his moment carefully after the main toil was over, usurped Cecil in a series of mighty tussles. Cecil then re+treated deeper into the forest and im+mediately started constructions again. Wallace thereby added Cecil's mound to his own real estate and set about pa+trolling both mounds. Cecil's forlorn revisit to his original mound is short lived. A deep, resonant `mmoo-oo-oom' announces the arrival of his victor. Cecil, his wattle with+drawn to a small cravat out of reluc+tant respect, rapidly retreats into the forest depths. Wallace regally ascends to the top of his new mound without losing a definite composure, the mas+ter of all he surveys. Unlike most other avians, and even their closest kin, these peculiar fowl have a domestic arrangement all their own. Whereas the other Australian mound builders, the Mallee Fowl and the tropical Scrubfowl, regard mon+ogamy as sacrosanct, the Turkeys hold much more libertine views. Liaisons between the sexes are fre+quent but brief. Besides the brief period necessary for mating, time spent together is limited to that required for egg laying. There are no pairs as such, and although a particu+lar female may visit a certain male re+peatedly one could hardly describe the relationship as a bond. Some females can visit up to three males during the season. The males however, bound by their decision to guard their estates, must remain at home and hope for a visit. Some make it, most don't and usually give up fairly soon. Wallace has stood atop his ill gained castle, fidgety and nervous, making the occasional rake at the surface. The transformation to a regal male, swag+gering and strutting, pecking effectedly at the mound surface is dra+matic. Yes, quietly and unobtrusively, a female has edged into the arena be+fore me. Only by this exaggerated sub+missive stance, neck withdrawn and all movements slow, does she escape the usual violent expulsion Wallace issues to all other intruders. Iris, her once yellow wing-tags also stained to orange, walks diffidently up the es+carpment of the mound. Wallace con+tinues to pace up and down, pecking, posing, until Iris' mien suddenly changes. From apparent submission to flagrant flirtation, she spreads her wings and fluffs out her body feathers: the message is unequivocal to Wallace. They mate, briefly and per+functorily. Iris recovers instantly. No longer either flirtatious or coy, she is now a hen of resolve and purposefully sets about raking and digging in the top of the mound. She has an egg to lay, the result of another union of some days previously. (Whether this egg is Wallace's is something I cannot say, but neither, I suspect, can Wallace.) Wallace, having recovered from his rush of passion, now sees before him only an intruder and an audacious one. He proceeds to cuff and peck Iris. She, shielding herself with an upheld wing, digs determinedly*determindly on. Wallace's har+rassment continues. Twice he succeeds in driving her from the large hole she is digging but she is soon back to her thankless task. Only when she is obvi+ously settling down to lay does he cease his attacks, and even appears to take some interest in the activity. Iris is now almost entirely hidden within the hole, having dug down to a depth that satisfied her numerous tempera+ture probes. The mouthful at about 40 cm seemed to be about right. She finally emerges after some min+utes of silence, another of her huge eggs in place, firmly positioned by carefully treading in the damp, warm earth around it. This egg is only one of perhaps thirty she may lay this season, a total weight of which comes to about three times her own body weight. She leaves soon after, sent on her way finally with another savage charge by an unsentimental Wallace. He returns to his domain, fussily filling in the hole and generally tidying up. Wallace eventually leaves the mound to feed for the first time at around 8 o'clock, a full three hours after he rose. F43 Australian Natural History 2006 words F43a Australian Natural History - Summer 1986-87 Floating giants Icebergs originate from the calving events of floating ice at the seaward boundary of outlet glaciers and ice shelves. The thick ice of the Antarctic interior, flowing constantly outwards under its own enormous weight, converges into fast-moving outlet glaciers at the continental margin. As the ice protrudes into surrounding waters, the effect of buoyancy causes further spreading and thinning, forming floating ice tongues or ice shelves. Bending stresses, caused by waves and swell, soon extract their toll and icebergs are born. Since the days of the earliest polar explorers, Antarctic icebergs have thrilled writers and photographers, terrorised mariners, fascinated civilian and military engineers, and tempted tourists, yet they've all but been ignored by scientists until relatively recent times. Icebergs (huge frozen masses of fresh water) are a common feature of both Arctic and Antarctic oceans. However, Antartic icebergs are generally much larger, colder and more numerous than their Arctic equivalents. For example, whereas a `very large' Arctic iceberg might meas+ure 750 x 350 x 30 metres in length, breadth and thickness, a `very large' Antarctic iceberg could measure 1,500 x 750 x 400 metres. With these dimen+sions, it would weigh up to 400 million tonnes - almost the entire annual water consumption for the city of Melbourne - and have a freeboard (height above water) equal to that of a ten story building (freeboard for tabular icebergs being typically 15 per cent of their total thickness). Of all the icebergs in the Southern Ocean, those over 1,000 metres in width ('width' be+ing the maximum horizontal dimen+sion at waterline) comprise only about four per cent by count, yet 51 per cent by volume. Most Antartic icebergs, however, are less than 500 metres in width, with the largest numbers (more than a third of all sightings) being in the size range of 50 to 200 metres. Imagine the mixture of terror and enchantment that must have 'shivered the timbers' of early explorers, who, in flimsy and sometimes ill-equipped sail+ing vessels, dared to probe Antarctic waters in search of the 'southern conti+nent'. One of the earliest of these ex+plorers, to whom polar regions were not unfamiliar, was Captain James Cook. For Cook, the hazards of sailing among icebergs were not taken light+ly. On his second voyage of discovery (1772-1775), Cook (in the HMS Reso+lution) circumnavigated the globe at an approximate latitude of 60°rees;S, cross+ing the Antarctic circle on three occa+sions but without actually sighting the mysterious continent they had hoped to discover. He notes: "...About noon came close under the above mentioned island of ice and were by a kind of indraught or some means or other insensibly sucked so near that we had scarce any probabili+ty of escaping being drove against it which must have been inevitable de+struction and it was equally as un+known almost how we got off without and we scarce got a cables length from it..." In the 20th century, icebergs have occasionally created news. The sinking in 1912 of the HMS Titanic, for exam+ple, was caused by the collision with a relatively small iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. The stagger+ing loss of 1,513 lives, making it one of the worst maritime disasters in the his+tory of mankind, jolted maritime authorities into organising the first 'In+ternational Convention for Safety of Life at Sea'. This resulted in the in+troduction of safety measures (today taken for granted), such as a place in a lifeboat for each person embarked, lifeboat drills to be held during the voyage and a compulsory 24-hour radio watch. Distribution and Dissolution A traditional method used to col+lect information on iceberg distribu+tions during Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions has been shipboard observations, both vis+ual and radar, within a 12 nautical mile radius of the ship. Icebergs sizes are es+timated and the numbers within desig+nated size categories recorded in a logbook with latitude, longitude, wa+ter temperature, sea-ice concentration and any other relevant information. Detailed size measurements are gathered for tabular icebergs and the more northerly pinnacled icebergs. In these cases iceberg height and width are measured trigonometrically, using a sextant to obtain the subtended an+gle, in conjunction with a distance ob+tained by radar. Satellite surveillance is at present not capable of monitoring iceberg movement and decay, except for gigantic icebergs larger than say ten kilometres in width. Typical problems incurred using satellites include obscu+ration by cloud, difficulty in distin+guishing between sea-ice and icebergs, limited resolution and cover+age, and difficulty recognising the same iceberg(s) again after breakage or rollover has occurred. The mechanisms by which freely floating icebergs are reduced from large to small are as yet not fully un+derstood, although they are known to be a combination of breakage, calving around the edges and subsurface melt. Melt plays a relatively minor part in the dissolution of large icebergs al+though it becomes the major mechan+ism in the dissolution of smaller, blocky icebergs. The speed of subsur+face melt is easier to appreciate when you realise that typical Southern Ocean water temperatures are around +1°ree;C. Melting of the above water por+tion by the Sun's direct radiation also has a negligible effect on iceberg dis+solution. Generally, the meltwater so produced percolates down into snow and firn (compacted snow) layers and simply refreezes. The effect of rollover tends to en+hance all of the above dissolution processes, particularly subsurface melting. Icebergs have been observed to roll over abruptly, although the spectacle is one that few are privileged to witness. Rollover will occur when, after breakage and melting, the thick+ness of an iceberg becomes less than or equal to the width. Sometimes ice+bergs may 'turn turtle' (180°rees;), although a roll of less than 90°rees; is more com+mon. Rollover is the primary factor re+sponsible for pinnacles - caused by thrusting edges or corners high into the air. When an iceberg `rolls' it rev+eals a characteristic smooth and rounded underwater shape. Normally a wave notch is visible, marking the position of the previous waterline. Sometimes the waterline may be stained green from algae, although this is uncommon. Rollover can also identify those icebergs that have sedi+ment layers embedded in the icemass. Particle matter in the ice and sediment from the sea floor can give rise to the appearance of black or dark green icebergs. Large tabular bergs, freshly calved from glaciers or iceshelves, may last for a period of years if they either run aground or remain in waters close to the Antarctic coast. Here the surface water is extremely cold, which minimises melt. More importantly, however, the presence of sea-ice dampens the swell and produces a flat sea, devoid of wave action. This en+vironment is one in which there are minimal bending stresses or erosion forces, responsible for the dissolution processes of breakage and calving. The deep draught (portion below water) of Antarctic icebergs causes them to drift in the direction of aver+age current movement. Icebergs, un+like sea-ice, are not greatly affected by winds or irregular surface currents. Bergs will simply rip through sea-ice like tissue paper if the overall current is at variance to the top few metres of the watermass. Large tabular icebergs are known to have travelled tens of thousands of kilometres in westerly moving cur+rents of Antarctic coastal flow (that is, around the coast over the continental shelf). Icebergs tracked by satellite transponder have shown typical speeds of up to half a knot. Size distributions of icebergs flow+ing in the easterly-moving Antarctic circumpolar current have been stud+ied statistically to determine life ex+pectancy. Analysis has shown that for icebergs less than 1,000 metres in width a 'median-life' of about 0.2 years may be expected. (The term median-life refers to the time taken for half of the icebergs in one particular size cate+gory to be reduced to half of their original numbers by breakage into smaller sizes.) This means that a medi+um iceberg of 350 metres width could be expected to last between six months and two years before all traces of the original berg are destroyed. Esti+mates of life expectancy are necessari+ly imprecise because of the fact that icebergs, like human beings, come in all manner of consistency, quality and shape. Recent studies of Antarctic ice+berg distributions have shown that the common northerly limit seems rough+ly linked to the average maximum ex+tent of Antarctic sea-ice at about latitude 59°rees;S. One might be forgiven, however, in thinking that the Antarctic convergence (or polar front), at lati+tude 51°rees;S in the Australian region, would have delineated the absolute northern boundary of icebergs, since this is where a sharp temperature difference occurs between the cooler waters of the Southern Ocean and the warmer oceans of mid latitudes. Sightings of icebergs north of the Antarctic convergence are relatively rare, however on 15 January 1982, two icebergs were sighted at 48°rees;S, 111°rees;E - only about 1,800 kilometres south of Perth. These icebergs were al+most certainly the remnants of a gigan+tic iceberg and may have come from as far away as the Weddell Sea, more than 13,000 kilometres to the west. Icebergs at these latitudes were well known to the captains of the clipper ships who, after rounding the Cape of Good Hope on their way to Australia, would have had to weigh up the risks of steering further south to pick up the strong westerly trade winds versus the increased likelihood of disastrous en+counters with icebergs. Reflections in Ice Perhaps on the next occasion you find yourself lounging in a reclining chair and sipping a cool lemon-squash, you might like to reflect, finally, on why the ice blocks in your drink have so much less freeboard than that ob+served for tabular icebergs. The answer to this question is twofold. First, the iceberg is floating in salt water and therefore has slightly more buoyancy. But second, and more importantly, most of the above-water portion of a tabular iceberg is in fact snow or firn with a density much less than that of ice. A typical thick+ness to freeboard ratio for tabular ice+bergs is about 6 or 7:1 although for irregular icebergs this ratio is more likely to be about 2 or 3:1. Icebergs are a fascinating phenomenon and a surprising amount can be learned about them by simply watching an ice cube melt and roll over in a glass of water! F43b Australian Natural History - Summer 1986-87 Formulating the future Many would like to see the Antarctic set aside, one way or another, as a continent free from development or exploitation of any kind. Humanity's history of discovery, explora+tion and eventual exploitation has seen waves of people move from their native land to inhabit what were for a long time seen as uninhabitable regions. Two hund+red years ago, white man moved into Aust+ralia shortly after moving into southern Africa. We are now showing signs of moving into space, the deep sea and Antartica. What are the possible resources available in Antartica? Although little hope of exploitation exists realistically in the near future, some possibilities do exist in the medium to long-term future, particularly fisheries (being ten+tatively developed now), ice (as a water source), minerals (including hydrocarbons), tourism and what I term serendipity - the unexpected results of research. In discussing the future it is also worth considering the impact on Ant+arctica of mankind's activities else+where on the globe. Ice as a Water Source Antarctica contains 25-30 million cubic kilometres of ice, enough to raise the sea level by some 70 metres should it melt. It sheds some 12,000-14,000 cubic kilometres per year as icebergs, with a water purity far in excess of normal distilled water. There has been much popular speculation about the potential role of icebergs as a water source, most centring on the concept of towing ice+bergs to the site of water need. A 30 million tonne iceberg is at the larger end of the medium-sized ice+berg range and contains about .04 cubic kilometres of ice, enough water to serve the needs of a city the size of Perth for seven to eight weeks in summer. That amount of water is worth some $14-15 million in Perth or $18 million in Adelaide. Both cities perceive a need for additional water for both water supply and quality con+trol.