My life got suddenly easier about a week ago when I finally got a new generator from China.  It took six months from ordering and paying, to receiving it.  The battery bank after 16 years of toil, was down to its last few percent of capacity.  It wasn’t obvious to me how aged and degraded the battery bank was until the constant input from the generator was out, testing the capacity which towards the end went rapidly downhill.  I ordered another set of batteries from a Cairns company, but it took a couple of weeks to arrive.  During that time I had to poke along the batteries using a petrol genset, but they were exhausted 3 hours later.  In the day if the sun was shining, which wasn’t often, I could wait until 8pm before firing up the infernal combustion engine and run it for an hour or two, more would be pointless as the batteries couldn’t absorb more.  Then getting up every 3 hours during the night to fire it up again, then 1 hour later to turn it off.  That was just to keep the lights on for the guests.  The inverter is factory set to drop out when the battery volts go below 21V for more than 3 seconds to protect the batteries.  Sometimes I didn’t make all the night calls and the system shut down.  Mostly when the guests were asleep (but I was not), so they didn’t notice.  It is rather like having babies again.  I went through the ‘great sleep deprivation experiment’ some 30 plus years ago having 2 kids, but I didn’t expect to have to do it again.  This reminds me what my daughters are currently or recently going through with their little tots.  It is a hard row to hoe, especially when I have had 30 years remission.

By extraordinary bad luck (for both of us), I had a guest who suffered from sleep apnea and required a powered face mask for blissful sleep.  I failed to provide the power throughout the night on several occasions.  He was most understanding and assured me that he wouldn’t croak, just choke.  The thing is that babies provide a very audible alarm, but the electrical system didn’t.  Then the new batteries arrived.  Batteries are batteries and you just plug them in, right?  Not quite.  They weigh a ton.  Literally.  I had to reconfigure my battery cupboard with 2 extra wooden shelves 75mm thick to take the weight.  They only just fit in.  Then the small matter of backing up the ute to within a couple of meters of their final resting place and popping them on the shelves.  They weigh 85kg each, on 3 levels, and I’m an OAP.  Not up to the job without help.  Fortunately, my daughter’s partner, and father of my 2 grandchildren (are you two ever going to get married?) have bought a 250 acre property just down the road and he helped me hump them onto the shelves and connect them up.  Thanks Blue.

Then a couple of weeks later the long anticipated generator arrived.  Its extraction from the clutches of the predatory “Customs Brokers” was achieved by my son-in-law Karine after I spat the dummy in my frustration and told them to heave it into the harbour.  I remembered he is a ‘Materials and logistics manager’ in Darwin and in frustration phoned him mainly for a big whinge and was I being ripped off.  Import isn’t his speciality but was for a coworker whose answer was “Yes, you are being ripped off’ but there is nothing you can do about it.  Kairne’s calmer head and greater skill and experience rescued the situation to get the generator mobile again.  There was a hitch in Bowen where it was off-loaded with a larger consignment and lost for a week or two, but he was able to trace it and get it on the move again.  He reckons I owe him a beer.  I reckon if he says that, then a slab is only a token of the effort he went to.  Again Blue, the true stalwart he is, was available to help me hump the generator down the waterfall to install it.  It worked and is working now.  Oh frabjious day!  I am now wallowing in surplus power, freed of the sleep torture, and have luxuriated in long hot showers after a winter of discontent and cold showers.  (Smart arse Shakespeare quote from Lear).

So the batteries cost about $10,500, and the new generator about $190 in China with a bit of freight and about $800 after every gate-keeping broker and bureaucrat in Australia had clipped the ticket with improbable fees such as “cargo management re-engineering fee”.  What really annoyed me was that I had to employ the services of a ‘Customs Clearance broker’ to interface with customs, but I had to do all the work of getting all the documents together!  The system is cracked as I am one who doesn’t have any of the information.  There is this very nice girl in China called Lisa, (a name for the benefit of westerners) who was constantly apologising for her assumed mistakes (actually caused at this end) and her bad English (it was pretty awful but fantastically better than my Mandarin).  She had been working in another department, but suddenly found herself handling overseas inquiries.  About the fourth person I had dealt with.  I think there is a lot of churn in employment positions in China.  I found myself reassuring her that she was doing great, but could she just make this amendment to that document and put it on the company letterhead, then change the boat it came on, retype the invoice so it didn’t contain the word proforma, answer question 4 in the packing declaration as a No, otherwise customs would demand a certificate, etc, etc.  It was evident that she didn’t have any first hand knowledge of the answers to these questions and neither did I.  Two completely ignorant people to any of the answers quietly conspiring to make the paperwork fit together.  If I employ a ‘clearance broker’ aren’t they supposed to do this shit?? Was it packed with any organic material other than the wooden crate?  I guessed no and directed her to answer that.  When I got the crate I found there was no organic packing.  But I never would have gotten the crate at all unless I made up the answers beforehand.  Thank you gentle Lisa for your help.

I wasn’t going to bang on further about the archaic import system, but it seems I have.  Sorry about that.  Perhaps I have in mind old B grade movies of docks in the days of sail where the wharves were bustling and infested with thieves and drunks, whores and pickpockets, rowdy taverns and wandering press gangs.  Well I think nothing much has changed, except the thieves now have computers and government accreditation.  As did the press gangs in those days, the accreditation that is.

 

My generator on the hydro system died in Feb this year, and I still haven’t managed to get a replacement.  The type I need; a 2 bearing, 4 pole, 1500RPM, single phase, 3KW, 240V, seems to be as rare as hen’s teeth except in China where they have everything, and will ask what colour you would like that in.  So I ordered one from China at the absurdly low price of A$200.  From the pics on their website, there were hundreds on the factory floor in stock.  In reality, they don’t have stock as that takes capital investment, instead they make them after the order comes in.

So after some negotiation on the shipping cost, I was never going to haggle over the cost of the generator, I sent them some money.  Apart from the very lengthy delay where I began to suspect it was a complete internet scam and I’d been had, they got it on a boat to Brisbane with a freight cost of just A$60 for a 65 kg by .09 cubic meter crate.  Brilliant.  I have a generator in Brisbane for just A$260!

Then the nightmare started.  Unlike things I have ordered over the internet that arrive by plane that just turn up in my mailbox, if it comes by sea, you need paperwork.  Reams of it.  A little bit of it from me, but the majority supplied by the Chinese manufacturer, Mindong.  to be supplied on their lettterhead, stamped signed and sealed with all the details of ship name voyage number, shipping number, times, dates ports, shipping materials and if it has been treated, if so provide certificate under AS10452, commercial (not profoma) invoice, packing decalration, packing list, and a whole heap of other documents I can’t even remember.  Then I find that to crank the handle of this elaborate bureaucratic machinery, I need a clearance broker.  Then I find that the system works like a game of Chinese whispers.  The entity that has all the questions to answer, customs, doesn’t talk to the party that has the answers to all these forms, Mindong.  They only talk to the clearance broker, charging a handsome fee, who talks to me, who relays it to some poor girl in an office in China, who has no direct knowledge if the machine was packed with organic material for instance or if the the timber crate was treated according to AS10452 etc.  She then relays it back to me, and I relay it back to the clearance broker, who submits this to customs who set the rules.

I should point out there are some complicating factors to this broken system.  You probably know that in China they don’t generally speak English.  And the English they have to digest is bureaucratic English.  I don’t speak bureaucratic English.  I feel sorry for the poor girl Lisa tang at Mindong, who tries to satisfy the crazy foreigner’s appetite for paperwork.  Another complication is some computer difficulties I had about the time the boat was nearly at Brisbane.  My computer went up in smoke.  Real acrid smoke.  Dead as a maggot.  Being rather remotely located and trying to run a business largely dependent on e-mail, I borrowed a friend’s 10 year old laptop which was good for a couple of days though you couldn’t see into the corners of the screen where all the important commands are because of screen decay, but then refused to boot up complaining that the file ‘superblock’ could not be read.  I have no idea what the superblock is, but it does sound important.  Then getting the use of laptops that I borrowed from guests so I could check e-mails by webmail occasionally, but of course whatever I could save went with them.  My excellent friend Robert who gave the previous computer to me, was able to install my hard drive into a computer he just had lying round (so he tells me), and able to update the drive to suit the new architecture.  Brilliant.  I don’t have to go through hours of agony installing programs and trying to import old files and make everything fit.  I wanted to pay him for his expertise, time and effort, not to mention his computer, but he wouldn’t have a bar of it.

So what with 4 different computers, 2 different delivery systems by e-mail program or webmail and often duplicated, I didn’t know what e-mails were saved where.   Also I was sent some documents from the clearance broker that contained wrong information about the boat and voyage number (as if that materially affects the lump of metal in the crate).  Last night I told the clearance broker to drop the effing crate into the harbour.  OK, I spat the dummy.  Totally exceeded my stupidity tolerance limitToday I got an e-mail which ignored my fit, and kindly informed me that they would either start charging ‘storage fees’ or an extra $150 ‘customs inspection fee’ if I didn’t comply by providing a valid ‘Packing Declaration’.  If the nice lady in China doesn’t send me completed document, where I coached her through the answers, I think I will be without power and in debt for the rest of my life.  Unable to satisfy the paperwork, unable to liberate the machine.

So the Chinese could manufacture and deliver to Brisbane a generator for less than A$300.  To get it from Brisbane to a depot in Cairns will cost me at least $750 dollars.  I did get an e-mail somewhere which detailed the costs on the Australian side which had numerous fees including ‘re-engineering fee’.  WTF?  The other fees (about 7) equally improbable.

Though the manufacturer was slow to get their act together, they delivered at minimal cost.  The real villains in the piece are the demanding requirements of Australian customs and the clumsy, no dysfunctional, system of communication.  If I don’t provide the exact paperwork, customs will demand about $150 to open the box.  I actually thought it was their job to open boxes.  It seems if you have a choke point, you can demand fees.  Since starting this blob, I have had a return e-mail from the manufacturer.  They can’t agree on what ship it was sent on, or the voyage number.  Apparently, the same crate was sent on three different ships.  This is entirely possible for quantum particles, but unlikely for a 65kg lump of metal.  Here I make an admission that could possibly land me in jail.  The long-suffering Lisa in China sent the document in Word instead of jpg, so I was able to change the details of what ship it arrived on to correspond with the details of what the clearance broker and customs required.  Yes, resorting to forgery to get all the little paper ducks in a row.

So the cost to to get it about 10,000kms from China was A$58.  The cost to get it from Brisbane to Cairns, about 1,800kms will be over A$800.  Not to mention the time wasted on paperwork.  Australia, is something wrong with this picture?  Are we choking on bureaucracy?  Are we the most inefficient and expensive country in the world?  I think so.

 

 

When the tribes of NW Canada assembled to discuss and decide issues, they had a respected elder to represent and speak for the interests of the seventh generation. To consider the future, and make sure decisions made today did not disadvantage all those future generations. Our present leaders and institutions lack that foresight. The political cycle is reduced to a few years of pork-barreling promises that can’t be kept. Get in power, blame the previous government for failure to deliver, run up deficits, then try and get re-elected.

I am of the baby boomer generation, which seems to be a bit schizophrenic. We pioneered the love and peace thing and were empowered by our parents as generation who were not just expected to be seen and not heard.  We embraced love and ethics, not money as the most important thing, then devolved into the most rapacious generation ever in the exploitation of the planet for money.  We evolved the present economic system which thrived on our consumption running up huge debts to be paid for by the next generation.  We trashed the planet and loaded it with our refuse.  Now we expect to be paid a pension funded by the people we have robbed.  But hey, we might even be able to get away with it as we have the political system pretty well sewed up and the financial system in our pockets.

That sounds very cynical.  Well yes, it is.  My generation stepped away from the ideals it espoused, and turned out to be the most environmentally destructive ever.  I guess part of the problem was that only a tiny fraction of my generation ever had these egalitarian and environmental ideals.  They were just emblematic and featured in the media characterisation, but the vast majority of my generation just got on with business as usual.  I thought a real revolution was going on.  I am hugely disappointed.

Below you see me with my grandson Philip born a couple of weeks ago.

I had just lectured him on the weirdness of quantum mechanics and particle entanglement, but fatigue overtook him before I could introduce  Pauli’s  uncertainty principal or Schrodinger’s wave equations.  It doesn’t matter , as my droning voice is comfort enough.  I am pursuing a policy that I had with my children.  That the content didn’t matter, but the contact and engagement did.  When my kids were young, I read to them from the complete works of Shakespeare.  The book was very big and it was cheap.  I guess the copyright has run out.   I read to them before they were born, and I read to them before they could understand.  The rhythm and cadence of the Shakespeare’s words are beautiful.  It was just the time spent with them and sounds they heard that were important.

By less than a year old, they are picking up on meaning , vocabulary and story, and you have to abandon Shakespeare and go to animal stories.  Maybe, a couple of decades later, they will  pick up on Shakespeare.

I loved reading to my children. I hope you do too.

I can answer that in a moment.  The care of children.

Now comes the difficult task of seeing where that leads us.  Of course the most important and enduring responsibility is to one’s own children.  You give them life when a sperm enters an ova, but for most people it is made real when a child is born.  From that moment, and for a long time to come, their body is their only possession.  For at least 15 years everything else is given to them.  The parents have given them life, but now a person is born who owns that body.  A real person different from any person before and due respect from day one.  And owed love and care.  “Owed” from the debt paid forward from our parents and grandparents.  It can never be paid back, only onward to the next generations.

Then comes the care of children in the family/clan/village/school where parents take turns looking after other children.  Then orphan children looked after by foster parents.  Even unknown children will be looked after.  Lose your little kid in a bustling Shanghai market, and I bet after 3 harrowing hours of searching you will find them being looked after by a stallholder, happy and fed.  Even animals look after kids.  I was driving about 70 dairy cattle through a muddy gateway to the dairy, a little kid fell off the fence into the gateway.  Before anyone could do a rescue, dozens of cows had daintily stepped over the child.   Plenty of mud , but not a hoof print on the kid.

The primary task of kids and teens is having fun and learning and the primary task of parents and grandparents is to look after them and nurture their body, brain and spirit.  It was ever thus and we are programmed that way to get our emotional rewards and satisfactions conforming to that pattern.  Otherwise would have meant the human race would have died out long ago, because no other animal invests such huge effort in rearing young.  No other animal is so helpless and dependent for so long in infancy.  If you were born a wildebeest, you would be expected to trek 20kms on your first day!

I think I have laboured the point about responsibility long enough so you are wondering where I am going.  So here it comes.  WTF can’t we realise that a huge part of that responsibility is to leave our children, our children’s children, and so on, a planet they can live on??  How did the disconnect between the powerful nurturing instincts, and the careless destruction of the planet occur??  I guess because emotions are immediate and rational considerations are not.  Sigh.  How to connect those dots?  You may guess from all the question marks, that I don’t have answers readily available.  It needs some clever thinking to harness what I feel for my kids and grandkids, into action so that we may pass on to them an environment so rich, so lush, so diverse and productive, as the environment we inherited.  It all seems so downhill at the moment where isolated examples of restoration are showcased while the mass destruction continues.

Which brings me to the desultory subject of the forthcoming elections.  I can’t see much point in voting for either of the major parties as they don’t adequately address future issues.  They protect established interests.  They look into the future and make sure it doesn’t happen.  You might think I would rush to support the greens.  A few strident comments, then they collapse back into the mainstream, hedging bets and courting the popular vote.  Can’t see any progress there.  I might not bother to vote and risk a token fine, though you can get out of that with almost any excuse short of a bad hair day.  I don’t think we can expect any real leadership from politicians on keeping the planet habitable, so you will have to do it yourself.  Seems obvious to me that if you care for your kids and grandkids, do it yourself by whatever means you have available.  Maybe we can shame the politicians into action, though the cynical side of me says we can’t, we can only show them where the votes are.

To show you how diligently I am looking after my 2 year old grandson when he is in my care when babysitting, I offer a few pics taken in the last few days to demonstrate my nurturing credentials.

Here he is playing with a possum and tweaking its ears and saying “ear” as no doubt his mother has done to him.  He did approach cautiously, and I did monitor the possum’s stress level.  Animals usually only attack humans out of fear, and this possum did not show any.  That rule of thumb does not apply to crocodiles.  Animals can be quite tolerant of infants.

Henry loves playing in my workshop.  There is so much junk in there and I don’t give him a hard time about making a mess, because it is such a tip already.  Shelves of junk and nails and tools, machines and a selection of 5 chainsaws such as he has seen his father use, piles of wood shavings to heap into bowls and buckets, racks of tools on the walls and boxes of sockets, sections for small bits of timber and pipes and springs, a veritable cornucopia of possibilities.  And a red-bellied black snake that has been living in there for months.  It is listed as the world’s 14th most deadly snake and quite common at Possum Valley.  Nine of the top ten deadliest snakes are Australian and found only a few kilometers away in the wet gum forests, but not here as I am told that the red-bellied black kills and eats it’s more venomous cousins.  Henry had already come across the black snake as I wandered out of the workshop a couple of weeks back to find him looking at a patch of grass at his feet.  As I walked up I saw the snake, it saw me and took off past Henry passing just a few centimeters away.  They are really docile and I have stood on them half a dozen times without mishap.  Not deliberately I wish to point out.

Anyway, that potential danger to Henry has been resolved as yesterday I found the snake dead in the middle of the workshop floor.  Just to be sure I lobed a bit of rubbish at it.  Still being cautious I got my snake tool (stick with wire loop) to pick it up.  I took it outside to photograph.  It looks as if it bit off more than it could chew.  Stone dead the both of them locked in a deadly embrace.  The snake reputed to kill the world’s deadliest, had met it’s match.  I suspect that it is a juvenile cane toad, itself poisonous, though in a passive form and concentrated on the back of the neck.  Ironic that two animals poisoned each other.  I have watched another fight to the death where a wasp and a spider battled it out as to who could strike the first blow.  It was a protracted battle, but the wasp won and carried off the paralyzed spider to be food for it’s brood.

I feel part of nature rather than above it.  I deal with it on a daily basis as it tries to plunder my food supply and establish a home in my nice dry house.  I defend my space, but realise that other life is trying to make a living too.  I hope Henry too will grow up feeling that.

 

No theme for this blog, just a random collection of thoughts, observations and news.  Last night I hosted 3 entomologists at the homestead as the cottages were full.  A prof, a postdoc and a technician.  All the way from Arkansas to collect and study mites of a certain family.  The red ones I understand, including those in the rainforest known as ‘scrub itch’.  They collect dirt and leaf litter, put it in plastic trays and study it minutely to find the mites perhaps half a millimeter across.  A painstaking task you would think, but excited gasps of joy happen when they discover their prey.  The unfortunate victim is then photographed, picked up with a droplet of moisture and deposited in a tiny vial of ether.  Its fate is to be processed for DNA.  The paperwork involved to get it to the USA will weight a million times it’s own weight.  All the permits to be allowed to collect organisms in OZ, then the quarantine requirements to export to the USA and other red tape to finally get it to Arkansas.  To avoid some of the mountain of red tape, they will drive down to Canberra and the National History Museum for them to export this tiny fraction of a gram of specimens to the US.  They were all interested, no passionate, about seeing the other wildlife in Australia.  When having dinner, a possum strolled past us at the dining table to plunder in the kitchen.  I elaborately ignored it to create the impression that this is an every day occurrence, which it is. They were enthralled, as the single species of opossum in the US is a ratty looking pest.  It pays to be cute.  They liked the birds, especially when I took them to a golden bowers birds bower and the male showed up despite it being out of season.

Fellow Australians, I was born in the UK which was largely wiped clean of any life about 15,000 years ago by a sheet of ice 2 km thick and has only a tiny fraction of the species which exist here.  Please revel and enjoy the fantastic and unique variety of plants and bugs and animals that Australia has.  Truly amazing.  Please value that and work to keep it.

The wet season didn’t happen and only about one third the average rainfall.  The much delayed winter may be starting as I had to put on a jumper today.  I am quite sure that global warming is with us and at a much faster pace than current models.  Record after record has tumbled this year and the pace seems to be accelerating.  Recent polls put the economy as the most important issue for the election to promote ‘growth’.  I would like to redesign the economy for shrinkage.  Oh, you haven’t heard that word in the economists lexicon. To suck our heads in on consumption.  To head towards a livable planet rather than a ‘Mad Max’ dystopia.  The green party has not grasped the nettle to tell us that we have to reduce consumption even though it is the elephant in the green room.  I hope the sex party is still on the ballot paper.

It is well known that politicians get elected to represent established vested interests.  Old money.  Their job is to look into the future …….. and make sure it doesn’t happen.  I can’t see any variation of that trajectory for the coming election in Oz.  Same ol, same ol.  But wait! in the US there is Hillary representing the deep state, the insiders, the slimy palm greasing lobby system, the elitist 1% sucking every last dime from the workers; against the billionaire Trump, the outsider apparently, proposing policies somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan.  Wow! that is entertainment.

How can a billionaire represent the interests of people struggling for a basic living?  He is so far up in the stratosphere of his own ego, he can’t see the ground.  If elected president, would he do anything to redress the imbalance of wealth distribution and severely tax himself?  Don’t think so.  Same might be said of Turnbull, though he is not a loose cannon like Trump.

Guests just left included a retired couple originally from Singapore, now resident in SA. A delightful couple on their way back from PNG where they were volunteering in the highlands of the Western Province.  Working for a Christian organisation providing human services because the government doesn’t.  We had a long talk about the belief in sorcery and the terrible, endless, cruel revenge killings of ‘witches’.  When somebody dies, even the very old, the assumption is that it was caused by sorcery and a perpetrator is sought and accused.  The accusation is enough, evidence is optional, and they are put to a horrible death.  Don’t be condescending here, the last such instance in Europe was about 1850, and the Harlem persecutions in the US might be more recent.  There was an article about exactly that, sorcery killings, on Al Jezeera (I can’t believe Al Jezeera isn’t in spell check) the next day.  I posted a comment which I rarely do, with Al Jezeera, as any comment stream quickly devolves into insults hurled back and for about the zionist/arab conflicts.  Even if the original article was about the crop failure of sorghum in Ethiopia.  I was saying that the culture shock problems in PNG are immense, and simplistic solutions offered by various creeds are unlikely to work in anything less than a century.  I even got a compliment.

I still haven’t got a replacement generator for the hydro.  Been on order from China since Feb.  I may have done my dough there.  I paid some money and all I have is promises.  I have made some other inquiries but not even an answer.  If anyone out there knows of a 240V, 4 pole, single phase 2-3.5KW , bare shaft generator, that exists anywhere in the world, please get back to me.  I am beginning to think of Alibaba and the 40 thieves.

Well I try to keep my posts under 1000 words and as of “thieves” I had 999.  Now I’ve blown it.

 

 

I welcomed new guests a few hours ago.  A couple who hadn’t been before and the lady was on crutches.  They had been expecting to go trekking in Nepal, but with a foot full of wires and plates, it took her some time to negotiate the two small steps into the cottage.  I was surprised to hear they were expecting to resume the trek in October, because I have trekked there and it is really quite demanding.  Then I had a massive flash-back.  It was forty something years ago, but I remember it in so much detail.  Four weeks in Nepal has made a bigger imprint on my mind than some long grey years I can barely remember.

So please indulge me while I reminisce.  I was in Kathmandu in the hippy-trippy days when the place to buy hash was the government operated shops as it was quality controlled. Sometime later I may describe the “Monks Pleasure Rooms”.  I had decided to do the trek to Annapurna base camp which was about a week’s trek there and about the same back.  I was in the hotel restaurant when a tall guy with crewcut and dressed in a suit and sunglasses swept into the room. Silence fell. Even more silence fell when we could see his shoulder holster.  This was sooo out of place in Kathmandu in the early 70’s.  We were on the same transport out to Pokora to start the trek and he explained he was CIA.  Oh! that’s OK then.  So we teamed up for the trek. Such magnificent scenery.  The heart leaps for joy at the incredibly rugged landscape and the snow capped mountains around.  My American companion said he was there to worship the mountain spirits. Yeah, right.  And how does that go down on the CIA expense account?  He also told me he was a lawyer and a fighter pilot.  But he was a good companion so I pardoned his fantasies.

Then we had a conversation about wing-tip vertices.  I did fluid dynamics in my course of engineering studies and studied such things.  That is the high speed spiraling tubes of turbulence that are generated at the end of the wings.  He knew his shit.  When was the last time you had a discussion about wing-tip vertices?  Then we had an overnight camp with another couple of older Americans.  Two lawyers they reluctantly admitted.  My companion engaged them in a lively debate about constitutional reform in the US.  The lady was an outstanding US lawyer who had been nominated for a position on the supreme court.  Her husband was a top laywer in European government and while we were there round a camp fire, a runner came to ask him to return to work.  The poor sod had been found by a guy who had run for days over the mountains to call him back to court.  So my dubious companion had now managed to pass himself off as a lawyer to two of the top lawyers on the planet?  Curious and curiouser.

By this time we had bumped into a party of 4 from Singapore.  Or should I say a party of 34 as they had 30 Nepalese porters.  These Singaporean guys were not backpacking.  They carried only cameras.  The porters were carrying wooden tables and chairs for them to sit on, crates of beer and every requirement for luxury in the Himalayas.  The clients would have breakfast served then stroll off up the track while the team packed all the gear then hiked past the clients so they could have morning tea set up along the trail.  Then as we toiled up the narrow valley into the Annapurna ranges, we met up with this old German guy with one porter and camped with them at 11,000ft under a cliff overhang so we wouldn’t get wiped out by an avalanche.  I had though myself a bit of a hero for reaching this place after a week of strenuous hiking.  This old German guy had done the same lacking major parts of both legs.  One amputated above the knee, and one amputated just below the knee.  Prosthetic limbs and 2 canes had got him this far.  Our dinner that night was rice and lentils cooked over such scraps of wood that we could glean along the way.  There was a serious shortage of cooking fuel then, I am sure it is much worse now.  We boiled the lentils for about 2 hours but it was still like chewing buttons.  At 11,000 ft water boils at a significantly lower temp.  That night the katabatic winds (cold air rushing down slopes as it is more dense), roared through our exposed overhang and I can say it was the coldest night of my life.  I had all my clothes on.  I was in my sleeping bag.  I cuddled up to my American friend and hugged him all night.  It was the only time I have done that I swear.  Next morning while preparing a meager breakfast, I remarked what a f*****g cold night that was.  The old German grumbled “that’s not cold” and put me in perspective.  He had lost his legs to frostbite in WW2 at Leningrad when the temp were below -25C.  I often think of that dour old guy and the lessons he taught me.  Nothing is so bad it can’t get worse, and you can survive.  Thanks old man.

So the next day we toiled up the valley into the huge bowl that is the Annapurna range.  The snow was waist deep, but the track had been beaten down by the large party of porters with the Singaporeans that had gone before making it easier for us.  Alas, the old German guy couldn’t make it because his canes just got bogged it the snow.  The gritty old bugger was not defeated by lack of spirit, but by lack of traction.  So I got up to the base camp for climbers and knew I could go no further as it takes a lot more fitness, equipment, planning and determination than I had available.  Base camp is a ridge of snow in an incredible circular range of mountains.  It is no use me telling you how magnificent it is, you have to see it glistening in the sunlight.  Just about when I thought I had reached heaven, we came upon the place where the Singaporeans had had their morning tea. They had departed and the porters invited us to sit down and finish off the left-overs.  This is the most surreal scene of my life.  Sitting at a wooden table and chairs at 14,000ft  in the most spectacular place on earth, on a snow ridge, being served pancakes and honey with sweet milky spiced tea.

That is such a precious memory it thrills me all these decades later.

 

 

It was a good idea the Greeks had.  The amazing radical notion that the whole people decide together who should do what in the society, how resources should be allocated and if you should shag your sister. From the time of cave men, it had been the man with the biggest club who decided everything in his own favour, and I don’t mean fan club.  Then as things got more complex, those who could organise the most clubs got to be despot and pick the harem.  Then when trade and money were invented, the clubs were trumped by the diamonds, and gold became king.

So the idea the Greeks had that power should be shared was really rad.  Of course they didn’t want to go too far, so the power was shared among those fit to enjoy the privilege.  Not women, nor the poorer classes that couldn’t demonstrated sufficient wealth, and definitely not foreigners or slaves.  Which put 1% of the population in power.  But hey, you have got to start somewhere.

The Greeks had a pretty good run of a few centuries with this democracy thing until the Romans came along and put them back into the box. But the democracy idea seemed a bit contagious, so the Romans  had their senates and their forums, though it never did spread beyond the 1%.  The rest just wanted bread and circuses.  The total pits of the Roman political system was the 1st century AD, when being stabbed in the back was not just a metaphorical phrase.  The most laughable incident perhaps was when the praetorian guard installed a horse as emperor.  A little later, when they had got over their hangovers, they decided perhaps a horse wasn’t up to the job, and installed Claudius who they thought was a total idiot because he stuttered and they could easily control him.  The only reason he had survived childhood in an aristocratic family was because he was seen as a bumbling and harmless cretin studying the Etruscan language and possibly its last ever speaker.  He surprised them a bit by being quite astute.  He survived a few years before being poisoned by his own wife.

Politics is still a tough business, but with fewer fatalities, though political assassination are still rife.  Here in Australia we have to ask if the system works.  My opinion is that no, it doesn’t work.  The civil service keep the bureaucracy ticking over and keeps the ministers from doing the worst damage to society, but the political system is barely functional.  The bureaucracy will never bring change to update systems to the changes in society, economic environment, advances in technology etc, and the politicians are too scared to move.  Politics in Australia has become all about the endless churn of attacking the other party, media bites, and damage control.  Brand, positioning and spin have become more important than substance of policy.  Abbot for instance doesn’t believe there is such a thing a global warming, so he scrapped the carbon tax.  But he did read the polls and realise that a huge chunk of the electorate did, so he came up with a ‘green’ scheme that actually paid polluters in the hope that they might use some of that money to clean up their act.  Yeah, right.  Another $100m wasted on fig leaf policy.

What is really hard to stomach is the personal vilification and smear that the politicians and the media dole out to their opponents.  A lot of it isn’t true but based on innuendo rather than evidence, but that doesn’t matter as the headline of today splashed on the front page can become the two line retraction of tomorrow buried at the bottom of page nine.  There are vicious personal attacks about a persons’ dealings from 20 years ago, their appearance, their sexuality, or just anything to smear them.

I listen to the parliamentary proceedings on the radio.  Yeah, honest I do!  Me and another bloke in Yallingup.  That’s how I learned that the proceedings start with a solemn reading of the Lord’s Prayer.  What an anachronism!  Some speeches raise concerns about the bill or give reasons for its necessity, but perhaps 80-90% of the time is spent vilifying those on the opposite benches.  Mostly calling them liars for saying a different thing now than they said 10 years ago.  Actually, I like to update my ideas as a result of new information and more thought.  Apparently for a politician to do so is treachery and deceit of the worst order and dubbed a back-flip.  Clive Palmer changes his mind all the time, but the mental picture of him doing a ‘back-flip’ is hilarious.  It would bring the house down.

Add this filter to your ‘Bullshit Detector’.  Is this politician talking about the ideas, the policies and issues?  Do they name the opposing party or a person in it?  Do they trawl the archives for sins of opponents or look into the future?  Do you get the slightest flicker of hope?

It is about time we started punishing our elected representatives for lack of performance.  Looks like an election looming quite soon, so an opportunity to apply the bullshit detector.  Ignore the personal attacks and instead mark down the person and party uttering them.  Listen to anybody actually discussing issues.  That will not happen often so wont take much of your time.  Develop a revulsion for ‘attack dog’ politics.

So, I discover our leaders aren’t our leaders.  They are dedicated followers of opinion polls.  Slaves to the media.  Fearful puppets of financial forces.  Minions of the inner elite.  Disrespected by the populace down to the level of secondhand car salesmen.  Manipulated by lobbies, bullied by corporations, coerced by donations and humiliated by trenchant criticism.  So give them a break.  Vote them out of office.

Instead elect those who don’t need to be there.  Reluctant candidates who don’t actually need this job.  People dragged kicking and screaming to endure the tedium of constructing laws and clauses which actually make society function better.  They should be given time off for good behavior.

 

 

Most days at Possum Valley are pleasant, calm, unstressful and pleasing even when it is raining and I can’t get some things done.  Yesterday was not one of them.  It started well with some sunshine after many days of clouds, and promised to get better as I was babysitting my 22 month old grandson Henry, who is an easy going and mostly finds his own amusements.  My daughter Alice, was going to town for shopping and an ante-natal check-up being within a few months of producing another grandson.  If I chose, I could even get some work done and service the cottages as I reckon that I can organize the cottage about five times faster than he can disorganize it because I work to a purpose and he only does it by accident.  They had only just arrived at Possum Valley and Henry had already lugged his foot-powered trike (no pedals), up the stairs to ride round the house.  He loves that.  He can get up more speed than in the rough outside, and the ridged pattern on the plastic tyres on the wooden floor gives off a most satisfactory Vrruummm, Vrrummm sound.  This is his second trike as he wore the first one out until the axle hubs collapsed and made the body rub on the wheels.

I was in the kitchen, and Alice had gone to the loo, as is the lot of those advancing in pregnancy, and the Vrummm stopped.  Then a short cry.  I strolled onto the veranda, but no sign of Henry.  Another quiet bleat directed me to the edge of the veranda and he had crashed his trike off the edge and down a meter.  He was just getting up as I went down the steps and picked him up and put him over my shoulder. Alice came out and I passed him up the steps to her for comfort.  Only then did I see considerable amounts of blood running down his face.  Alice is a nurse and put on her nurse face.  With Henry in her arms she got a clean washer, moistened it and cleared away some blood.  “Ah, this is going to require some stitches.  Look after Henry a moment while I get things together.”  I got my first look at his cut where the blood flow had mysteriously stopped.  Wow, it was big and deep but had a definite bottom.  It rather slowly dawned on me I was looking at two or three centimeters of my grandson’s skull.  The hole was a centimeter wide.

Alice came back with large plasters and deftly pulled the gash closed while applying the plasters.  She administered some nurofen to the distressed kid, organised baggage, and ushered a rather shaken father into the car.  She phoned ahead to the triage nurse at Atherton hospital, and to her partner to let him know what had happened.  Henry vomited on the way and we stopped to clean and comfort Henry and I got explicit instructions how to drive.  On arriving at hospital we were promptly seen by the triage nurse.  then half an hour of paperwork.  But the first thing they checked was vital signs and possible neurological problems.  Read brain damage.  I’m thinking, but he’s got a hole in his head, but Alice understood that shining a light in his eyes to test for different eye dilation was more important than patching the hole.

Many hours later they got to patching up the hole.  Kids at 22 months don’t like being sown up.  some internal stitches with dissolving thread and a dozen or so external stitches.  Alice was first in the scrum over his body, another has his legs and another clamped his head as the doctor did the needlework.  I was out in the A&E waiting room with 2 rooms and 2 doors in between and heard Henry’s protests, but I doubt anyone in the hospital didn’t hear the screams and spirited fight that Henry put up.  Probably some arriving out-patients decided they weren’t so bad after all and went home.  We were at the hospital for about 7 hours as they wanted to do observations.  Thank you the diligent and friendly staff at Atherton hospital.  Ironically Alice starts her new job in two weeks.  At the A&E department Atherton.

Today I had a phone call from Alice and Henry is fine and back to normal leaping onto his trike at the first opportunity.

Once again I am in awe of how well my daughters can just handle shit.  See a blog about 2 years ago “My Hero” of my other daughter’s trials and tribulations.  Alice had all the emotions any mother would have to see her toddler son badly hurt and his face running with blood, but just took charge of the situation to achieve the best outcomes.  I am so proud to have two strong, resilient and resourceful daughters.