Kiangardarup

Daisy Bates in 1908 - Her Year of Living Dangerously

2008-05-09T23:28:00.009+08:00

Daisy Bates in her prime
Recently there have been two forays into the life and work of Daisy Bates – in a review of both for the Sydney Morning Herald, Angela Bennie concluded, “Perhaps the definitive Bates is yet to be written”. Indeed, most recent work has been somewhat sidetracked by her narcissistic problems with truth and her seemingly racist attitudes regarding half castes, cannibalism and the imminent demise of the Aboriginal race. Bob Reece to his credit acknowledges the importance of her work for Native Title cases although, even in Native Title law, remains a resource that has yet to be fully tapped.

In the Battye Library there is a personal file kept while she was working for the Native Welfare Board of W.A. from 1905 to 1910. Her job initially was to record a dictionary but she was adept at turning it into something much bigger. It is clear from the record that she relied on her contacts in the Perth elite, such as her mentor Malcolm Fraser, the Attorney General and her women friends at the exclusive Karrakatta Club. Every year, Fraser lobbied indefatigably for a continuance of her allowance of ₤150. But at some point, everyone who seeks patronage from the elite has to prove or reprove their ‘reliability’. In 1908 Daisy’s reliability came into question.(there's more)

She had almost finished her work by the end of 1907. Her grammar was being reviewed by R.L. Matthews in Victoria she was discussing how the work was to be published with the Government but there was something nagging away about whether she had everything. Most of her informants had come from around Perth or were in the employment of the gentry, and while their information was good, there were some holes. A Mr Jull from Mt Barker had told her that the descent system on the south coast was patrilineal. She hadn’t been to Albany but had heard of Tommy King (Wandinyil) who had been alive since the earliest settlement of the state and was renowned for his willingness to talk and trade.

Arriving in Albany 7 May 1908, she discovered that Wandinyil had died the year previously but Wabbinyet and Jakbum were camped out on the Perth Road and were willing informants. What she learnt from them destroyed her certainties, “I shall be compelled to rewrite six chapters” she wrote to the Acting Chief Protector. “Mrs Hassell has offered to pay for a trip out to Cape Riche.” By the end of the month, she is Esperance asking for more expenses “ I have constantly to supply my native informants with tobacco, tinned meats and sundries”. By the end of July, she had travelled 1900 miles and visited 28 townships through the south coast, the great southern and the southern wheatbelt forwarding invoices for rail tickets and expenses to the Acting Chief Protector.

Her travel diary makes exhausting reading as she literally chases down people from town to town - Collie to Darkan and back Collie and on to Brunswick Junction in 4 days cadging lifts in buggies or on borrowed horses where she could get a side saddle, just to catch up with one group. In this time she records the bulk of her Great Southern “dialects and pedigrees”. She is on a mission now, her eyes have been opened as she has come into contact with other groups in the south west and realized that she has only half the story, if that.

She is in Perth for a week and then she is off again to the Goldfields. Suddenly she has discovered that even within the Noongar (or Bibbulmun as she insisted on calling it) there were different habits and customs, shades of grey and nuance that her white and more colonized informants had elided over. Her trip through the goldfields would be taxing today. She visits 21 towns and travels 1700 miles in five weeks. At Menzies, she wrote “natives afraid of constables and hid, walked some miles next day with some boys and found native camp. Obtained pedigrees … all of them differing from statements of white residents”. She is beginning to risk her reliability.

On her way back to Perth she has a chance to “witness an initiation” at Burracoppin. The Assistant Protector telegrams her to return to Perth forthwith. She writes back, “In view of the proved unreliability of the statements received from white people the Murchison must be traversed…”. The question of reliability is being asked on all sides.

She is back in Perth by the 12th of September, after a trip to Rottnest to follow up with some of the prisoners she is on the train to Nannine and the Gascoyne by the 24th. It’s clear that she is not going to give the protector a chance to stop her. A week later, she is giving a lecture in Meekatharra (proceeds to the hospital) and she drives out to the ‘boolee boolee’ ground. She writes - “ ‘boolee boolee’, a special seed, whose harvesting occurs at this time, gathering of all natives from surrounding districts”. On the train back to Dongara she travels with “2 native murderers from Lawless and Menzies … and obtained p[edigrees]. and some d[ialects]. arrived Dongara midnight.” She is becoming a dangerous woman.

At Mingenew, she “found a Berkshire Valley woman who gave me Jindal and Manara woman’s ped. Had to work with her during her laundry work, walking from washtub to clothesline”. She has discarded virtually all her white informants as reliable sources of knowledge and has recognized the separate importance of women’s knowledge. It would take another 50 odd years for the rest of Australian anthropology to catch up as she blazed a trail for the likes of Olive Pink and Caroline Berndt.

A few days later, at Moora, she finds a ‘native camp’ where all but one of the residents is ‘half caste’. She writes, “Obtained pedigree of native as I consider the half caste information of no ethnographic value”. A viewpoint she was reiterating from Lorimer Fison , the co-author of the landmark book “Kamilaroi and Kurnai” (published in 1880), who had cautioned that “...they had to be ‘continually on the watch’ that ‘every last trace of whitemen's effect on Aboriginal society’ was ‘altogether cast out of calculation’… ”.

Her supposed distaste for half castes originated not from an unthinking prejudice but from her aspiring to follow the dictates of scientific research at the time. It would be later reinterpreted as prejudice on her behalf, because she was so obviously ‘unreliable’. As Elizabeth Povinelli points out, “given time, deeply held moral convictions …[reappear] as simple parochial beliefs, as good intentions gone awry.” Today, in native title cases arguments about the authenticity of “customary beliefs and practices” determine the issue of people’s entitlements due to the perseverance of this belief.

By the time she has finished this third trip she has travelled 5400 miles and recorded 34 dialects from the southern half of western Australia. The protector writes to her at the end of the year that “her employment is to be terminated”. Fraser again intervenes but the knives are out. She spends most of 1909 rewriting her work and trying to negotiate a publishing deal with antagonistic officials who adopt a hard line. No money will be forthcoming. In 1910, the State sees a way out. The noted and reliable anthropologist, Radcliffe Brown is coming to the state and she is to be loaned to him. More importantly, the drafts of her book are to be given to him for him to publish as he sees fit. She writes to the Undersecretary of the Premier’s Department “I regret … my long and arduous labours… have not met with more equitable consideration” and pleads that she could have the material that Brown doesn’t use for a popular book. Eventually she publishes this in her influential book “The Passing of the Aborigines”, but her original work is not published until 1985. The conflict with Radcliffe-Brown is discussed elsewhere and a source of some dissension. Prejudice surrounds Daisy and her works, I hope this article stimulates some discussion of her guts and determination. She is accused of woolly headed thinking more than once by her reviewers but her actions I suspect speak louder than words.

Sources:

Povinelli, Elizabeth, "The Cunning of Recognition - Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism", Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002

State Government Personal File, Daisy Bates C.SO. 1023, State Records Office, Battye Library, Perth.

Angela Bennie, book review, The Sydney Morning Herald; 1/3/08; no internet text; this text quoted from http://www.missionandjustice.org/daisy-queen-of-the-desert-australiaaboriginalhistory/ [last visited 9 May 2008]

Small Town Saints and Sinners

2008-05-07T10:50:00.003+08:00

In a small city, there is an edge between anonymity and identity where those who don’t fit in, live halfway between madness and normality. I know several quite ordinary saints who conduct miracles over the chook pen.

One looks after her Noongar neighbour’s young daughter while her mum oscillates between speed and prison, she makes sure she the kid gets to school, standing up to the aggro when it comes her way with strength and patience. Another borrows other people’s cars so she can visit 'her boys' in prison, they’re no one’s boys, in actuality, but she can write letters for their appeals or to get them home or just listen to their loneliness. Is she a saint or just misguided as some of the guards think. Her life is guided by spirit voices who tell her what she is meant to be doing for the planet. She’s survived more than her share of tragedies. Whenever I talk to her, I’m left breathless by this other world and the power that she grants it. She makes me believe in miracles.

There are sinners here too, on this edge of town. Narcissistic tendencies get full rein in a place where you can pretend to one more mark that you are poor and misbegotten and can you spare me a dime. This belief, that my view of the world is all that matters, compounds itself as the emo queen screams abuse at the cops and her mother. Her demands get more unreasonable by the minute. She’s just like Putin, seeding the clouds so it won't rain on his big parade. Except she hasn’t got a cloud seeder just some stolen drugs. My narcissistic sinners commit no grand auto thefts; their crimes are against emotion. Stealing hearts and twisting desires to ensure their grandiloquence and the hubris of their miraculous birth.

Fortunately, in small cities and amongst the poor at least, saints outnumber sinners and the disabled and destitute find jobs and friendly shop keepers who keep an eye on their money for them. People remember their names and do what they can because the saints inspire them.

Noongar Resistance on the South Coast

2008-05-04T00:29:00.004+08:00

This is a much awaited public copy of an essay I wrote last year. I've just finished rewriting it tonight. I will post a footnoted and referenced version to my website tomorrow.

Introduction

“And you know Kimmy, it seems a bit funny that different times when our people travel and been going down, some of thems’ cars have stopped and they have trouble, just like the spirits are trying to stop them, and telling them not to go past [Cocanarup].” … “in the darkness a voice said, ‘Oh, what happened at Cocanarup means a lot to us’ ” . In rediscovering his Noongar ancestry Kim Scott published the first written account of a massacre that occurred near Ravensthorpe towards the end of 1881. The wadjela record is fragmentary and oblique, “terrible stories abound” but no one doubts that something happened. The Noongar record, on the other hand, is specific as to circumstances, numbers and names. In order to examine how these two opposing narratives arose I want to explore the genealogy of inter racial murder and violence on the south coast leading up to the 1880’s from the initial settlement at King George’s Sound (Albany) in 1826.

The colonial history of the south coast makes much of the apparently peaceful co-existence between Noongar and the British colonizers that marked the colony’s birth. Garden, in Albany’s official history, records that “during the 1830’s Albany became the showplace of race relations” . In 1833, following the death of Yagan, Gallipurt and Manyat were sent to Perth from Albany to explain to the local population the value of co-operation. Tactfully, they pleaded ignorance of the local language. The “superior intelligence of the Albany natives” , the qualities of the “men in charge” , and the “small size of the settlement” are cited as reasons that here, at least in the beginning, peaceful settlement was no myth even if it was exceptional.

Fifty years later race relations in Albany were very ordinary indeed and conflict on the south coast from Albany to Eucla reached a peak as the local authorities turned a blind eye to massacres, mass murderers and the concerns of authorities in Perth.

This account, of necessity, skims the surface of the Noongar resistance. Some subjects such as the impact of disease and traditional payback are omitted completely. It begins in the last decade of colonial rule and works backwards to the beginning. Like Alice reading the Jabberwocky, we must hold the colonists’ accounts up to the looking glass to decipher them, to see the view from the other side

Cocanerup and other massacres of the 1880’s

In 1881, R.C. Loftie, a gentleman of the “old school” , took over as the Government Resident at Albany. It was the sort of place “where above all a gentleman is required” and he was “highly popular” . On 27 February 1882 he was most put out, having to return “to my office after four o’clock” to respond to a telegram from the Colonial Secretary that complained “about three shocking cases of natives in want” . The telegram had been sent in response to one sent by Campbell Taylor visiting Albany from his station at Eucla. Taylor found the three lying next to the road “within a mile of the town” near Mr Gardener, the birdman’s house. One was a young girl of 19, “lying in a perfectly helpless state of partly from a great boil on her knee which for want of urgent treatment has become a putrid sore”, another “frightfully burnt about the belly and privates…some boys had put some red hot ashes on him”, the third, Towlett, was to die of starvation and thirst within the week . Taylor had complained that the police “made light of” the incident and his willingness to bypass Loftie may have been due to his knowledge of recent events at Eucla and at Cocanarup.

Six months earlier the telegraph station master at Eucla, G.P. Stevens had taken a statement from Geordie, a Mirning man, which he was to forward later to Loftie, as Chief Protector of Aborigines in the district, and which was the basis of a report made by Constable Truslove . Truslove accused the Kennedy brothers and William McGill of a “wholesale system of murder of natives” on their sheep run at Mundrabilla . The Superintendent of Police in Perth thought it was of “sufficient importance” to pass it on to the Governor, Sir William Robinson, who expressed the hope that “Captain Smith will not lose sight of this case” . According to Stevens, Truslove was shown the graves of 16 natives .

Geordie, much later told his story to the young child Arthur Dimer who grew up to be a man of Ngadju and Mirning descent who, in his 70’s, told it Peter Gifford in 1993 . Gifford was able to uncover the few documents relating to this mass murder. He cannot “excuse his [Loftie’s] inaction” in response to repeated reports “over what were, in effect, accusations of multiple murder of Aboriginal people” by McGill and the Kennedy’s .

In March 1880, John Dunn, one of three brothers who had been running sheep at Cocanarup since 1872, was killed.

It was Granny Monkey’s [Ngurer] brother, Yandawalla, that killed Dunn, you know, for what he was doing to the women.
The truth was, Esmeralda Dabb was thirteen years old when Dunn raped her, and him and the overseer were busy satisfying themselves with the young girls and they locked all the old people up in the harness room…
They were shepherding sheep …and…having initiation ceremonies…she went and told the men…and… they come back and they speared him, they killed him. Yandawalla speared him, at Cocanarup.

Next day, when John still had not come back, he [Walter] and Robert set out to look for him. They followed tracks, lost them; found them again. It was two days before they came upon John’s body and signs of a scuffle. The body had a spear wound in the neck and bruising on the arms as though they had been held.

After much delay Yangala (Yandawalla) was put on trial in October 1881, based mainly on the evidence of Dartaban who had previously been accused of the murder by Yangala. “The Attorney-General told the jury the case rested solely on Dartaban’s evidence”. Yangalla was acquitted leaving the Dunn’s “stunned at the result” .

There is no evidence of when exactly the massacre that followed these events occurred but it seems likely that directly after the trial there would have been a strong motive. The following year, Walter and Robert, bought the women of the family, to see John’s grave. They stayed six months before returning to Albany . The brothers may have felt confident of their situation by then but it was misplaced as the following year in September the Noongar again attacked, James was ‘beaten and left for dead… Robert was also attacked by them, but he shot 2 of them Dead and wounded 3 more”

Many of the Noongar accounts claim that they were “given permission from the authorities”, they “got a permit to kill the seventeen people that were residents of that place”, they “bought back the wadjela farmers and two cops with guns” and that “the police were sent up from Albany” .

“Old Henry Dongup…reckoned that altogether there was over thirty people that were killed down there.” All the people living at Cocanarup were killed except for a couple of children (the impact can be traced in genealogies recorded by Daisy Bates and Gerhard Laves ).

The popular “old school” Loftie’s brother-in-law was Maitland Brown who, in 1865, was hailed as a hero for leading a punitive expedition that killed at least 15 people in revenge for the murder of three explorers at Moola Boola . In his first year as Resident Magistrate and Protector of Aborigines in Albany, it would appear that he has ignored one report of a massacre at Fraser Range and possibly actively encouraged another at Ravensthorpe. It is little wonder that Campbell Taylor, felt motivated to send telegrams and strongly worded letters of complaint in February 1882.

In 1883, Albany residents dislike of “newcomers” and resentment towards Perth found voice in the new Albany Mail. They dreamt of separating from W.A. and annexing to S.A . A viewpoint shared by McGill and the Dempster brothers who had taken up the first leases at Esperance Bay in 1865 .

The Dempsters in 1880 had demanded an apology from the Colonial Secretary when he issued a circular banning the practice of “imprisoning natives on the islands” . They claimed that, “our conduct towards natives generally has been such as to merit esteem from the natives and praise from the public in general” . By 1870, the Dempsters had already twice reported to the Colonial Secretary Barlee that it had been “necessary in self defence to take an Aboriginal life”. They were forgiven “so long as no complaint is preferred.” The Dempsters claimed throughout that they had “very little trouble with the natives” . In 1883 outraged when Loftie connived with the Dempsters by giving them “an authority in blank” to care for “sick natives afflicted with measles” enabling the Dempster’s to charge the Government ₤291 for care that Constable Truslove reported to be greatly exaggerated. The Albany Mail accused the Government of short changing Albany by “thousands of pounds per

By 1890, after 10 years of Loftie’s protection, the Noongar population of Albany was reduced to six who dutifully attended the celebrations of Colonial independence (see below). In 1881, Loftie reported that there were 9 “exclusive of course of those in employ of householders who … would appear in the census” but Loftie was clearly in the business of under-reporting, in the same report he states “It is known that there are a few wild natives between Esperance and York but impossible to return the number – not exceeding 50.” Much later, in 1992, it was claimed that these were the last of the tribe (LOTT) and that the 800 or so Noongar residents recorded in the 1991 Census were from ‘elsewhere’ , although at least 33 Noongar burials are recorded in the Albany Memorial Park Cemetery between 1900 and 1935 . What is clear from the record is that many Noongar people had retreated from the town and the hostility that had developed towards them from the 1870’s on. Fanny Taylor, Campbell’s mother records in her diary in 1873 “[Candyup] Bobby came out but bought us no letters; he is afraid to go to town as Mr McGill is said to be in Albany" .

Resistance 1830 - 1890

The events of the 1880’s did not occur in a vacuum. Noongar resistance along the south coast to the spread of colonial settlement follows a pattern that is, in retrospect, evident in the record from the earliest days of colonization. Wadjelas were cautiously evaluated as they moved into new country, an initial test was how they responded to an offer of guidance through local territory . The consequences of cattle and sheep on native pasture and their kangaroo herds were clear from the beginning to both sides.

The Noongar would demonstrate both their numbers and authority to the newcomers, a late afternoon or evening visit usually timed to occur when the men (and their guns) were absent and only women or servants were around was made. At the same time raids leading to the destruction of sheep or stores in significant quantities occurred.

The guerrilla war that followed was mediated by Noongar ideas of payback and individual honour as well as organised resistance . The front line troops were wadjela shepherds and Noongar women and the war was as much about women’s bodies as it was about men’s land. It is striking how this frontline, so much in evidence between 1840 and 1890 on the south coast, is the progenitor of the policies and politics of the early 20th Century.

The Dempsters had ‘pioneered’ the Esperance region in 1866 and had initially settled at Menbrunup on Esperance Bay. By 1873 they had reported to the authorities on three separate occasions that it was ‘necessary in self-defence to take an Aboriginal life’ and in that year “runners with a maintch stick … collected about a hundred men, women and children…” to raid Dempster’s and drove off “between 300 and 400 young weaners” .

Biggins suggests that this is a “new tactic” but it was first employed on the south coast in 1839 against Sir Richard Spencer’s farm on the Hay River when he lost "300 fine toothed ewes and all the lambs out of 500” . It was a tactic designed to forestall the newcomer, at the same time these new farms were besieged as the local Noongar made clear their proprietary rights.

At Augusta in January 1834 Fannie Bussell records “We had a visit or rather an invasion from a number of natives… they seemed well aware of our unprotected situation, demanding bread in a tone of great authority…” Later at Vasse in 1837, her sister Bessie wondered “How will all these wars and rumours end!” It was to end in bloodshed with mass murders in 1837 and 1840. After the first massacre, (over the killing of a calf) her sister Bessy wrote ‘9 were killed and two wounded. No one in the house looks or speaks like themselves’ and after the second she wrote ‘ I fear more women were slain than men...Three women, one man, one boy are known to be dead, but more are supposed to be dying’

At the Hay River in 1840, Spencer wrote “they came in great numbers about the house towards the close of evening” and at Kendenup in 1841, Hassell wrote “the natives have assembled to an alarming number” . However, John Hassell was quick to recognize the value of diplomacy alongside force majeure and, whereas others were all too willing to preach the value of communal punishment following the putative success of the Pinjarra massacre , he recognized the virtue of protecting and rationing those in the immediate vicinity whose land he had usurped while hiring shepherds who were capable of ‘gross acts of brutality’ and who became his front line in the ongoing guerrilla war . This enabled Hassell to report that there were a ‘great many well inclined natives towards the white people… [and to request that] several native constables be made in the district’

It established a pattern. Shepherds became the expendable front line troops in the war against the Noongar. They were often charged with crimes for their actions although rarely successfully prosecuted. The loss of hunting grounds forced Noongar families to work for rations on the farms and enabled the colonists to divide and conquer. By 1840, most districts had two or more native constables who became crucial in the pursuit of the Noongar resistance. But these men risked everything, in 1847 “300 natives carrying fire beside their spears” surrounded a soldier’s house at Kojonup, they were after Bimbert and his brother George who usually stayed with them. The brothers escaped and apparently prospered but with their bridges burnt forever.

On the Noongar side, women became the front line and the war was fought over the right to their bodies. John Dunn was murdered because “the [Dunn] men were messing around with the women” . The ownership and abuse of Noongar women is a constant theme in the documented conflicts along the south coast. In 1862, Anne Camfield and others petitioned the Governor to change the law to make it a criminal offence “for either black or white to take or retain a native woman contrary to the consent of her husband ” because “in this district…the greater part of the serious crime committed by the natives has originated in this manner” .

Suspicion undermined many well intentioned people. Bobbinet went from being a trusted employee of the Graham’s at Eticup (south east of Kojonup) in 1865, to being a hunted murderer ten years later . Bobbinet was accused participating in the murder of a Noongar shepherd called Jacky Mullish in 1874. According to Bill Baker in 1953 newspaper article, he was a “red ragger” who “had always resented the intrusion of the white man” , but according to his family he was framed. The family history accords more with the facts in the contemporary record.

According to the trial record, Lance Corporal Armstrong and trooper Michael Fahey visited a shepherd’s camp at Beenup Swamp early on the morning of 13 January 1875 where Bobbinet was rumoured to be staying. He along with 6 other Noongar men were in the company of Donald McKellar, a shepherd. McKellar had entrusted Bobbinet with his rifle the previous Wednsday. Armstrong rode into the camp with his gun loaded and bailed up, at Fahey’s direction, a “native I [Fahey] have since found is called Bob Guarich” . Bobbinet had grabbed one of the three loaded guns in the camp and fatally shot Armstrong. Fahey was vilified by the police force and dishonourably discharged thus preventing any alternative view to Armstrong’s ‘heroic deed’ . Bobbinet was captured after a full scale manhunt which, according to Baker, was to result in “a trial with all the trimmings and an execution” He was caught by Constable John McGlade and was hanged in Perth, before his execution he apologized for the murder of Armstrong and prayed for forgiveness . His two children were sent to Swan Native Home and his wife Lucy remarried .

Whether or not Bobbinet was on the side of the resistance, it was still active. In 1880, when ‘notorious hut robbers’, Youngie and Tommy shot a man named George Smith east of the Williams River, the posse of four police, several farmers and trackers that pursued them returned wounded and dispirited, having caught only one out of the six in the gang ( which included three women) after 9 days and a shoot out in the marlock scrub . The resistance was not easily quelled.

While the displacement of kangaroo by cattle and sheep, exacerbated by the hunting and export of kangaroo skins, forced the Noongar to depend upon the colonists’ largesse, in 1841 and 1842 another threat emerged. American whalers arrived en masse on the south coast and decimated the population of Southern Right Whales . The coastal people had opportunistically exploited strandings and, latterly, the waste of the whalers as a source of food. In April 1844 the Government Resident wrote, “this season this source has failed them” .

The consequences were quickly bought home to the residents of Albany. Norn, Denin, Bobby and Wylie (the latter on a native constable’s rations for his assistance to Edward Eyre) staged a series of raids over a period of six weeks on every available store of food in the town . So effective was this action that there only rice available by August. Local trackers refused to co-operate and the Resident was forced to send to York for Mr Drummond, the feared ‘protector’ of natives. . However the ringleaders had given themselves up before he arrived, cheerfully admitting in court to their part in the various crimes. Denin cheekily told the court that he was ‘asleep during the robbery of sugar from Mr Warburton’s station but another man put some of it in his mouth’ .

Although various terms in Rottnest were meted out, it is clear that the Noongar men involved were aware of the political implications of their action. Indeed Norn was to become one of the most well known figures around Albany, and, in 1890, on the occasion of colonial independence, petitioned the crown reminding his Excellency “that in the year 1829, all of this country belonged to my tribe…Since that time we have been gradually deprived of our hunting grounds and nearly all our kangaroos have been killed by the white man” He may also have been the pseudonymous Kyan Gadac who wrote in 1855 to the Colonial Secretary “There is a tract of land in this colony which time out of mind belonged to me and my ancestors. I can point out its marks and boundaries and no blackfellow ever disputed my right…it is true I have no title deeds but undisputed occupation, when continued for a long series of years, you white men I believe, consider a just title.” Both petitions ask for blankets and flour - rent in other words.

The colonial perception of peaceful settlement at Albany owes much to the early interactions between a young man, Mokare, and various early officials. Mokare was an uninitiated man with a great facility for language and the nephew of the local landowners at the time of colonization. De Sainson, Nind, Barker, Wilson and Collie left descriptions of the Minang based upon their interaction with him . His role as an interpreter was pivotal in the survival of the colony but he paid a heavy price. He was ostracised by the wider community and he and his family were regarded with grave suspicion for their apparent alliance with the newcomers . Just prior to his departure Barker, the most perceptive of Mokare’s interlocutors was to write,
There are a few tribes or families of the Will's still trying to preserve peace, chiefly those who live nearest to this part, but the great majority have been stirred up to hostility by Patyarite(Woolangoli's cousin) who since his recovery, has been constantly going about exciting wrath & revenge & has persuaded the young men of some tribes to come from a great distance.(Feb 13, 1831)
The resistance had already begun.

Postcript

“You know why there are no Aborigines living in Denmark [west of Albany], it’s because it’s taboo – there was a massacre”. It was said in a knowing smug voice in 1986 when I first moved to the south coast conveying a privileged confidence. Later on I discovered that there was at least one Noongar family living there, mistaken for Italians probably because of there surname and I could find no trace of any massacre. “The last Albany Aborigines died out around the turn of the century”, members of the local historical society assured me. There were 800 recorded in the 1987 Census and I’ve identified over 33 Noongar graves in the Albany Cemetery from 1890 to 1930 when many people had abandoned the town because of the persecution of Loftie and his ilk. The persecution only intensified over the next 40 years as Noongar people were corralled into concentration camps of Carrolup and Moore River unless they were able to secure work on farms and stay out of the towns which maintained a curfew against their presence until the 1950’s.

There was a massacre at Cocanarup near Ravensthorpe to the east of Albany. “…and that’s why there are no Aborigines here and most of the locals think that’s just fine”, I was told recently, it was the malice that was the message. The massacre had only become a topic of public discussion in the last few years as local Noongar people have begun to record their history. The Noongar historians wanted it recorded and reconciled but the white descendants resile from this confronting possibility preferring the opiate of forgetfulness to the thorns of haunted memory.

The history wars are personal, my family is chasing DNA tests to prove that they have a touch of Aboriginality – preferring to forget that their pioneering ancestor, Harry Broome, left his DNA in the descendants of the Yorta Yorta women he raped before he died, slowly, from tertiary syphilis. The dementia enabled him to forget.

But this forgetfulness hides the knowledge that an irrevocable bridge has been crossed and as Bessie Bussell put it “no one in the house looks or speaks the same”.

Meme of the week

2008-05-02T23:35:00.001+08:00

"If Chinese foreign asset growth continues at its current pace, China’s government, the Bank of Russia, the Saudi Monetary Agency and a few Gulf sovereign funds will pretty much be the global financial system."

from Brad Setser's Economic blog

Dodgy bullets and Predator

2008-05-01T20:31:00.005+08:00

One reason this blog is going to be a daily thing from now on is because of a bloke who went by the moniker of Predator. The other reason is that the dodgy bullets have caught up with me and I've got metastases(secondaries) from the cancer in my jaw. So far, the count is two one in my spine called 'arthur' and one in my shoulder called 'sinclair'.

It's kind of a privilege to be able to know that your death is imminent. Although how imminent is still 'a piece of string' and I'm still finding out things, had my second cat scanned today since sinclair still is a bit of mystery. Optimistically, 12 months give or take a bit of traditional Injibardi healing perhaps. Pessimistically, it depends on sinclair and his other undetected cousins. But I intend to live life to the full - I don't have a 'take it easy' gene and there's too much that I want to say and do.

Predator and his mate stacy
from cat.org.au
Let me tell you about Predator though. I came across his minimalist website from a link on the old Indymedia sites a few years ago. He was a young bloke, in his twenties when he died from kidney cancer. His passions were anarchy, alternative technology, all kinds of d-i-y science and illegal caving. The last involved exploring the drains and pipes that are found underneath every big city. Sydney his home town has a plethora. I used to catch the underground city loop train from Central station and dream about jumping the fence and looking for those ancient pipes and the Tank Stream. Predator and his mates were way beyond that innocent fantasy, they took major risks to tag and get into places that they were not welcome. A few weeks ago someone was dragged dead out of a sewer pipe near Bondi beach. One the clan.

He was destined to have a short life. The man was a genius with more energy and appetite than any normal human. There is a web site cat.org.au created by Predator and others way back in the late 1990's where they pioneered the use of unix and running their own servers to do web casts from community events. These days we rely upon, unthinkingly, ISP's to provide us with access. These guys grabbed there own DNS space early on so that they could run it themselves from the bottom up. It's become slightly redundant and the site is maintained as an archive rather that an active site. It relied, I think, on Predator's energy and intellect.
He wrote about everything from the information paradigm, 'a light hearted' epistemology, viewing human nature and life as an information system; through to details of his own hair rasing experiments of enhancing his masturbation by applying 20v electric currents at the point of orgasm! But his tour-de-force is his diary written upon his diagnosis up until he could no longer write. Maddeningly masculine in outlook, it is a gripping yarn and tragedy as he regards his disease as a biochemical experiment trying one cure after another, putting up with doctors who can't keep up with his intellect, how the allure of death improved his sex life and finally a few days before his death when he reaches the point of no longer being able to write.

I wont write as personally as him, but I'm inspired by him to use the occasion to record as much of the miscellany of indigenous history and culture and environmental knowledge that I've acquired over the years.

Yorgum - a large red flowering gum

2008-04-30T18:10:00.005+08:00

Yorgum is "a Noongar name for a large red flowering gum tree with healing properties" and also the name adopted by the Yorgum Aboriginal Family Counselling service( an indigenous run service). Their introductory page contains the following words "yorgum a symbol of grandmother for the family tree", "dwott yorgum kwopping very good walbrininy healing".

I'm recording this as an example of what I was talking about in my previous post - of how the writing of Noongar is taking on a life of its own. Let me unpick some of the words here.

dwott is a word used for various eucalyptus trees. George Moore recorded its use in the 1840's, Moore spelt it twotta . Yorgum is probably derived from Yok(woman) and may also be a name for a specific tree. Large red flowering gum trees are not common on the west coast. The most likely candidate is Corymbia ilicifolia which is generally a small tree. It would be nice if someone could ask the service for me about the origin of this word. My intuition is that it may well find its way more generally into the language.

kwopping is a variant on kwop/gwab - here the -ing ending is used as an intensifier(very). Daisy Bates is enlightening on the variations of this common word in Noongar.

walbrininy is interesting. It's not recorded in any of the early word lists as far as I can tell. But is now quite common in the Perth area where it means 'healing'.

A very brief history of written Noongar

2008-04-28T23:14:00.000+08:00

Words tend to congeal, like blood from a wound, out of the flow of possibilities and spellings. The Noongar language is still flowing across the page redolent with potential, like the earth after the rain.

Tonight I counted 13 different word lists that had been written over the last 200 years recording the southern Noongar dialect as it has been spoken around King Georges Sound since 1801. At a guess, there would be another 30 or more word lists for the whole of the south west during this period of colonization. Now Noongar people themselves are beginning to write the language in their own way, scratching the itch making the blood flow again.

Consider by way of contrast the languages of the Western Desert, these languages have been ‘saved’ partly by linguists writing them down and providing a phonetically based script. Well, at least that’s the linguist’s justification, the actual saving was done by the speakers speaking and the learners learning. What the script and consequent dictionaries and grammars have provided has been a way of competing in the classroom with English. But even this argument is flawed - the descriptive tools of linguists have become the prescriptive tools of the classroom. The clotted words have colonized the poetics of recitative.

Collett Barker, in 1830, wrote about Noongar visitors arriving at King Georges Sound “when they have something important to say they say it in a sort of recitative”, Nind referred to “a chant”. The traditional language was sung as much as it was spoken. When I read this sort of thing, I feel that we have missed out on a high culture where everyday conversation was an art form that would leave the salons of Europe for dead.

Something else happened instead. Unlike the precise dictionaries of the Western desert, Noongar was written down by ordinary people trying to communicate what they thought they heard around them. As a result many Noongar words have solidified into spellings that (in much the same way as English) do not map the pronunciation but are purely symbolic. Thus balga, Palgarup, refer to the grass tree and to a place where grass trees grow; quenda, rather than kwenda is used for bandicoot. In linguistics both sets of words Noongar and Western Desert are considered technically symbolic but clearly the former is more arbitrary than the latter.

The form is also political. The academic spelling was for years, Nyungar, but this was challenged by Noongar people themselves in the 1980’s and so by 1992, the first dictionary produced by the speakers themselves was the Noongar Dictionary. Many Noongar people speak bitterly of being unable to speak their language as children and young people. They risked arrest, one lady I know recalled being put off the school bus for saying something in language. Another spoke of the aura of fear and criminality that surrounded the old people who lived on the edge of the Gnowangerup reserve.“We were too scared to talk to them”. An unfortunate legacy of Daisy Bates was her appellation of Bibbulmun to the people of the south west. Writers like Jack Davis derided this mistaken metonymy. During the 1960’s and 70’s there was a slow and painful process of reclaiming their own name in official and educational publications, of fighting the studied ignorance of racism.

Many people objected to the 1992 Dictionary, especially on the south coast. “That’s not our talk”. The complexities of the dialects were not acknowledged, not through any sense of superiority but more from a lack of time and money. So today a new phenomenon is beginning to occur. As people write stories, signs, lists and posters they are making their own spellings, revising those found in other dictionaries. Two books featured here recently spelt kangaroo, yongker and yongka. In Perth I’ve seen other examples of this fluidity (although I’ve been remiss in recording them). It’s as if each family wants it’s own way of doing things and it’s also a form of resistance. As Luce Irigary wrote… “fluid movements that permeate and resist, but are irreducible to the phallocentric[read colonial] structures of representation”.

Eulogy

2008-01-11T22:55:00.001+09:00

It's been a 400km day, a clear-sighted blue sky day. A driving day from the coast still green to the gimlet and salmon gum and yellow straw fields of the hinterland. To Katanning, for a funeral.

He was a good man who touched the hearts of those around him and when two of his innumnerable grannies, 10 year old girls, solemnly dropped flowers in his grave I cried. When I heard the voice of his friend and mentor, the Rev Eric Hayward of the Aboriginal Evangelical Church, break at the end of a long service that he had officiated over, preaching the redemption of Christ and the victory over death, preaching consolation and hope to the family of this young, 61 year old grandfather taken on Xmas day, he too had tears in his eyes.

When I met him, he was working to revive the Noongar language, trying to keep the culture alive. He saw no contradiction with his evangelical faith. I remember he attended a men's meeting over a long weekend and came back so enthusiastic, growling out lingo, capturing the poetry of it's tonalities. The stuff that can't be put in dictionaries or on paper. His eulogy records that he would sing any time of day, and play cards with anyone, and of course, he wrote songs for himself, his family and anyone who would listen. He was a 'Noongar lover', his wife wrote.

Sometimes, wadjela people say that the poet and lover in the Australian character is an inheritance from our Irish ancestry, but AB reminded me that the poet and lover are icons of our Noongar ancestry. Songs and dance, Daisy Bates once observed, were the most tradeable items at manjars(fairs) far more valuable than material things like spears, and flint and special foods.

And tonight, I'm watching on TV Kev Carmody's songs being "re/discovered" and when our hearts are open our eyes do cry...

More Noongar language books

2007-11-21T22:41:00.001+09:00

Four new children's books have been produced in Noongar language by Batchelor Press. These are traditional stories told by Jack Williams and Carol Petterson of Albany that have been told in Noongar and English by the authors. With the assistance of Denise Smith-Ali and a variety of family members the authors have used the current Noongar vocabulary and their own memories and idiosyncrasies to produce a new text. A similar process has been used by the Laves family translators although in the latter case the original story tellers have long since passed away.

This process which is occurring more and more these days is indicative of the way in which Noongar is being re-invigorated within the indigenous community. The language of the stories is discussed within families and a new generation of speakers and writers is evolving. It is only a matter of time before we start to see a new generation of texts in Noongar language.

Carol Petterson recalls that she was "beaten for telling the bobtail story in that 'filthy' Noongar language", an experience that was shared by all members of her generation. The "shame and distress" that she felt as a youngster is these days a strong motivation for her and others to revive the language.

Jack Williams' stories come from the Stirling Ranges and the real treasure in Jack's work is to be found in the accompanying CD where he sings a traditional Noongar song associated with his stories.

There is a renaissance of Noongar culture that is just starting to flower. The next few years will be exciting indeed.

Copies of the books are available from Batchelor Press email them at batchelorpressATbatchelorDOTeduDOTau

Cape Verde Cliffs on Mars

2007-11-10T20:29:00.000+09:00

"Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech."
This picture is from NASA's Opportunity Rover which is beginning to crawl into the interior of Victoria Crater, the cliffs have been christened "Cape Verde" by NASA. The color is from "scattered light from dust on the front sapphire window of the rover's camera" according to NASA's press release. I've cropped NASA's image. If you click on this you'll get a larger version that will fit on your desktop if so inclined.

A new warm current

2007-11-06T23:44:00.000+09:00

Sea surface temperatures off southern africa
Off the east coast of southern Africa the water is quite warm at the moment. In fact there's a warm current carrying warm water far down into the southern ocean.

temperature anomalies
It's been that way for the last month (these pix are from Nov 2 and are cropped from the daily pixs posted at the US Navy's Oceanography & Meteorology Centre ). The anomaly picture shows how unusual it is - the deep red splodge is 4 degrees above normal.
Currently the temperatures off the north west coast of W.A. are slightly below normal which is why the La Nina is not happening as it should. The Leuwin current is sluggish and only just getting into gear. Instead all that warm water is on the other side of the Indian Ocean probably gonna melt a few icebergs but it ain't gonna make it rain.

Four different ways to say "good"

2007-10-23T19:51:00.000+08:00

Waddib (B.coccinea) at Mt Barker Banksia farm source:wikipedia

I've posted at my Noongar language web site a copy of Daisy Bates 1914 article on Noongar dialects. It confirms my opinion that one of her best qualities was her linguistic skill. In analysing her genealogical data I learnt to trust her spellings of individual names, even though she might get a relationship wrong she never misheard a person's name.

She identifies 17 different dialects within Noongar country which is easily the biggest number identified by anybody but which also accords with the accounts of many Noongar people I've spoken to who insist that there are far more local variations than are generally given credit for in the academic linguistic literature.

Here are Daisy's variations on gwab, good.

Gwâba, good (Swan, Bunbury, Vasse)
Gwâba-gwaba, very good (Swan, Bunbury, Vasse)
Gwabalitch or gwâbajil, best.
ŋwiri, good. (Dunan dialect, Capel)
ŋwiri- ŋwiri, very good. (Dunan dialect, Capel)
Gwâb, good. (Katanning.)
Gwâbărt, very good; or Gwâbadăk. (Katanning.)
Kwâb, good. (Esperance, also Kaiali wongi.)
Kwâbadăk, very good. (Esperance, also Kaiali wongi.)

Pia (B. occidentalis) source: wikipedia commons

I've also updated the list of plant names including some banksia's recorded by Baron Hugel recorded in Albany in 1832-3. Waddib, Banksia coccinea and pia, Banksia occidentalis. The latter is (probably mistakenly) recorded as B. Grandis by other 19th Century authors(Moore, Grey, Lyons etc.).

A good day for a story or three

2007-10-17T20:28:00.000+08:00

I’d never seen quite so many crows as I did last Saturday as I walked up past the rubbish tip to the Noongar Centre, more like a mass murder really. But it was a perfect Mondyeunung day, the start of early summer. The winds were deciding to change direction from the winter westerlies to the summer easterlies and they’ll debate this from now until Christmas on the south coast. Something new in the air – there certainly was up at the Noongar Centre. A buzz was in the air and it wasn’t just about the terribly important persons wandering in the door. They were here incognito (“I’m just a Lockyer boy”, said the Premier). It was what they were here for. It had taken 77 years for these stories to mature.

The day was a pre-publication launch of three stories, the first three to see the light of day from the Laves collection. Stories dictated by today’s elder’s parents and uncles back in 1930 at the White Star Hotel. A young linguist, Gerhard Laves pursuing his Ph D., equipped with a knowledge of a modern phonetic alphabet, plenty of enthusiasm, and a supply of sixpences, good money in those days. Besides how else was the language and the stories going to be preserved when it was a crime to talk too loud, and could get you kicked out of school for sure. Mind you it was a close run thing, they sat in an attic, while our linguist became a school teacher in depression era America,until Michael Walsh an Australian linguist discovered traces of his visit in the local literature and decided to track him down. That was in 1975 and as these things go it took another eight years before the material returned to Australia with the old man's blessing and another ten or so years before word of the material seeped through to Albany's Noongar community.So it goes.

It was almost ten years ago when people first started to work on setting up a reference group, getting funding for transcriptions and the long painful process of deciding who was spokesperson for what family and how it was going to function. Mind you, patience is a renowned virtue in Indigenous Australia.

Kim Scott won the Miles Franklin Award for his book Benang. There’s a second Indigenous winner now from the other end of the country, Alexis Wright. But these stories, saw him in the role of midwife rather than procreator. So much discussion -about placenames, should they be included; about which words to use, we don’t say it that way today; should we talk this over with the family first – one story was pulled for that reason, the family weren’t ready, the story wasn’t ready; about illustrations – although it’s clear that the artists provided morale boosting moments away from the words.

So today was about giving out 50 copies of the story to the wider family, to the relatives, and yes, one to that boy from Lockyer, that one makin’ all the big promises and one to that old white fella, Bill Hassell whose father’s father had recorded many words and whose grandmother had recorded uniquely women’s stories from Jerramungup – home country for some of today’s family. ‘An unexpected privilege’ he was touched in the heart.

Finally, Iris, Roma and Kim took turns reading one of the stories to us about a boy finding his uncle, fishing for groper and learning about his inheritance.

Symmon's Noongar Grammar

2007-10-01T15:21:00.000+08:00

Things to do in between doses of radiotherapy could include copying Charles Symmons Vocabulary and Grammar from the 1842 W.A. Almanack on microfilm at the Battye library. And then, pausing for a rest and more water, and very slowly, turning it into some web pages. Why would I do that? You may well ask.
One reason is that apart from an abridged publication as an Appendix in the 1892 edition of Lawrence Threlkeld's Awakabal Dictionary, it hasn't been published since 1842. Another reason is that the only other comprehensive attempt at a Noongar Grammar is by Wilf Douglas in the 1960's. But I suppose the real reason is that it's just so damn interesting!
Charles Symmons was not greatly regarded in the colony at the time because he wasn't a gentleman and he was overlooked for the position of 'Protector of Natives' which went to Francis Armstrong. But Symmons learnt the language quickly and although he acknowledges George Grey as the source of some of his work. I suspect that Grey owed him a debt as well when it came to writing and understanding Noongar language and culture. But then Charles wasn't a gentleman.
He was a teacher though and he had learnt Latin. So he established the first school for Noongar children. His knowledge of Latin is evident in his grammar and Latin wasn't a bad start when it came to Noongar.
Anyhow, you can take a look at Charlie Symmon's work at my Noongar language pages. I'm off to bed.

Crystallnacht - Oz style

2007-08-07T19:44:00.000+08:00

Goebbels was found of accusing Jewish people of abusing their children. In 1938 Hitler authorised the SS to destroy Jewish property and confiscate their businesses. The same thing is happening today to Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory and the Labour opposition is craven in it's acceptance of legislation that goes against nearly every fundamental human right.

Under the new legislation introduced today child abuse and something called 'aboriginal violence'(defined as an offence that carries a penalty of greater than 3 years) are now to be dealt with by the Australian Crimes Commission with the same rules as apply to organized crime and terrorrism. They seem to think that the only child abuse that occurs is 'organised'.
Anyone accused of any of these crimes will lose the right to silence and be subject to the various special rules that apply for these other crimes. Anyone who knows anything about child abuse will recognise the futility of such a draconian approach. A close reading reveals that child abuse includes 'neglect' now considered part of the purview of the ACC! Then we have this new category of crime - 'Aboriginal violence' -the only redeeeming virtue of this is that the High Court will chuck it out. In the mean time anyone who violently resists arrest will go down for a very long time indeed. Anyone who throws a spear will lose the right to silence.

Oh yes, then there's the changes to the land rights act - which has been suspended as has the Racial Discrimination Act and any laws regarding Racial Discrimination enacted by the Northern Territory Government, indeed any laws of the Northern Territoy government are superseded. The purpose of these suspensions? To enable the Commonwsealth to take control of town camps and to offer them as freehold land after five years. To remove any restriction on non- community people from using any 'common space' on an aboriginal reserve. To offer 99 year leases ostensibly to Aboriginal owners but in fact to any whitefella who can persuade a land council, or even the minister that s/he has a legitimate interest - after all there are lots of traditional owners with the wherwithal to buy their own homes.Not!

Meanwhile the same government has scrapped CDEP and killed off the social services that were being provided on the cheap by this organisation. it has killed off ICTV, the indigenous television production company that had come to serve a critical role in health and positive messages in communities. And now we have the new welfare reforms which I haven't thad time to read yet because I've been making futile calls to ALP Senators pleading that they show some moral fiber on this issue. I start chemotherapy tommorrow and I can do no more. God Help Australia!

Australia’s Indigenous Women Explorers

2007-07-22T22:49:00.000+08:00

It’s one of those stories that has been told in bits and pieces but those who’ve had a whiff have followed its trail like a hunter chasin’ a ‘roo.

There’s the official story of colonization on South Australia and Western Australia and then there’s this other story. Rebe Taylor tells the story of Kangaroo Island in her masterful local history “Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island”. Sarah Hay created a fictional version of the sealer gangs on Middle Island near Esperance in W.A. in her award winning book “Skins”.

Julie Gough got in touch with me a few years ago because she was tracing the path of her ancestor, Woertomenyer from Tasmania. Her story and the other stories told and untold is of the diaspora of indigenous Tasmanian women in the early part of the 19th Century.

“It was a fact of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture that the men seldom learnt to swim: when they needed to cross a body of water, they were often ferried on rafts by the women, who were proficient swimmers. The Aboriginal men were therefore of limited use as labourers to the sealers, but the women proved to be invaluable” Terry Crowley, “Tasmanian Aboriginal Culture”, in Language and Culture of Aboriginal Australia, eds. Michael Walsh & Colin Yallop, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1993 p. 58

As Rebe Taylor points out, the idea of sealers as wild men who abducted these women was at least partially a 19th Century invention and only part of the truth.

Indeed, it’s a fact of Australia’s colonial history that Tasmanian indigenous women were present with their sealer men at the first settlements of South Australia and Western Australia, at Kangaroo Island and King George’s Sound respectively. Woertomenyer who was present at King George’s Sound in 1826 eventually travelled on to Mauritius, Sydney and back to Tasmania. Other’s like Towser and Eliza Gamble settled near Albany and have descendants in wadjila and Noongar communities.

Julie Gough will be in Albany on August 24th where she will join others for an informal discussion and conversation, “Sealing days in Southern Seas: Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Stories and History of those waters”. Location: Albany Public Library, time: 10.00 am.

Dodging the bullet - part 2

2007-07-22T14:01:00.000+08:00

I’m a bad patient – being an ex-nurse, that’s regarded as a truism – but I’m also impatient, not a patient that I’d like to nurse. I was reassured by a kindly nurse after 11 hours of surgery that everybody loses it after a few days, simply from the lack of sleep. I still had to apologize to a couple of nurses because I arced up at them – such is the interpersonal cost of anger(as my counsellor and friend would say).

But I think sometimes it’s worth being a bad patient because there’s a lot of bad medicine around out there and as a patient you are on the bottom of the heap. Being hospitalised is the medical equivalent of being certified, you have no rights except those that you can assert for yourself. That assertion inevitably involves you treading the fine line between aggression and tears, between resignation and anger. For me, it involved a lot of praying to get through the pain and discomfort and to manage the emotional turmoil of helplessness – besides which the Bible was the only book available, and you could read it in disconnected passages – why not the Koran, the Dhamma sutra, the tao te ching? Never mind, the Bible is at least as worthy of attention as any other great religious text and there is considerable comfort for the helpless to be drawn from it’s message of love and faith. A prayer or a mantra is something that the mind can cling on to when the seconds seem long.

Then there are finally those moments of grace when you look out the window and realize that you have survived and that the world is shining and beautiful. The sigh of relief and the prayer of thanks when the surgeon comes to you after a week and says that the microscopy has confirmed that, ‘we got all of it’.

There is nothing that can prepare you for the shock of major surgery and the physical cost of recovery. Even 6 weeks later I am still weakened and tired – the process of recovery is a gradual thing clawing back a bit of strength day by day and some days losing out to sleeplessness or complications.

Speaking of complications, one should avoid Friday discharges from big city hospitals especially if you are going to fly off to a country town as I did. It seems that there is an inevitable cost of iatrogenic disorders that accompanies surgery, something that was feared in the 19th Century and earlier times, but which it’s my experience has not changed today. I have learnt the hard way to assume responsibility for my own care because leaving it up to doctors or nurses simply leads to bungles and troubles.

Arriving home on a Friday, I stayed with friends that night and broke out in a massive sweat that night. By Saturday night I had borrowed a thermometer and confirmed that I had a temperature of 38.1. So after speaking to the surgical ward in Perth I took myself to the local Casualty department to try and get admitted. Bad move. I got sent home with a couple of flucloxacillin tablets, ‘come back in the morning’, this despite the fact that I had a discharge summary that was less than 48 hours old. So I come back in the morning, after another sleepless night. Bad move. The doctor on call, is not my GP, but one known to have a terrible reputation. Fortunately the nurse in Causalty is one of these true heroines of nursing. She’d seen me the night before but had been on triage and was ‘pissed off’ that I’d been sent home. Nevertheless, with a combination of guile and skill, she got a cannula in my arm and a dose of IV antibiotics and persuaded me and the (bad) GP that I should wait until Monday to get admitted under my own GP. ‘hospitals full’, she said. There was a remarkable number of empty beds when I finally got admitted on that Monday! But I’m eternally grateful for the white lie, I saw the GP in question deal dreadfully with a young man in the bed next to me during the following week.

So I sat outside my GP’s office on Monday morning – ‘give me the hard core antibiotics or I will kill you’ – I’d had 3 sleepless nights by then. Well he did, and while he was at it he wrote me up for some hard core analgesia (oxycodone) without asking whether I was in any pain. It was an instruction from the surgeon in Perth. Pack drill.

3 days later I partially dislocated(subluxed) my shoulder trying to turn over in bed having been frozen in position as I nursed my precious cannula (that nobody wanted to replace with a proper line) and doped to the eyeballs it was remarkably easy to do. I felt the snap and some discomfort but the next morning my mind was distracted from this by the fact that the cannula had finally tissued. These days they allow nurses 2 goes before calling a doctor to insert an IV line. Of course they don’t have specialized nurses in country hospitals who do this all the time. It’s a skill that only comes with practice and it’s the patient who gets to experience their sporadic practice. This is called improving patient care.

The next day after having dealt with my constipation caused by the combination of iron and oxycodone. ‘Yes I can administer my own suppositories’. I decided to refuse the oxycodone –‘We thought that was brave Bob’ – she said 2 hours later as my back went into spasm. It took me 24 hours to work out that I’d had enough oxycodone for my body to think it was a habit. The GP (not my GP, just one from the group practice) had decided that I could go home on oral antibiotics. I had decided that I was going to ‘cold turkey’ off the oxycodone. So I went to my friends place and threw myself into some intense rounds of Chi Kung – the first that I’d been able to do in 3 weeks – took aspirin and fought the demons through the next couple of nights.

I recalled my time back in 1974 when I had helped establish We Help Ourselves(WHOS) in Canberra. I was never partial to heroin but as a social activist I had witnessed the death from an overdose of a great poet, Michael Dransfield. WHOS was astarted by ex-addicts prior to the widespread use of methadone. It had two rules - cold turkey is the only way to go and if at first you don't succeed you're doing about average. I made the mistake taking some panadeine on my first night and after whipsawing into convulsions I recalled those two rules to my friends and my mum the next morning who were still putting me up and putting up with me . I wanted nothing more than to return to my own house with it's trees, bandicoots, birds and Ebony, my rat-hunting cat.

And God provides. I finally got into my own home, which had been cleaned and renovated by my friends who had come together over the previous weeks to support me. I was overwhelmed. One of my Noongar friend’s had found a black beanie, with yellow and red bands and it was lying next to my computer as I walked in the door. It has hardly left my head since then – the strength of the Land is with me. I settled down to endure a week of painful sleep management with a painful shoulder that I had no diagnosis for.

Ah but “ Can’t do that, computer says no”, we can give you plenty of drugs but anything that involves real people and real help is another matter. The surgery had left me with no teeth and one side of my face paralysed and I was unable to eat properly or speak without spitting. It took 3 weeks of asking before I got to see a speech therapist and I couldn’t get a physio referral at all and ended up paying a private physio to diagnose and treat my shoulder. Hard if you’re living on a pension and have no car.

I’ve had great support from friends and family and from a few heroic nurses who really care and who are better at working the system than me (and I've been sustained by my daily Chi Kung regimen). But I wonder how people who don’t have my knowledge and my network survive.

I’m about to go to Perth for 6 weeks of chemotherapy and radiotherapy and I discovered yesterday that they hadn’t removed all my teeth as I was told. I’d been dealing with a recurrence of candida (thrush) in my mouth which should have stopped once I finished taking antibiotics. So I was having a good look and I find a dead, infected molar in my remaining upper jaw. So when I go back to Perth tomorrow I expect I’ll still be a bad patient demanding it’s removal before they start and screw up their precious timetable and I expect the computer will say no. But I intend to live and survive so I’m damned if I’ll be a good patient and lie down and die. Not just yet, anyway.

Dodging the bullet – part 1

2007-07-16T14:59:00.000+08:00

“Well, is it stage 2 or 3?” I asked, trying to sound knowledgeable. He looked at me gravely, “It’s stage 4, it’s into the bone you can see here.” he said pointing to the Cat Scan of my jaw that we were looking at.

“So what are the odds?”

“60% survival in 5 years” he said. It was not good news, but he didn’t beat around the bush and he offered a means of beating the odds.

“ I’ve seen head and neck surgery back in the late 70’s and it wasn’t a pretty sight” I was pretty dubious. In those days a flap from your shoulder was grafted in place of the missing jaw and you sat in ICU for weeks. Not a pretty sight and survival was not good.

“Things have progressed since then. We take a free flesh graft from your arm or leg and micrograft a vein and artery into the blood supply of your face. Survival rate from surgery is about 95%“

Well, that sounds a bit better I thought and the quiet professionalism and honesty of this ENT surgeon was making an impression. I could work with this man I thought. Up until now, I’d only had a diagnosis that had made me contemplate the most painless way to shuffle off my perch. Here was a lifeline.

“You’ll need radiotherapy afterwards. It’s best if we take out your teeth as they’ll be affected by the radiation” Well my teeth were rotten anyway and it was my persistence at pursuing the lack of healing following the removal of a wisdom tooth that meant that we had got it early.

“Your lucky in that respect.” It had only spread into my lymph glands in the last month or so and since I’d moved across the demarcation line from dentistry to medicine things had been moving fast.

“We’ll get dentures for you in 12 months time” Something to look forward too.

So I went home for two weeks and threw myself into an intensive program of Chi Kung and prayer. For the last 5 years I’d been coming to terms with the manic depression that had ruled my life. Up until I had sought counselling I had ridden the ups and downs through of political activism interspersed with black periods of despair softened by alcohol and marijuana. I’d given up cigarettes 20 years ago and gave up alcohol as part of my personal deal to seek counselling and I had been ‘quitting’ dope, having longer and longer dry periods during my counselling. So that by the beginning of this year I had enrolled in university and I was set upon reinventing myself. I had learnt to control my agitation by self medicating with Valproate after going through the retinue of antidepressants.

But nothings ever easy and postponing my exams to have surgery seemed like the least of my problems and deciding to never touch dope again was the easiest of decisions. There is something about the threat of imminent death that sharpens the mind wonderfully. I threw myself into finishing off my essays and coursework. I managed to get into a recording studio for 2 hours and record 19 original songs before I lost my teeth and worse. I’d had numerous goes over the years and always given up because I couldn’t stay in tune or stumbled over a beat. This time I didn’t care it was just get them down it’s now or never.

In the last few days before I left for Perth, I managed to get up an exhibition of a selection of never seen paintings from 1840. They’re 65 water colours done by Robert Neil of fish and snakes caught with the assistance of half a dozen Noongar men. Each drawing had the Noongar name for the fish, as well as the Latin name, and where he knew it the sealer’s name and the settler’s name. 4 different languages came together. It had taken me several years to track them down and get them photographed in the British Museum. There full publication is a project for a cancer survivor.

I was as ready as anybody could be to dodge the bullet.

40 years on - J'accuse

2007-05-27T20:45:00.000+08:00

Referendum baby (Source:National Museum of Australia)

I can't help but wonder what there is to celebrate about the fact that it was only 40 years ago that we decided to acknowledge that the First Australians were human beings. It was, after all, 22 years after the demise of Nazi Germany and the failure of our own 'final solution' (a phrase in common use in 1930's Australia) was due more to our inefficiency compared to Germany than any moral fibre we possessed. As I recall, the 90% vote was as much a repudiation of the more embarrassing vestiges of the White Australia Policy than out of any real concern for the status the First Australians.

At the time the Gurindji people had just begun their walk-off from Wave Hill to assert that, after 180 odd years, the colonists had not destroyed all resistance. In 1967 Bill Stanner called the Gurindji walkoff 'a little miracle' in his lectures describing the 'great Australian silence' about the absence of the First Australians in our Colonial histories.

The struggle to reclaim this land from the colonists continues to this day with little success. The misnamed Native Title Act has become nothing more than a way of legalising the continuing theft of land by the colonizers. As Marandoo Yanner put it the other day, "For every [square]kilometer we've gained we've lost 100 square kilometres".

Instead of Native Title being something worth valuing and respecting it has been universally seen as a problem by the comprador class led by John Howard, the traitor. I accuse him of high treason.

When this country is invaded by the next colonial empire they will turn around to us all and say your title only exists in the 'crown' of some old empire. How can you demand that we respect your backyards and your farms when you have shown no obligation to settle with your own people. This is the great travesty that has been wrought over the last 12 years by this cowardly little man beholden to no Australian cause. This man has betrayed us all irrespective of our antecedents. Sure he has had allies on both sides of politics but it has been his desire to live in the lotus land of the present, recognizing no past and no future, that has called the tune.

What sort of country are we that celebrates our soldiers acting as mercenaries ('lest we forget' indeed) and despises and forgets those people who have fought and died defending it's own shores over the last 200 years?

The Dentist as Murderer

2007-05-24T11:29:00.000+08:00

Hi my name is Rob, I’m a dentist I can’t show you my face because… well I’m a murderer, but I’m getting paid bucket loads to appear in this ad for a toothbrush. Not that it’s any different from any other toothbrush and not that I care one bit about your teeth really. After all they’re your responsibility and I’m just here to charge you an arm and leg if you can’t look after them. How do I get away with it? Well, while everybody concentrates on critiquing medical practice I can get away with murder and I’m laughing all the way to the bank and, no, I’m not going to show you my face.

You see it’s like Catch 22. I can get heaps of money from the aluminium companies because I’m a steadfast supporter of them making a profit out of their waste fluoride which I claim (with dubious support) to be absolutely necessary to improve dental health but when it comes to any individual set of teeth, I don’t have to take responsibility for my professional practice because I can blame it on the victim (sorry patient) who obviously hasn’t cared for their teeth probably. Good eh?

I can recommend that you have braces on your teeth and I don’t have take responsibility for any damage to the enamel caused by them. You see it’s your responsibility and by crikey can I make money from them.

Of course, if you’re poor and can’t afford my rates you can go to a government clinic where they will solve the problem of the pain caused by a hole in your tooth simply. We’ll just pull it out, like they did in the 19th Century. Not that we care that this is guaranteed to cause further damage down the line to your other teeth and result in you losing all your teeth prematurely with consequent damage to your overall health perhaps reducing your life expectancy by 5 or 10 years. You still can’t see my face, can you?

We dentists could of course make professional submissions to the government about the long term costs of these antiquated practices but we won’t because we make so much money charging those who can afford it for fillings and root canal work and so on. We could make submission to the government about the value of public education programs regarding prevention of gum disease and how to clean your teeth to prevent this as you get older but we don’t because… well you get my drift.

Of course if you have something really serious going on in your mouth such as cancer. We won’t bother to look to closely if you’re poor. There was a bloke in here the other day – he had a hole in the base of his wisdom tooth. We yanked that out and didn’t bother to wonder how a hole could occur that far down. When he came back and complained that there was still pain. We just tapped his gums and said ‘sensitive gums, go away’. Eventually he went to a private dentist to get an xray and that showed that a chip of the wisdom tooth had got left behind. Well whose fault was that! We’ll give him some antibiotics that will shut him up.

Silly bugger came back complaining that the antibiotics hadn’t worked. So we better have a hack around –can’t get it – let’s refer him up to the University clinic and get a student to practice on him that will shut him up. Let’s give him some more antibiotics as well.

Silly bugger complained when the student created a hole between his nose and his mouth and left him with no follow up or analgesia. Doesn’t he realize that it’s summer and we need a 6 week break. Let’s make him travel up from the country a few times at his own expense before we do anything and give him some more antibiotics for his non healing wound.

Silly bugger went to his doctor. But you know there is a demarcation line that the most left wing unionist would be proud of between dentists and doctors. Doctor won’t do anything until the dentist makes a referral back except give the silly bugger some more antibiotics.

Silly bugger’s been complaining now for 15 months about this – so we better have a good look. Hmm, the hole in the bone between his mouth and his nose has gotten bigger and that ulcer looks suspicious let’s get him back under a general anaesthetic and take a sample for histology in two weeks time. Wonder what’s eating that bone away.

OK he’s unconscious and can’t complain now - these public patients are such a waste of time. I can’t be buggered to fill out this pathology report properly and I’ve got to pick the kids up from their private school. Get him back in 2 weeks and we’ll see if our handiwork has made any difference.

“Nurse, ring up the pathology company and find out where that pathology report is” – turns to the silly bugger – “actually it’s healing quite nicely you know, I think we did a good job this time”(best professional smile). Hang on a tick here comes nurse with the path report – oh dear you’ve got a squamous cell cancer - better go back to the country and see your GP. It’s his problem now.

Silly bugger knew he had cancer 4 months ago but nobody could be fucked listening. Now he’s in the hands of a specialist who reckons his got a 60% chance of surviving the next 5 years because it’s stage IV and been eating the bone away for some time. Silly bugger needs to have all his teeth out now because of the radiotherapy – he won’t need a dentist anymore that’s for sure.

My name’s Rob I’m a dentist I can’t show you my face…

Last Bus Zone

2007-05-14T20:52:00.000+08:00

Actually, its not quite the last bus, but I am becoming a frequent traveller between Albany and Perth as my persistent dental problems turn tumorous, that's hardly very humourous, they could after all be numerous. Sigh.

So it's so cold and gloomy today on the south coast and there's one carriage on that interminably long wheat train pulling into the port where the grain has been caught and some of it's even sprouted. The pigeons have seen it and make a great to-do, keeping up with the trundling train.

I traveled on the bus with a bloke just out of the army, last six years overseas, travelling on the bus was a bit of test for him, he explained. He didn't expect civvies to understand that...

He was the best company though...

Its come to my attention that people have internalized Guantanamo Bay. Nobody seems to care any more about whether things actually work or not. Nobody bothers to fill in your form anymore. The Breshnevian paradox. The systems going through the motions but its not really for anyones benefit anymore. It's just to facilitate and secure profits. So we have to stand up and remind people just who they are.

'if you want to live close to the edge like that
if you want to lie near to the fire
you've got to accept there's a risk attached
don't look back if you want to go higher.' Bungarra 1983

Everything fragments...

Mal Brough - ANZAC

2007-04-16T23:30:00.000+08:00

There's something about the ANZAC tradition that resonates in the image of Mal Brough, a doomed Government's Minister for Aboriginal[Indigineous] Affairs, setting forth a new vision for a future. Something enticing and intoxicating, perhaps. The nuance of acknowledging a person's country that creates a frission.
In many ways what the debate is now boiling down to is the question of the creation of sustainable institutions. The official "no more ATSIC" line is going to have to give way to the realpolitik of governance in Indigenous institutions. But this quickly leads to questions about the governance of Australia as a whole. Traditional Australians may want to start by questioning the validity of 'state' boundaries.
But, on the other hand, there are no boundaries in the totalitarian world of the twenty first century. Strength lies in openness and honesty. These are, sine qua none, democratic qualities. Consequently, immigrant Australians will always want to extend the metaphor beyond the shores of rectitude.

Is it so unreasonable to suggest that a rewriting of the constitution should start by recognizing the traditional boundaries and homelands of the first Australians and that we should reconsider our tiers of government on that basis? Surely we, Australia, should be the immovable object in the face of the irresistible force of the 21st Century? Is not then the Indigenous land rights movement the ultimate Conservative project???

Genocide - the Australian Labour Party way.

2007-01-22T18:12:00.000+09:00

You know it's bad news when the press release goes out on the Friday before Xmas. Certainly the Western Australian Government knew what it was doing by announcing that it appeal the Federal Court ruling on the grounds that "The Nyoongar claimants had not provided evidence of a single society at the time of white settlement..."(West Australian, p.4 Saturday December 23,2007)

The appeal says

"There were important differences within the alleged 'Nyoongar'...There was conflict and enmity between Aboriginal groups within the claim area and that Aboriginal people were fearful of dying in the land of another group lest they spend the afterlife among people not of their own kind" (ibid)

The State Government solicitors go on to chastise the Judge, Justice Wilcox,

In plain language , his honour has confessed his own aspirations for a determination in the first respondent's(claimants) favour."

Which is really irrelevant and uncalled for, but understandable after what he said about the lawyer's behaviour! Whether and how such comments might influence the Full Court of the Federal Court next April is something the State Government lawyers might consider.

IMHO, the grounds for appeal are despicable, dishonest and bound to inflict grievous damage upon the Noongar community. What's being played in the courts is only half the story. Labour Governments in this state (and in Queensland) have never supported Aboriginal rights despite their socialist pretensions and this is our Palm Island.

"The Bibbulmun Nation occupied(sic) the line of coast between Jurien Bay and a point somewhere east of Esperance Bay, toward Point Malcolm. Its inland boundary(approximate) stretched diagonally from about Watheroo to about Mt Ragged. Its widest area was between Augusta north east to about Kalgarin; its narrowest area was in the Esperance district" (Daisy Bates p.46 "The Aboriginal Tribes of Western Australia",A.N.U.,1985, published posthumously)

Daisy Bates probably wrote those words sometime in the 1920's, after unsuccessfully smoothing the dying pillow. But she knew what she was talking about as did the rest of the white population at the time. Her popularisation of the word Bibbulmun to describe the Noongar people was in fact a source of considerable friction in recent vernacular history. It was during the 1950's and right through to the 1980's that Nyoongar objections to the term Bibbulmun were heard and finally heeded. There was no question about what the term described - the debate was about which term to use.

By the 1840's white fellas had established that the linguistic differences between Albany and Perth were basically dialectical and apart from a particular incident at the time of the Pinjarra massacre, Noongar people could make themselves understood and had family ties across the territory. This enabled them to be used for mail runs.

You can tell that the state Government lawyers have read the next bit of Daisy Bates as well when they claim "Nyoongar people had at least two separate societies at the time of white settlement".

"Although the Bibbulmun Nation throughout its whole area had but one fundamental language, and possessed similar customs, laws, etc., there were two forms of descent within its boundaries, the tribes dwelling on a narrow line of coast from about Augusta to Jurien Bay following the line of maternal descent, white the rest of the tribes had paternal descent."(Bates,ibid. p.46)

But perhaps they didn't read this bit

"Ngarndil[from Busselton] has been 'adopted' by his father's relatives who lived in the Kojonap and Belgarap area(paternal descent). Ngarndil's boy and girl therefore enter the class of their father. This system is called "ngulingbara" or "walangalang" changing from one side to another."(Bates,p.24(typescript), MS365(NLA listing) Section III 2B)

Yep, not only did they have both paternal and maternal descent running side by side, they even had ways and means and words for moving from one to another. The real problem with this argument is that it ignores the real issue. Geneological descent is irrelevant to a traditional Australian conception of ownership which is firmly rooted in the spiritual importance of one's birth place.

And yes, indeed, as the bright young lawyers note, traditional people want to die in their birth place. Their birth place being a very particular and individual place that was, not surprisingly, within their home range. The suggestion is demeaning and quite frankly racist in its studied ignorance of widespread custom and practice, not just in Noongar territory but throughout Australia. These lawyers should know this as they made great play of people's birth places during the testimony that I heard in Albany.

The lawyers, it is reported, also claim that "the Nyoongar people could not show any claimant had genealogical origins in the Perth area..." which is actually quite irrelevant since the Court made no decision about the minutiae of the claim - all the court decided was that the claim should be heard as a single claim. The lawyers concluded that they could not show "that their traditional laws and customs survived". Which is a bold claim to make without actually contesting any of the general evidence tendered, but is made nevertheless on the apparent hope that the court will agree that what we are talking about is "Perth area" and not Nyoongar territory as discussed by the Court. But it also is irrelevant because no decision has been made as to what Native Title rights may or may not exist in the Perth area let alone any other part of the south west.

But the real damage will be done outside the court. It took a good 10 years to get the Noongar claimants to agree to hear the claim as one. This occurred because of constant politicking by bureaucrats and lawyers championing one or other family over the rest and by the fact that every Noongar family is in a state of chronic pain and crisis. There is a funeral every Friday. Not to put too fine a point on it, blood has been spilt and lives have been lost because of the tensions that this claim has generated.

For the State Government to turn around now and tear up this hard fought and painful consensus that was demanded as a pre-requisite for even hearing the claim is a shameful act of bastardry. I'm sure that they will sleep well when they see the consequences in riots, feuds, murder and mayhem. Will they have enough space in the jails? Will they need to reintroduce leg irons? Now that they have set the scene to set family against family to revive all the individual claims - do they think that it will make things better?

The sheer pity of this is that most Noongar people understand that even under the most favourable outcomes their will be precious little in it for them. Most people have endured the last 10 years of being sidetracked by questions of who is entitled to claim what. Most people would rather get back to more immediate problems like getting their culture respected in schools, keeping their kids off drugs and out of prison, or being able to pay the rent on their own land in the midst of a mining boom.

But no - from the party that bought you Inspector Neville and the White Australia Policy - you can only expect more pain.

Gifts from the past

2007-01-20T16:23:00.000+09:00

I spent this morning as a guest of a group of Noongar elders at a little ceremony to mark the return of some stories. The stories were returned to the descendants of the story tellers after an absence of 77 years. Its a long time for a story to go wandering.

It's not that these stories had ever been forgotten or not recorded elsewhere but it was how these stories were recorded that made all the difference.

In January 1931 Gerhard Laves, a graduate student from Chicago was half way through a 2 year study of Australian Aboriginal languages when he ended up at the White Star Hotel in Albany on the south cost of Western Australia.

Albany Advertiser 31 Dec 1930

A couple of weeks before Moses Waibong and Yorkshire Bob had organised a traditional corroboree.It was a gesture of solidarity with the town's working poor as the depression had started to bite. They probably had also heard on the Noongar telephone that Gerard was on his way.

In two weeks, Gerhard recorded, in phonetic shorthand, 100 stories from a dozen men and women in his room and in the back bar of the White Star Hotel. He did a similar thing at 5 other places around the Australian coast.

But it was the depression - and he had to give up thoughts of linguistics and his notebooks and cards and boxes of slips of paper, dictionary entries, went to the attic, to gather dust and to survive flooding and forgetfulness.

Until 1983, when another graduate student remembered or discovered these notes and after a slow and gentle journey copies then the originals were returned to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra.

It wasn't until about 1998 that serious efforts began to be made to return the stories collected in Albany. The University of Western Australia became involved 4 years ago and a young post graduate student there completed the arduous task of transcribing and ordering all the material.

The University has worked alongside a committee of descendants of the story tellers who have provided them with a constant source of inspiration and urgency - as the value and importance of this gift from the past has gradually been realized. 2000 slips of papers, a dozen notebooks of heiroglyphic symbols have been ordered into bound volumes for each story teller.

There were tears shed today as something was returned without attachments.

Each family will decide for themselves what will become of the stories. Some will surely be published, others may never see the light of day.

A small but valuable word list has been compiled which will add to the general knowledge of the southern Noongar dialect.

There were no young people there. Our high schools still don't recognize Noongar culture, they seem to prefer gang violence and drugs.

Still, it was one small step today - in the right direction.

Farewell Flamingo - Welcome 2007

2007-01-07T22:38:00.000+09:00

Flamingos at Lake Ngongorongo (Source:Wikipedia)

As the last of the flamingos flies off into the sunset, their home overwhelmed by the stench of human garbage, perhaps we shall look forward to the year 2007 in which we humans start to realize the enormity of our sins. Baghdad is our world, spiralling into poverty, ruled by violence, waiting for the next catastrophe as we tighten our belts and pretend that there will always be enough to eat.

Ah - but there are still plenty of Canute's and Midas’s out there - ready to fight their way to the top for the riches and glory. While the rest of us know, it’s only ‘money and pain’. The famines will start soon, not so much from carbohydrates but protein will become an increasing problem for many people from now on. By 2008, it will be too late, it is already too late. We have used up half the pond and all the fish. The thing is, if your doubling time is 30 years and it’s taken you 100,000 years to cover half the pond, then it will only take thirty years to cover the last half of the pond. We are well into our last 30 years.

What happens to the pond is not pleasant – all the oxygen gets used up and everything chokes to death. In our case, it will be all the fresh water and everybody dies of thirst.

Of course it’s not all doom and gloom. Some will become more efficient – like the Nazi’s did – running their death camps on time – exploiting every last square inch of their patch of earth. Perhaps, with sophisticated permaculture designs, some of us will stave off the inevitable. For some, stupidity will offer many millions of people an early grave and their land may recover on it’s own. But most of us will be somewhere in between, fighting for our sanity and our family’s survival.

For all our technological know-how, we seem to have lost sight of the facts of reproductive life. We can’t survive without reproductive goods like air, water and food and we need these in a time compulsory manner. We are just another animal in the face of these demands.

The folly of fertilizers is all too clear to those who can read their land, they can increase your yield in a good year, but destroy it in a bad year. The 19th Century chemist Berthollet, praised the development of chemical science as overcoming the ‘thousand disasters of nature’ when it guaranteed a supply of purple dye from coal tar rather than from Indigo. But he did not see that we are, ultimately, still captive to the ‘thousand disasters’ of living. Not for him, or any 19th Century man, to acknowledge the vicissitudes of daily living, so far removed from the perfection of their scientific world.

But feminism and famine have put paid to Berthollet’s vision. Today, the gene merchants have supplanted Berthollet and his fellow chemists. They offer not much more than a plank to sink on with their transgenic monocultures. Mind you we will need every one of their tricks before we’re through, we just won’t want to put up with the hubris.

The point about plagues, is that they kill the wrong people, or at least the people who we don’t expect to get ill. Plagues increase the stupidity factor almost as much as religion and war. Communities can often deal with plagues, but it really does depend upon the strengths and weaknesses of the community. We can decrease the stupidity factor by talking to one another and helping each other to identify these strengths and weaknesses. But again it will require humility rather than hubris. Have no doubt that as pollution and poor diets weaken our collective immunity, the coming influenza epidemic will be but a harbinger of things to come.

George Orwell recognized in 1948, the commencement of ‘eternal war’, the ‘cold war’, the ‘war on terror’ as being nothing more than the stick to subdue a society, to guarantee the rule of violence and privilege over the rule of law. Nothing much has changed. Karl Marx recognized that a decent society would have to wait for a global revolution. Well, that time has come for good or ill. While revolutions can be bloodless or quashed with extreme violence, they all share a similar phenomenology. Discontent is crystallised by some event and personal discourses, suddenly become social discourses and in today’s age they become global discourses and revolution will follow.

A jet stream powered cyclone

2007-01-01T22:50:00.000+09:00

Indian Ocean Cyclone loop (203kb) (Copyright Eutmetsat 2007)

This little movie of new year's eve in the Indian Ocean - shows you what those birds were on about (give it time to load if you're on dialup). Streaming south east from Africa is a band of cloud that bridges the gap between the tropical zone and the poles. Similar bands of cloud are often seen over Australia but they don't usually connect up with the polar front quite so spectacularly.
If you look in the middle at the bottom you will see an impressive jet of clouds squirt out from the polar front in a north westerly direction. This jet goes on to provide the angular momentum which drives the creation of the cyclone forming to the south west of Western Australia.

'impossible' jet stream forecast for 3 Jan

The jet stream in the stratosphere is driving this jet of cloud, it's streaming in this quarter at close to it's maximum speed. I think we've about to see the drought break. Exactly what's going to happen is a bit of a mystery the forecast stratosphere for 48 hours time is I suspect physically impossible. As you can see it is what meteorologist might term 'extremely meridional' over the west coast. The question is going to be how it interacts with the west coast and how far north it goes. At the moment the low has stopped but the air behind it is driving up from a long way south and a secondary low seems likely. I don't know how windy it will get but it's sure gonna rain!

Ngarnak-wayarn - The rain bird is visting

2006-12-30T23:31:00.000+09:00

Black-faced cuckoo shrike(source:wikipedia)

Kalokwen was how Edney Hassell wrote it down, ngarnak (beard) - wayarn (fearful ) - was how Carl von Brandenstein translated the name of this bird. It always appears in the south west when rain is in the offing and it appeared here today.

Satellite image for 30 Dec 2006 0900UTC(copyright:Eumetstat 2006)

In Sumatra and across the archipelago the monsoon is setting records. The whole region is covered in clouds. The ITCZ(Intertropical Convergence Zone) has extended to cover 20 degrees of latitude in monsoon clouds this year. The current Eutmestat satellite image of the Indian Ocean shows the first cyclone of the year forming over near Madagascar . A couple of days ago there was a band of cloud stretching all the way across from Indonesia. There were dramatic 'tropical instabilities' occurring - areas 100 miles across were exploding with thunderstorms. But now the wind has started to shift and the ITCZ is acquiring angular momentum . The cyclone near Madagascar has not got a name yet and is but a few hours old - and it's very big.

A new trick for dieting, a Cosmic Mystery and how we think

2006-12-26T20:10:00.000+09:00

Some weeks, it's worth reading Nature Alerts, the pre-print email that Nature magazine drops in my letterbox. I can read the abstracts for free - and then it's a quick dork to follow up interesting discoveries and controversies. This week - it must be Xmas - three stories take my fancy.

It seems that the bacteria in our guts changes as we put on or lose weight and it may be possible to use this knowledge to help dieters. It certainly opens up interesting ideas for further research. It's worth pausing to consider how much living things like bacteria matter when compared to non living things like calories in our calculations - consider the now discounted corrosive affects of alcohol on our stomach's and duodenum's.

The Cosmic Mystery is in the form of a Gamma Ray Burst, to be precise, GRB 060614. According to Wikipedia,

"the study of GRBs is one of the most dynamic in all of science. " and "Additional discoveries are being made constantly".

These are bursts of serious firepower, that occur over a few seconds to a few minutes at random times and places in the sky. It wasn't until 1997, that it was realized how serious was the firepower when it was confirmed by the Beppo(love that name, love those Italians) Satellite that the GRB''s came from a long way away, extra-galactic away to be precise. Up until GRB 060614 it was reckoned that there were two kinds. Short ones, when neutron stars fell into a black hole (an unfortunate accident) and long ones when stars went hyper nova - that is collapsed on themselves. Like supernovas but bigger. Our latest candidate is a long one and a relatively close one but there's no trace of even a teensy nova. Oooh - spooky!

But that's OK - I know how to think this through. Only the Japanese would consider the following to be ethical treatment of subjects!

If subjects are required to remember a large number of complex motor sequences and plan to execute each of them individually, categorization of the sequences according to the specific temporal structure inherent in each subset of sequences serves to facilitate higher-order planning based on memory.

Go that - where going to teach you a 100 complex physical exercises and you have to remember how to do them and then ...where going to measure

cells in the lateral prefrontal cortex [to show that they] selectively exhibit activity for a specific category of behavioural sequences, and that categories of behaviours, embodied by different types of movement sequences, are represented in prefrontal cells during the process of planning.

What I want to know is how they did that. Poisoned their subjects with radioactive dye and put them through a quick MRI - now another quick 100 kung fu exercises! But now we know

the development of macro-structured action knowledge[occurs] in the lateral prefrontal cortex.

So now you know, the prefrontal cortex, right, it helps with the kung fu, right, so look after it.

Kimbo - you're not dead! - Mark Twain

2006-12-04T20:07:00.000+09:00

photo from "Fathering from the Fast Lane" by Bruce Robinson

Reports of the death of opposition leader, Kim Beazley, are premature. He was recently seen, holidaying in Kashmir with his peshmurga bodyguard.

Tonight, ABC TV carried his requiem following his loss of the leadership of the ALP and the death of his brother. Insiders revealed that the retro's had been in the can for years, and besides, surely the silly season had started already, all right!

Personally, I hope the bomber stays on and keeps the sharks at bay - reportedly, his parliamentary seat is hotter property than a 5c mining stock. But you never know, Rafaelo Carboni was a miner who had a few brains. But then, he was Catholic and Italian.

It's terribly sad but true that the events of the last 24 hours have guaranteed the ghoulish coverage of his brother's funeral and if I was to have one wish it would be that the media observe the traditional Australian rule of respect and not mention his brothers name. ...but that might be too much...so I would completely understand if a holiday in Kashmir seemed like a good idea... Kim, my heart is with you and your family...

A Mondyeunung Cyclone

2006-11-27T23:52:00.000+08:00

An intense southern cyclone is winding up off the south west coast of W.A. tonight. Big rain coming tomorrow - this gif was created from BoM satellite loop for 1200-1500UTC 25/11/06 .

Mondyeunung is the Noongar name of the season (the two moons approxiamately) from late October to January. A good time to canoe or sail around the harbours or the sound at Albany as long as your back before noon. By then the easterly sea breeze driven by the deepening west coast trough starts spanking in. Sailing ships were often trapped for days or even weeks at time in Princess Royal Harbour/Mammangart because the entrance is a keyhole to the east into the sound and the winds show no mercy.

Tonight the Madjet is wagging his tail and bringing rain. It's midnight, dead calm and the humidity is 99% outside - everything is quiet. The calm before the storm...

Waternup - a history of crows

2006-11-22T22:55:00.000+08:00

How do you spell the words of a history that's been forgotten,
in a time when the future seems to be so uncertain...?

Did you know that, among the prisoners of Sandakan,
there was one young Arthur Morrison...?

He had to apply for citizenship to buy some land with the pennies he'd earn't
fighting for his country...

While other men were granted land for their small acts of gallantry...

Of course, he was not to be acknowledged, the shame would be to great. So now i negotiate...

Small memorials on a hill that once had honey possums. They died out a few years ago... me an' Sylvia trapped the last one.

It's called Watenup or Wardanap - that's the crow's business - 'look as far as you can see... now look farder ...'

So how should we remember young Arthur Morrison? Son of Mongalwar, a desert man who moved to be with his wife, whose son went off to war...for love...for life...?

-

Borneo Burning

2006-11-08T21:33:00.000+08:00

(Image courtesy of MODIS Rapid Response Project at NASA/GSFC)

The two images above are from the Terra Modis satellite that sends back pictures of the earth every day. They show fires as red dots in the top photo taken 4 days before the bottom photo. The red discoloration of the sea in the bottom photo is silt from run-off following fires on the south coast of Kalimantan. (Map of Borneo)

Here peat fires are burning once again According to Planet Ark

a thousand orangutans have died this year due to fires in Borneo.

An average of 1 billion tonnes per year of CO2 is released into the atmosphere due to tropical peat fires in SE Asia (mostly in Indonesia) this figure dwarfs the emissions from most other sources.

In 2004, Nature News reported on the consequences of the 1997/8 fires on Borneo. In that year

fires released 13–40% as much CO₂ as a typical year's global emissions from burning fossil fuels

The airport at Palangkaraya was closed for three months in 1997 - it has been closed for at least that long this year and is still closed today. The fires this year are said to be as bad as 1997 even though it has not been as dry as then. It still remains as corrupt as then.

It's worth paying a visit to Google Maps and zooming in on the south coast of Borneo . You will sea vast scars across the landscape where the rainforest has been leveled . Initally this was for Suharto's mega rice plan which was a disaster. Nowadays the land is being cleared for palm oil and rubber plantations. It is greed this year and not drought which is driving these fires which are the major contributor to the accelerated rate of increase in CO2 levels seen since 2000.

Blowing in the wind

2006-10-16T22:32:00.000+08:00

Last Thursday the temperature hit 43 degrees at Eyre on the Nullarbor Plain. It was a record for October out there. But there ain't no stats on humidity records. But the relative humidity that day was 1% in Eyre. In SE Australia, below 15% is considered to be extreme fire conditions. The air was dry and hot all the way up to Giles and Uluru that day, and that air is what fed the fires in Tasmania the next day. It surfed down ahead of the cold front coming across from south of W.A.

Now the reason the air was so dry and hot is a bit of a mystery but there is a clue in the ozone hole which is now affecting the position of the jet stream. The southern hemisphere jet stream that week was dipping and turning steeply south east across the centre of Australia. It was dumping air out of the stratosphere over the north west interior(south of Balgo). The ozone hole has stretched out over the antarctic like a dumbell and is beginning to rotate relative to the earth it's currently moving past South Africa . It was the secondary wave created from the hole deforming the jet stream that pushed it into an extreme meridional pattern.

It's what you get when you destroy the ozone layer and raise the level of CO2 at the same time - the start of a worrying synergy. The ozone hole is constrained not by the amount of chlorine in the stratosphere but by the temperature and area of the antarctic stratosphere. The chlorine only builds up in the winter dark which is set by the size of the earth and doesn't change. And the clouds of SO2 ice that catalyse the reaction only form when the temperature is cold enough. The problem is the stratosphere gets colder as the lower atmosphere gets warmer. As well, the CFC's and the other halo-carbon gases all contribute an order of magnitude more of warming than CO2(weight for wieght), in the troposphere as well.

We get it both ways.

I've been listening to some rather eminent people propound a sceptical viewpoint about climate change recently and I must say that some of them should consider their positions carefully. The president of the Victorian Farmers Federation is itching to start a class action for damages because of climate change. He's not the only one I'm sure. People in prominent positions have a duty to not ignore the evidence just as they have a duty not to ignore a crime. The current political climate might protect them but the winds of change are blowing hard today.

Mind you, I suspect that the drought will break this summer over eastern australia and the ozone hole is showing some positive signs of repairing itself quicker this year than previously.

Noongar Native Title victory and the nature of society

2006-09-22T11:58:00.000+08:00

Noongar bidi(pathways) from 'Mokare's Domain' R.A. Ferguson, in 'Australians to 1788'(1988)

The Native Title decision handed down in the Federal Court has been a great win for Noongar people against the odds. I, for one, did not think that the Court would rule in favour given the recent history. But having now read the remarks by the judge it's clear that his ruling is consistent with previous decisions by the Court.

The current decision with regard to Perth was part of a larger claim over the South West by the Noongar people. The Perth area was considered first at the request of State and Federal Government counsel, to expedite matters. (At least in their terms, by finding that native title doesnt exist). Of course, expedite is one of those nice legal terms that really means 'make a decision in my favour immediately'.

The decision follows on from a couple of negative decisions in regard to land, specifically the Yorta Yorta and Larrakia decisions. I haven't read the Larrakia decision so I'm not sure what it turned on. The Yorta Yorta decision turned on the 'tide of history' which, according to the judgement, swept away Yorta Yorta traditional laws when they sought refuge at Cumeraganga mission in the 1870's. The judgement found that enough of the Yorta Yorta's laws and traditions had been lost for there not be any residual native title.

Now, compared to the Noongar, the Yorta Yorta were a small nation in a relatively small area along the banks of the Murray River near Echuca. The Noongar, who today number in the 20,000's, are the traditional owners of an area larger than the State of Victoria.

In the current case, the Justice Wilcox, spent some time considering whether the Noongar people were and are a single society. He found that they were and are a single society for the purposes of the Court. This is, IMHO, historically correct and relatively indisputable. Once he had made this decision the issue becomes not that a small group of people has been dispossessed and put on a mission or reserve, which was indeed the fate of many Noongar people but that there was always a society being maintained outside of the concentration camps.

So, whilst Inspector Neville, attempted to emulate German efficiency in his own eugenic project during the 1930's, it didn't work. Australians, unlike Germans, are notoriously inefficient when it comes to bureaucracy, and he simply couldn't keep track of everybody. Besides many wadjela farmers had come to rely upon Noongar labour and knowledge, indeed Noongar people have been the mainstay of agriculture in the South West from its very beginnings. Noongar people like traditional Australian people elsewhere still live in the many small communities of their homeland. These people, in places like Gnowangerup, Tambellup, Beverley etc. etc. have not left with the move to the cities but stayed behind.

The consequence of segregation on reserves and the 1905 Native Welfare Act, meant that people had to maintain their close knit communities. The families that survived were those the strongest. They survived the forced removal of children en masse. Amongst the survivors, nearly 20% of Noongar people over 40 report being forcibly removed from their families. Stolen. (see the Report) As a result of this and the constant litany of abuse and racism the Noongar community exists almost invisibly within the broader wadjela community.

People often complain to me about 'feuding' and fighting within the Noongar community. Indeed, everyone has at least an opinon about everyone else and it's often difficult to get people to sit in the same room together. I point out, that in Albany, at least, your dealing with a 20,000 year old village with about 1000 people living in it. Of course, there are feuds and feelings that extend back into the mists of time - a difficult concept for many wadjela who've burnt their bridges behind them to settle here.

Realpolitik suggests that the State and Federal Governments will try to appeal this decision to the High Court. Indeed the Federal Government will probably want to bang the drum as it were. This is shameful and a waste of money. At some point the Crown, collectively, has to deal with Noongar Native Title and the State Government, in all likelihood, will end up negotiating Land Use Agreements with the SWLASC piecemeal. I don't think that this will be a good outcome.

The State could bite the bullet and set out to establish a framework for negotiations. Currently the SWLASC is the designated body for Noongar land claim negotiations but anyone familiar with it's recent history should be concerned about the on-going legitimacy of this organisation to represent Noongar people. The current claim is the result of a decade or more of fighting and negotiating between various factions and families. It is by no means clear that the so-called 218 families is in fact every Noongar family in the south west. Nor is their any mechanism for settling disputes which I think will inevitably arise under the current setup.

Whilst the SWLASC represents Noongar people in the Federal Court, there are local community groups and agreements with local councils that have already been negotiated. In effect, local councils may choose to negotiate with their local community rather than SWLASC. Indeed SWALSC will need to establish local bodies to negotiate native title issues in some local shires and cities.

The key issue that will arise are those surrounding democracy and openness of procedure. It will be very easy for people to claim 'commercial confidence' to restrict discussion surrounding future act negotiations. For this reason it would be much more sensible if the State Government was to initiate discussions to establish a Noongar representative body that was elected and representative of each community rather than running off to the High Court as Mr Howard's lapdog.

Noongar organisations are efactions or families to the detriment of the community and this is a source of continual frustration within the community. In my experience Noongar people are passionate about their community organisations, elections are hard fought, meetings far more well attended than most other community groups. But the community is continually wrong footed by arbitrary funding decisions, and a lack of legitimacy in the eyes of the wadjela community.

Indeed, in evidence to the Gordon enquiry, I submitted that we were in danger of creating an Aboriginal mafia - take strong families, weak governance and prejudice and mix well for a couple of hundred years. But the decision is not mine. It's Mr Carpenter's and his Cabinet. Renowned for their strength of character and vision.

"The West Australian" - muckracking joournalism at it's finest.

2006-08-25T16:58:00.000+08:00

[rant warning]
The desperate downward plung of the journal of record in Perth into the nether reaches of yellow journalism has been painful to watch. A cause for my regular bouts of apoplexy at the latest 'campaign' dominating the front cover. Complaints have been lodged with the Press Council on a number of occasions, warnings, and indeed, IIRC, they may have even been fined over publishing the personal details of a ten year old child they accused of terrorizing a neighbourhood. A mere bagatelle.

Nevertheless, this week they have gone too far for this mere mortal to remain silent. An editor is of course, entitled to voice an opinion, stridently if necessary. But in a one- newspaper city, as isolated as Perth is, that paper has a responsibility beyond it's partisan leanings.

This week's major story resulted from an open verdict by the Coroner in the death of an 11 month old child. The child was neglected by its drug addicted mother and had been the subject of repeated pleas by one grandmother to the Department , and to the Minister, for the child to be taken into care.

The Minister, Sheila McHale, had sought the advice of the Department which had, wrongly as it turned out, decided not to take the child into care. The Liberal opposition in Parliament, smelling blood, proceeded to accuse the minister of being responsible somehow for the child's death. The fact that no responsible minister would override the advice of the Department in such a manner was conveniently overlooked. What if she had? There would have been howls of outrage for her intervening in a welfare matter. Prima facie, interference would have been seen as grounds for her dismissal.

Nevertheless the West Australian was pumped with outrage and when the opposition alleged in Parliament that the family had been given a holiday to 'hush it up' following the child's death, they had the front cover ready to go. A complete blank page - what the government won't tell you - in small print - see inside for details. The government did actually tell us, later on the same morning, when the Premier read from a letter from the grandmother, outraged over the political point scoring, and vehemently denying that there had been any holiday paid for by the Department. The holiday had been arranged prior to the child's death (other children were involved)and the grandparents sought a refund for some of the fares after the child's death. This was given as part of normal emergency and bereavement relief funding. (I've had occasion to seek this kind of funding on behalf of others, myself)

The real pity of it is - that, coincidentally, a report was published into failures in the Community Welfare Department following the investigation of 30 odd deaths over the last 5 years. The West Australian in it's haste to personalise the attack against the Minister buried this story in the details. I'm sure we may get round yet to hearing about the problems within the Department - we haven't yet. But if we do I fear that any real debate will be squelched in the static surrounding this week's farrago.

The grandstanding by this newspaper and it's hectoring righteousness are poisoning the body politic of Western Australia. This latest blundering excuse for journalism merely demonstrates that the welfare of children is not an issue - only one thing matters - bringing down the Labour Government.

Watchin' the drought spread

2006-08-07T16:33:00.000+08:00

This drought movie shows how the drought has spread over the last 12 months. The link will take you to the Bureau of Meteorology's NDVI map viewer. These are satellite photos taken by the NOAA-17 satellite and they've been color coded to show vegetation growth. It takes a little while to load but you can really see the way in which the winter rain has failed across southern australia. If you want to make your own movie then go here..

Energy Policy for Greens

2006-07-17T19:18:00.000+08:00

Went to a meeting last week run by a local Greens MLC. Seemed to be more concerned about anti-nuclear issues than about a realistic energy policy that responds to climate change and peak oil. Here's a few thoughts on an energy policy for Western Australia -

The climate is changing fast, much faster in the last 18 months than previously and much faster in the last 10 years than previously. This means that the requirements of daily living, namely water and food, are likely to be immediately threatened as crops and water supplies fail. The idea that this won't happen on a catastrophic scale is simply wishful thinking.

We are addicted to oil as a fuel and our behaviour regarding it's availability is similar to any heroin addict. Namely denial of any problem followed by violent responses when shortages occur. We are in deep addiction because we have substituted oil for many other forms of energy, our lives revolve around oil. Of course, it's not the same for everybody, some people have moved on.

Our immediate priority should be the substitution of public for private transport. We need to be demanding free and subsidized public transport throughout our towns and cities.

It doesn't take much back of the envelope stuff to work out that even for a small city of 30,000, having a fleet of mini buses and taxis, supplied with drivers, would be cheaper than the collective cost of maintaining one car for every 2.5 people.

The question is how to acheive the transition - obviously the price of fuel will make the public side of the equation more acheivable. It's also true that in a city like Perth, public transport is already being provided at close to optimal timetables along major routes. So it's not unachievable nor is it going to destroy the fabric of civilization.

We need to greatly expand the context of taxi services. Not necesarily by removing rules, but by expanding the types of services provided. For people living without a car, the need for a means of transporting relatively bulky goods(to big for public transport)can be a major problem. What's needed is cheap local taxi truck services. This can be facilitated by rules and regulations governing quality of service etc. The taxi business needs to be expanded - the problem here is the maintenance of monopoly control by companies and owner drivers who benefit from restrictions on plate numbers. The companies need to be convinced that their monopoly sets will be broken up:-) if they don't agree to an orderly expansion of the taxi business.

We need to re-introduce the subsidy for gas conversion of vehicles and to have a formulated plan for the conversion of 80% plus of the W.A. private vehicle fleet to gas within 5 years. Subsidies could be directed at the poor. A 5 year crash program to train mechanics and others and to provide the equipment required should be run be the government and industry, preferably by some one with autocratic powers.

We need to expand the availability of local free bus services, like the City Link and Freo Link buses. But by this I mean expand our concept of a bus as well as expand the services to smaller centers and towns. These vehicles do not need to run fast and can be small. There are many Asian examples of small buses albeit most of them powered by diesel. we can and should use gas.

On a purely local south west level we need to consider building a Manjimup to Mt Barker railway line. This would link the Albany-Perth and Manjimup-Bunbury lines and make and offer a the potential of a viable passenger rail service to Albany from Perth via Bunbury. The current Albany - Perth line takes 12 hours compared to 6 hours by bus and was discontinued in the 1960's. The bus trip via Bunbury already takes about 10 hours. Mt Barker to Manjimup is 150km and is mainly devoted to woodchips, wool and vines. The potential for a second rail route to Albany port for the woodchip industry is also obvious.

There have been a number of calls recently for the extension of the gas supply grid to Albany from Manjimup and doing this at the same time as the railway line would make a great deal of sense.

The State Government has introduced new rules regarding new buildings being energy efficient but there is an obvious need to also retrofit the existing housing stock to reduce energy demands. The important synergy to recognize here is that there is a concurrent need to retrofit for water conservation as well. So it makes sense to think about how these two tasks can occur at the same time. For instance, any water storage device can act as a heat storage device and used for heating or cooling as needed. (We forget that water can be used to store heat as well as used to cool.)

In this area much could be gained by a well funded education campaign encouraging home owners to do it themselves, supporting innovations and inventions through competitions and so on.

We need to recognize that energy is limitless it's how we use it that matters.

At an industrial level we need to emphasise co-generation at every level. There should not be a refrigeration plant that isn't cogenerating from it's waste heat in the State. Nor should there be an air conditioner that isn't powering a stirling energy or heat exchanger and generating electricity from it's waste heat. These solutions are technologically mature - what's missing is the expertise. The state should be facilitating this process through workshops and conferences with industry bringing in international experts and consultants.

As with private housing we need to recognize that energy conservation and water conservation have significant synergies.

We need to publically own the transmission lines and corridors to ensure that (1) energy buy back is facilitated fairly for all parties (2) corridors are selected with the public interest in mind. The idea that natural monopoly assets like roads and electricity supply lines should be in private hands is nonsense and the current flirtation will end in tears.

Already the people of Gnowangerup and the Great Southern are outraged at the corridor being chosen for the power to go to the Wellstead iron ore mine. Not only does this traverse a spectacular unmarked landscape by running across the foot of the Stirling Ranges, but it also by-passes towns like Gnowangerup which have been complaining about the poor quality of their power supply for years.

This is on top of the tragic results(two deaths) of the Kendenup bushfire that was clearly due to the poor maintenance of the power lines in this district.

We need to look at alternative uses for Collie coal and for ways to revitalize the town of Collie. Specifically we need to look at its potential to be used as the starting material for nanotech materials. Collie coals' high sulphur content makes it ideal for producing nanotubes of carbon.

Collie itself, despite it's current despondent and gloomy state is actually an ideal town for a technology park based around the production of nanotech devices. We have many of the raw materials (e.g Silicon, various heavy metals as well as a conveniently available and otherwise unusable coal supply), Collie has the cheapest real estate in W.A., it has it's own water supply, abundant electricity and plenty of technological and industrial know how.

The nanotech industry is poised to take off in a major way. New devices and ways of using and manipulating objects at nano-scale are being announced weekly. Nano devices have a very high surface to wieght ratio and can be used to catalyse many energetic processes with a high degree of selectivity and control. Nanotech lubricants are already on the market.

We need to continue to support the fledgling eucalyptus oil industry. Eucalyptus oil has great value as an industrial solvent substituting for oil based solvents as well as having a high octane rating and having potential as a fuel additive. The failure of this winter's rain should alert us to the fact that basically north and east of Albany highway is going to turn into desert or mallee scrub in the next few years unless we pull our finger out. The oil mallees being grown come from the south east and don't need as much water as blue gums. But clearly trees are going to make a difference whether they are blue gums, oil mallees or tagasastes. You can already see this on satellite images of the Great Southern.

Eucalyptus oil can also be used as part of a nano-tech industry described above, to provide a more biodegradable waste stream than the TCE and related chemicals that have poisoned Silicon Valley.

Oh, and we don't need to sell uranium nor build any nuclear plants neither...

Rhinoceraus bye bye! No more Rhinocerai!

2006-07-15T15:40:00.000+08:00

Aljazeera is reporting the extinction of the W.African black rhino

Conservationists estimated that there were more than 100,000 West African black rhinos in 1960. That figure dropped to an estimated 14,000 by 1980 and the animals may now be extinct.

The wold Conservation Union is reported as saying that

experts had searched 1,200 miles of habitat in northern Cameroon, but failed to find any sign of the West African black rhino.

In the pubs and speak-easies

They're taking a straw poll

About the death of each species

For whom does the bell toll

It's the winds of change

It's time for change

A touch of the tar

2006-04-14T13:11:00.000+08:00

‘A touch of the tar’, I’ve heard that expression several times recently. A peculiarly repugnant British expression based upon the notion of racial purity. To have ‘a touch of the tar’ was to bring into question one’s reliability, it not only implied miscegenation but also adultery or otherwise unlawful relationships. Indeed up until 1944 in W.A., it was unlawful for a person of ‘aboriginal descent’ to have sexual relations with a person who was not of ‘aboriginal descent’. In Rebe Taylor’s book, Unearthed, about Kangaroo Island, she documents how the possession of traces of ‘aboriginal blood’ marked a person out for exclusion from the other families of the island. Kangaroo Island provides a stark example of what was commonplace throughout Australia up until the 1950’s and some would argue still today - the exclusion of indigenous Australians from all economic and social intercourse on their own land.

The demand for ‘land rights’ since the 1960’s has been a recognition that not only for people who still retained occupancy of their country but also for the dispossessed of the cities, the right to even be in public spaces, like towns, cinemas, swimming pools, had been fought for and lost and won again. The right to exist without being invisible still haunts people which is why the right to stay in the Domain in Melbourne or outside the Cathedral are issues of such passion. The right to not be invisible.(see also GST - Genocide, Soveriengty & Treaty site.)

Mabo made a difference because it recognized the invisible occupiers of Australia. As a result, it has led to recognition of traditional law and traditional culture. The Courts are changing the way they deal with people, local Councils and schools are choosing to fly the Aboriginal flag alongside the Australian and State Flags and people are searching for that ‘little bit of tar’ that might make them a traditional Australian sometimes out a sense of genuine longing and compassion sometimes out of misplaced pride and venality to seek a share in their ‘riches’. Of course, most people who have been here for more than 4 or 5 generations will have some traditional Australian relations even if they don’t have any ‘Aboriginal blood’ themselves. This is as much to do with the maths of ‘six degrees of separation’ as it is to do with the illicitness or otherwise of these relationships.

Of course there is far more grief than wealth in these stories because every one of them contains a ‘stolen generation’ or two, a child taken because of the whiteness of it‘s skin, to be redefined as an Indian, Italian anything but an Australian. A lie to haunt a life and a family.

Blackness of course demanded institutionalisation, police, jails, reserves, children’s homes, and missions. It demanded invisibility. The old equation of the tar brush and racial hatred continues to hold its grip on people right through to the present day. In the 1960’s, the historian, C.D.Rowley, divided Australia into ‘colonial’ and ‘post-colonial’ halves. The south east to Brisbane, and the south west , were ‘post-colonial’ the rest retained the attitudes and beliefs of the ‘colonial period’. This divided in attitudes amongst the wadjela still persists to this day and is the chief reason that Hall’s Creek, Alice Springs and Palm Island amongst others are disaster zones of humanity.

There is change on the horizon, the mining industry in places like Kalgoorlie and the Pilbara is often the source of progressive approaches to traditional owners. Mabo has made pragmatism rather than ideology important. Nevertheless, imprisonment and football are still the major alternatives in a young boys life.

Traditional Australians take a rather different approach to family relations to their colonial masters. The idea of ‘keeping one’s blood pure’ and marrying one’s own kind are derided and warned against in many stories told by traditional people. The world is divided into two paths, that of your family and that of your in-laws, the people who you can marry. It is not just people but plants, animals and places that are your mother’s or brother’s, or your husband’s or mother-in-law’s in relation to you. Everything is related. In general, we inherit our ‘path’ or our ‘skin’ from our father’s side.

In some places, the world is divided again, by generation. You share your ‘skin’ with your grandmother(father’s mother) or grandfather(father’s father) and your spouse is distinguished from your parent’s spouse. In the Western Desert, there are eight or six subdivisions and the rules though complicated to an outsider are well understood by children and regarded as natural. In this environment, a stranger, after a while and some discussion, is allocated a ‘skin’ that defines his or her relationship to the community and individuals. That defines that persons rights and obligations, whether they carry them out or not.

In prison too, men ‘make brothers’ with each other as part of the cultural resistance to the contingent relationships of the ‘mainstream’. Brothers are not contingent but are made for life, and tie families as well as individuals together. There is a degree of hybridisation with the romance of Afro-American culture, which has played a part in popular traditional Australian culture since Bobbi Sykes and other’s introduced the politics of ‘black power’ in the 1960’s.

Nevertheless, to be related, in traditional Australian culture, is not a question of blood or blackness. It is a question of visibility and presence, and of respect and pride in one’s family, our family.

Cyclone Carina - a perfect storm

2006-02-28T21:33:00.000+08:00

Cyclone Carina was directly beneath the Meteosat-5 weather satellite when this image was taken. She is in the middle of the Indian Ocean miles from anywhere - Central pressure 910 hPals and wind gusts to 290km/h at at 1000 UTC 28 Feb. according to MTOTEC the Indian Ocean cyclone monitoring site based in Mauritius(thanks for the photo!) - I think. Click on image to see higher resolution.

Why it's been a cold summer

2006-02-13T20:04:00.000+08:00

Why it's been a cold summer - Seasonal(Nov 6 -Feb 4) sea surface temperature anomaly from NOAA Climate Diagnostics Centre map room.
This map shows why this summer has been so cool in the south west. Essentially the Leuwin Current has switched off for the time being and instead of there being warm tongues of water off the coast it's all cold upwelling from the southern ocean.

It's probably going to be a really good for the fishing and it could be a bumper year for the gnurri(salmon)fishing. Traditionally in the season of Metelock(Feb - Mar) Minang Noongar men speared salmon in the surf, waiting for them to appear in the window of the wave.

Today, the gnurri is the mainstay of family based inshore net fishery on the south coast who own camp spots on the beaches at this time of the year and woe betide any brave surfer who ventures too close. Sharks might be the lesat of their worries.

In the shallows of the harbours, traditionally herring and skippy were trapped in fish traps into which they were driven by laughing women and children during the day or enticed into at night with the light of grass torches. The numbers are down but there's still a feed for the patient on the jetty or off the bridge.

It's the holiday season on the south coast and it's in full swing.

Remember me - just talking

2006-01-30T22:46:00.000+08:00

Winnie Larsen (nee Woods) with Koik kyenurruf(Stirling Ra.) in the background

I was thinkin' about the way in which thoughts can run round in your head like phantoms and ghosts, like castles in the air, until you're beleaguered with by possible futures. A spice trip on Dune. I used to call this - tripper's rules - back in the days when - what matters is what's said, not what's inside your head.

But then, words are never enough, you never say what you mean, and you can bleed all over the page...

I launched a book today, oh boy, written by an old lady who has won her war.
"The Dusty Road" - so named for the dust thrown up by the cars - like a weelo's call - a signal to run and get your best dress on or to hide - for Aunty Winnie and her sisters and brothers - if the gubba was coming 'to sort out your color' you'd better hide.

Winnie Larsen never learnt to read because she got kicked in hip by a bull when she was eight and spent the next 4 years in hospital and then was carted off to an orphanage until she escaped..

When she was in her fifties she decided to learn to read and write because she had a story to tell. So she went back to TAFE and learnt to write and she spent the last 10 or so years writing down her story and it was finally launched today.

It was a warm and enthusiastic and color blind crowd of 60 or more (not bad for a country town of 30,000 souls) that had cause to warmly applaud this quiet acheiver. The ripples of good feeling and idealism that were sent forth will flow through this town for a few days and perhaps act as a homeopathic remedy for a little while against the apathy and dissension that can poison all our lives these days.

I'm really proud of the part I played in publishing this book. It's only a small print run so far, although after today's sales, I'm planning a second run. I'll wait to hear the reviews from the locals which will surely be soon in coming. But, for me, her stories are already haunting my dreams.

There are fragments that are a sentence or a paragraph that expand in my head like cinemascope.

"When my sister Una arrived with her three little ones, she had nowhere to stay. I can still remember her pushing an old cane pram with her two sons and her daughter walking alongside, crying. Then the pram wheel fell off to add to all her sadness. She was pregnant as well, and I was expecting my second child, Jeannie, in a month. So mum set to and built an extra room for my sisters and her little ones to live in."

This is from when she was living outside of Katanning in the 1950's with her indomitable mother.

Anyhow - if you read this and are interested in the book then email me at wandinyil(at)gmail(dot)com - it's been a long day..:-)

Grim News from the Arctic...

2006-01-02T21:04:00.000+08:00

A polar bear amidst whale bones - a superb shot from Steve Ringman at the Seattle Times - view their slideshow

Nowhere is climate change more noticeable and more noticed than in Alaska. Here Craig Welch from the Seattle Times provides a comprehensive summary of what's happening as the climate continues. The local traditional owners say they can taste the change in the meat that they hunt and kill.

Bird flu idiocy - who's running this country?

2005-12-12T19:52:00.000+08:00

I'm sitting here listening to the 7.30 report on a bird flu exercise. Bizarely, it is imagined that human bird flu is going to enter Australia courtesy of an infected bird. Surely, it's obvious to blind freddy that bird flu will enter Australia through a human vector once it has become established in the human population from a cross over (if one occurs) in Africa, China, etc. etc.
I can't believe this crap is being taken seriously!
The virus that enters Australia through a human vector will result in rapid spread of the virus through a port and then outwards. The spread of the 1919 epidemic from Newcastle and Melbourne is well described.
Slaughtering birds is superstitious nonsense which seems to be de rigeur for these times.

The new economic reality -advice for fund managers and housewifes

2005-12-08T20:51:00.000+08:00

Those old enough to have been able to comprehend a newspaper in 1981(or thereabouts) will remember the term stagflation - the curious combination of inflation and unemployment that was experienced due to the oil crisis of 1979. As a result, Hawke and Keating had to float the dollar because of the resulting current account crisis. The difference between then and now is that oil is not going to come down beause of the resolution of a hostage crisis or the war in Iraq(fat chance) - instead oil prices will continue to steadily increase as a consequence of peak oil.

This is already leading to supermarket inflation which is exacerbated by the lack of a competitive market for products. A duopoly of Coles and Woolworths is an agreement to fix prices not competition. Many annual fees will experience a 5 - 20% hike this year due to fuel costs being passed on.

Unemployment hasn't started to rise yet but it surely will in the New Year. There may be a lag as the backlog of construction and investment gets worked through. The current rates of employment disguise a lot of part time work and dual income families struggling to pay the bills. These people will be sorely affected by an economic dowturn. This will be in turn exacerbated by the changes to the Single Parent Pension and the dissocation of the dole from C.P.I. increases. People on the dole and single mothers with children older than six will not be gauranteed rises in their income along with the C.P.I. as are other pensioners. In times of high inflation this will not produce good outcomes.

A critical factor is how the worlds and Australia's economy adjusts. In the 1980's, floating exchange rates and trade liberalisation helped the economy to absorb the income shock. This time round the income shock is much more severe and long term and barriers are increasing as nations go onto a war footing. From an economic point of view a war footing makes sense, military Keynesianism is acceptable to the most died in the wool free marketeers. Wars create artificial demand through destruction.

In the 1980's stagflation was regarded as a new and unusual phenomenon because everybody accepted that the only cause of inflation could be unsustainable demand in the form of wage rises. Demand driven inflation. Stagflation is supply driven inflation.

Let's cut to the chase, what to do...

Well in my country town the local fruit and vegetable grower who uses a bore and a shade cloth and a green house, with integrated pest control, provides vegetables year round and is doing very well thank you. The duopoly that is driving up retail prices is only sustainable because of the economies of scale that depend upon cheap fuel.

Buy a flock of sheep or goats, there's never been a better time.The price of cotton and plastic clothing is sure to rise sharply.

Buy a bicycle - sell your car.

Invest in industries that are unique or rich in information in your location.

Make your own bread, establish bulk sources of flour, rice, lentils, oils, etc.

Pray, and try and lend a helping hand.

As communities become more insulated the degree of sociality becomes important. Diversity, cooperation, civility, and mutual respect for differing points of view within a community are important measures of sociality.

Ultimately, it will come down to how we learn to live with the new economic reality of increasing scarcity and decreasing resources.

The advantage of communication is that we can share solutions as well as problems.

Mary O'Brien's "The Politics of Reproduction"

2005-10-10T23:25:00.000+08:00

We are but locusts experiencing our first plague

"The Politics of Reproduction" by Mary O'Brien was a deeply unfashionable book for its time, 1980. It was the height of the lesbian separatist wave in feminist literature. In philosophy the works of Mary Daly in the U.S and Luce Irigary in France were at once opening up the world to a feminist viewpoint by withdrawing into a separatist world. Sheri Tepper's, "Rust" and Joanna Russ', "The Female Man" popularised this viewpoint. It is commonplace(at least by men!) to regard this as some sort of dead end of feminist thought, but, in reality, it was Mary Daly's sweeping agenda in "Gyn/Ecology" that laid the groundwork for women outside of the 'Western' World. Such issues as clitoredectomies and female circumcision in Africa, suttee burning in India and the history of footbinding in China and more, demonstrated that Feminism and the position of women was a philosophy, and a practice, that could step across specific cultural, or economic, agendas such as Capitalism or Judeo-Christianity....

This developing viewpoint swept aside the marxist-feminist school of philosophy that had co-existed alongside the cultural feminist school up until this time. The so called 'collapse of communism' completed the job on marxist-feminist thought as it pummelled into submission by post-modernist verbiage.

Now Mary O'Brien is not your average communist, she wouldn't even call herself a Marxist. A Hegelian, yes, a materialist, yes, and a feminist assuredly, yes but a Marxist, definitely no. And "The Politics of Reproduction"will, I'd argue, be remembered as one the most important texts of the era. 'The Politics of Reproduction", is first of all, a feminist critique of Marxism. Its also a feminist critique of capitalism that dissects Engels famous essay on the reproduction of the worker through the family, through the observation that, for all it's so-called 'feminist' ideals, Engels never once mentions in his essay the biological reproduction of the family nor the role women in this process.

Before becoming a philosopher Mary O'Brien was a midwife, so she had a self declared stake in this argument, being, as she put it, a close observer of the work that is women's uniquely, 'the labour of labour'. The labour of reproduction she identifies, has a number of critical moments besides parturition(giving birth) in which women's labour is critical. The first moment of reproduction, she observes, has been known colloquially as the oldest profession – prostitution. There was a 60's chant about 'marriage is legalised prostitution' I recall.

Apart from identifying kinds of work that women often don't get paid for, she crucially supplies us with a generalised description of the nature of reproductive work. She, critically, distinguishes reproductive work from the productive work that Marxism and Capitalism variously describe. Of critical importance is that this distinction, although based upon sex and an acknowedgement of women's unique role in reproduction, does not depend upon the sex of the labourer to describe it.

Reproductive work differs from productive work in that:

(1) it is cyclical rather than linear with respect to time,

(2) it is time compulsory rather than time voluntary. ( the baby needs changing now!)

(3) it is necessarily social rather than socially necessary.

The last one is important because it offers an alternative view of reproductive currency. Social necessity is another way of saying 'demand' and hence price. Necessarily social goods are how people work together, how they react to a cyclone or in a queue.

Mary O'Brien goes on to describe the other critical moments of reproducing ourselves, the labour of childcare, schooling and so on. But a little reflection will reveal that many of the tasks that governments carry out are also reproductive by nature. As productive individual work has come to dominate private life so the government has been forced to take up the tasks of reproductive work.

Germaine Greer once described the way in which the Mughal Empire's agrarian system collapsed. A complex system of irrigation, forests and farms was managed sustainably over much of western India for 700 years. The British destroyed the system within a decade by changing the land system, whereby tenant farmers paid the Government with a day's labour a year, to one in which the land was rented for coin and could be brought and sold. The reproductive work that had maintained the system was lost and it collapsed and the region was reduced to desert.

There is a capitalist fetish to transform all goods into money and it is this particular fetish that often causes the most damage. Thus the first labour strikes were and are fought over issues of time rather than wages, 8 hour days and 5 day weeks matter far more in reproductive terms. Labourers will, where possible, sacrifice offers of higher wages to protect their right to reasonable working hours. Opposition to the current Industrial Relations changes(in Australia) is driven as much for concern for this issue as for wages.

Whatever the outcome of the current political situation, the labour of reproduction will be of necessity dealt back in. Even with a complete removal of say a 40 hour week, the government will be forced to mandate other provisions to prevent people being forced to work unreasonable hours. It may not happen straight away but it will happen.

Beyond the immediate political situation, it's also clear that Mary O'Brien's characterisation of reproductive work has much to inform us regarding the nature of government and economic rationalisation. Or rather to indicate why economic rationalisation fails to deliver the promised outcomes. Specifically, reproductive work, such as that provided by health, education, welfare and emergency services can be cut only to certain levels without having significant affects on outcomes. A nurse can only look after six acutely ill patients, a teacher can only teach thirty children, a town over 500 people(say) can't function without a police officer. These limits are not easily amenable to technological fixes, because time can't be made to go faster and a baby and a hospital patient, both need 24 hour care - nothing less!

All is not lost, however, many women have famously managed reproductive work by 'doing five things at once'. Hospitals that have strong focused preventative medicine programs, schools that have after-hours adult education: There are many examples of reproductive institutions doing more than one thing because it is in the nature of the work itself.

One can also see how these ideas can be married to a design philosophy such as permaculture, with it's 'everything must serve four purposes' rule of thumb. Town planning is an area much neglected by the feminist broom More broadly, reproductive economics encapsulates the requirements of sustainability and provides some signposts for achieving this.

Reproductive work begins by asking about one's children (Jesus was good at this) and more specifically, their needs their future. It immediately raises the 'necessarily social' aspects of their reproduction, the nature of the partnership. It has been demonstrated that the position of women, their education and their control over fertility are prime determinants of population growth throughout the world (Susan George, "How the other half dies") . Improving these three things reduces the number of children being born and enables poor countries a chance to restore the ecological damage caused by overpopulation. This is the locust's lesson….

more later…

Mainungull (JIlba) -Spring

2005-10-07T22:52:00.000+08:00

Waugal The rainbow snake - the spring jet stream bringing showers and changeable weather to the south west. (Image from COLA/IDES)

Bangelung- Bremer Bay and the Noongar Native Title Claim

2005-10-06T23:56:00.000+08:00

There's a wild Celtic spirit in the genes of the many British migrants, convicts and refugees that resonates with the Noongar love for the land. The hopeless and helplessness of it that can drive one to drink, despair or acts of crazy bravery enough to be called anzacs. Like biscuits, flattened like the land and the experience of prison or boarding school where the man who pays the piper plays the tune.

It sings in our hearts and haunts our dreams, like a puzzle to be unravelled, the secret of living in this great land. Living on the edge is one thing – walking the Bibbulmun track and learning to endure is a lesson we all should learn until it becomes to crowded and cheap.

Living in the centre is another thing entirely – crawling out from under the crash into the blanket of silence and despair. There is no cheap knowledge – there is no track out here that can become popular – just red sand, spinifex and mulga - and secrets.

Secret ways, secret places. Not secret from some ill design, although that is the crow's story. But secret can also be hard won knowledge, the knowledge of generations of women and men searching out the ways and means of living in the desert sands.

Next week, they are featuring the Victorian Court's Circle of Elders experiment in restorative justice on 4 Corners. Even as we take away Native Title rights from the Yorta Yorta by reading their history as a territorial conquest, they (my people) have asserted their rights by recognizing that Native Title implies Native Law and that their (our) law has generations of precedent that could make a mockery of Common Law or more positively will force a reassertion of it's importance in the Australian context.

The week after this, the Noongar Native Title claim will begin formal hearings in Albany. The Noongar claim is over the South West of W.A. covering Perth and the entire South West from Eneabba to Ravensthorpe. Mind you, this combined claim is an uneasy alliance between the three overlapping claims that had been filed but, together, they represent the largest single group of Aboriginal people in Australia.

The problem for the Noongar people has always been finding agreement with each other. Mind you, this has been exploited by whitefellas, hypnotized by the vehemence that can be expressed towards one in-laws in a community that is, in reality, a small thousand year old village. A consequence of apartheid laws and attitudes that were and are still prevalent in W.A. Fuelled by the injustice and the poverty that makes this the funeral season (it's the end of winter and there's a funeral every Friday), anger serves a different currency in this community. It can be used to intimidate wadjelas, because they've never been hungry, or had their kids go hungry and seen their high ideals go up in panic and fear.

The Noongar claim is probably the most important decision in the land, and it will come down to how a camping ground at the coastal hamlet of Bremer Bay(Bangelung - place of salmon) is viewed. The first Noongar Native title claim was lodged over the Bremer Bay area in 1992, in shortly after the original Mabo claim.

The reason for this was that, at the same time as the Mabo case was being decided, the issue of which shire Bremer Bay (on the south coast, 80kms east of Albany) should be in was also being decided.

The Gnowangerup Shire's historical control of Bremer Bay was at least partly due to the Noongar seasonal traffic from Gnowangerup and Ongerup down to Bremer Bay. The camp sites along the track, which is today a road, can be named by the families that travel this route, more importantly the campsite at Bremer Bay itself, was recognized by Gnowangerup Shire as a native camping ground and preserved and used as such. However, Jerramungup had become, in recent times, a significant town and for purely financial reasons it made sense for the seasonal village of Bremer Bay to come under it's control. Jerramungup is after all 50km closer!

In the aftermath of the Mabo decision it quickly became apparent that the Jerramungup Shire Council, to whom Bremer Bay was now being bequeathed, did not share the view regarding the disposition of the 'Crown' Land designated as native camping ground. As a result, a valid claim was lodged on behalf of the families immediately affected.

Shortly after, broader overlapping claims were lodged on behalf of the Southern Noongar and the Perth Noongar communities. The current claim is the combined Noongar claim, the only one to be recognized by the Court and negotiated after much heartache and acrimony.

The precedent that matters will be the Yorta Yorta decision by the Federal Court where it was found that the decision to move onto Cumeraganga Reserve in the 1880's destroyed the 'fabric' of Yorta Yorta law. The difference between the Yorta Yorta and the Southern Noongar people is that many of them (over 50%) remained working on farms in their country and continue to live close to their traditional lands.

Amongst other places, these included the Bremer Bay campsite where the Warrangu, Koreng and others have come to spear salmon in the surf in late summer and to relax on the beach since time immemorial. The only difference is that the spear has been traded in for a surf rod and reel and the kids play with computer games instead of orphaned animals.(Maybe these things matter, but more likely, they are just the surface of things. Children play with what’s available.)

In a way the Yorta Yorta decision is a rod for the court's back, because it drew an arbitrary line in the sand regarding where, when and how the fabric of a law existed and was thereafter no more. On the other hand in the Miruwong Gajerong claim, it was established that Native Title is a 'bundle' of rights (such as the right to hunt, or to camp) that can be unbundled.

The Noongar Native Title Claim will, in all probability, end up in the High Court, simply because it's so important. The question that will be hopefully decided will be how the 'bundle of rights' and the 'line in the sand' intersect. But more broadly, as the Yorta Yorta experience demonstrates, the law of karma guarantees that the law of the land may indeed prevail even if it's form takes a little while to evolve and it appears and grows in unexpected directions.

Scott Parkin- Peace activists are now terrrorists?

2005-09-12T23:00:00.000+08:00

Scott Parkin threatening national security in his home town of Houston. Pic from Houston indymedia

Katrina - A Political Forecast

2005-09-05T22:40:00.000+08:00

The rain falls like tears tonight as the last survivors of Katrina are plucked from their living death, emaciated, shaken to the core... the revolution has begun. The question in their eyes is 'if our government can leave us like this, what allegiance do we owe it?'.

A question more shocking in its clarity in the US than it would be in Australia where allegiance is only required of immigrants, non-allegiance is a birth right.

It's a question that is being asked by the allies of the US as well. Although only dear old Victor Chavez in Venezuela was game enough to be critical of the US government - before he offered help. You can bet your bottom dollar that there's been lots of late night meetings in the corridors of power in Canberra, reassessing their reassessments of US power 'n influence.

What matters is how the politics of the situation is played out. Worst case scenario, right at the moment has gotta be race riots, although the weather for one is against it and the race issue is really a bit of a sidetrack.

The problem is that people's welfare was a poor second to the war in Iraq. The director of FEMA, who's already the chief scapegoat, was in charge of emergency responses for the whole country not just the black bits. Authoritarian administrations usually succumb to some fatal hubris, Nero fiddled and Bush played golf. It's not just the director of FEMA whose days are numbered.

In the current situation, it's difficult to see anyone countenancing Cheney or Rumsfield as the next President but they are the next in line if Bush is impeached. The alternative is for Congress and the House of Represetatives to take control of the Executive in some way. Since neither of these possibilities seems likely, the only other alternative will be on the streets. The only way that the street can be restrained at a time like this is if a full accounting of the circumstances surrounding the cyclone and it's aftermath is given.

I hope that someone in the US legislature realizes that an enquiry needs to be held not just to determine blame but to ensure that the truth is told and that the victims can attest to their own pain and suffering. As well as the stories of horror and despair, there will come also the stories of heroism and self sacrifice, freed from jingoism of patriotism and the TV news. Then people will realize that there are shades of grey in amongst the black and the white.

All one can say at the moment is that the US has reached one of those fluid moments in history where it's course is going to change. This dream is over.

Ozone Hole heaading for a record?

2005-08-30T23:23:00.000+08:00

The ozone hole over Antartactica is heading into record territory according to early reports. Its early days yet the ozone hole, which has formed every year for the last 30 years or so, is currenly on track to reach the size of the 1996 and 2000 holes which are the largest on record. Its probable that there is a maximum size imposed by the dynamics of global circulation that means it can't get any bigger. But this doesn't mean that it is not having a cumulative affect. Go to the TOMS site where there is an archive of ozone levels and compare any given day over the 15 odd years of records(be aware that the color coding changes a couple of times). You will notice that over the temperate region of the southern hemisphere ozone levels have been falling year in and year out.

More worrylingly perhaps is the fact that as far as the southern ozone hole the 1993 Montreal Protocol seems to be having little impact. Although this is hailed as a success there are a number of glaring loopholes . The impact of shuttle launches and their fuel pollution in particular the NOx gas; the impact of Methyl Bromide which is still widely used; the impact of CFC production that has probably contunied illegally in the 3rd World; and lastly, the impact of PFC's that have been untouched by the Montreal protocol yet will be one of the most persistent long term causes of ozone destruction around.

As the ozone hole gets arger and ozone level fall generally, two things happen. One is this exacerbates global woarming and the second is that it increases the amount of harmful ultraviolet radiation that reaches the ground. This has a number of consequences -it causes an increase in sunburn in fair skinned people; it cause an increae in melanoma and other skin cancers in susceptible animals; it causes an increase in the rate of fungal and viral disease in plants and animals because of the genetic damage of the UV to surface cells in most organisms.

But don't worry it's all part of the grand design.

Roundup kills frogs

2005-08-08T20:26:00.000+08:00

The effect of Roundup herbicide on frog populations has been a source of concern for some time. An Australian study found that the critical issue was the surfactant(synthetic soap) that the Roundup is dissolved in that was the problem. A new series of studies on North American frogs has confirmed the toxicity of Roundup. Rick Relyea Laboriatories have reported that these frogs were 10 times more susceptible to Roundup than the frogs used in the Australian studies.

These results suggest that the Australian studies may have inadvertently underestimated the risk of Roundup and that more speices of frogs should be studied in Australia to determine the risk.

Frog species are in rapid decline around the world.

As Rick Relyea points out most frogs don't breed in large ponds where there are predators but in small ephemeral pools and puddles. The latter are often inadvertently or deliberately sprayed to control weeds. Rural drains and channels around Albany are frequently sprayed to control weeds.

Frog populations around Albany have been declining for a number of years. Some of this decline may be attributed to drier winters and land clearing but at least some of it may be attributed to herbicides like Roundup.

What I want to know is why we're nt using it on the CaneToad???

2005-07-28T23:18:00.000+08:00

The southern jet stream(27 July 2005) starting to lose it's zonal flow which has peristed for two weeks

Heavy Weather

2005-07-28T22:25:00.000+08:00

'looks like we're in for heavy weather, there's a bad moon on the rise'- (Credence Clearwater Revival) - they were probably singing that in Mumbai last week, if they were prescient, today its 'raindrops keep falling on my head' as record 24 hour rainfall causes chaos.

Meanwhile, the same moon has bought a record low rainfall for the month of July for Albany and most of the south west of W.A. We've had about 60mm(nothing more than 5mm/day for 2 weeks) as opposed to an average 160mm, in what is usually the wettest month of the year. So much for reliable rainfall.

Both these events have been triggered by mass movements that are starting to occur in the climate system as the climate shifts between dynamic equilibriums.

One factor has been the position of the southern jet stream over the last two weeks which has been in a strongly zonal pattern with little variation in latitude. This pattern is on the verge of breaking up tonight and the IDES/GRAS computer models suggest that it will be wiggling all over the place by next week. This should see a return to rain in the south west with what looks like potentially heavy conditons.

The subconcious glottis

2005-07-11T21:14:00.000+08:00

The Science journal, Nature contains an exciting new study of the acoustics of the didgeridoo today. It seems that the secret to effective didg playing is to use your glottis (the dangly bit at the back of your mouth) which experienced players seem to be able to control subconsciously. So now you know!

This reminded me of a blogger that I like jill/txt who is an aussi expat teaching 'information humanistics' and 'digital literature' in norway. She's currently on her summer vac but she's well worth catching up with. Don't really understand why - it's just my subconcious glottis speaking.

Mokar moon - midwinter blues

2005-06-26T15:51:00.000+08:00

I've a mad couple of roosters having a singing contest in the background - it's that time of year - time to sharpen the axe... oh well.

It is indeed a rainy winter and the marri and the old timers were on the money. But the signs aren't good for a break in the eastern states drought. Once the July moon is passed and the season starts to turn the blocking highs will start to form again and the green drought will continue. The El Nino doesn't want to get the climate skeptics off the hook so this drought can be blamed entirely on climate warming one assumes.

However, I once studied 100 years of Australian rainfall data from 1850 - 1950 collected as cumulative monthly anomalies for a large number of recording stations. This is good because it enables you to calculate the length of droughts and dry periods in terms of months instead of years(All BOM drought data is collated by calendar year periods).

My data revealed two definite periods for drought length in Australia one of 7 years and the other of 15 months.

Given this then the current NSW drought is in it's seventh year now - if it sticks to past patterns then it should break this spring/summer. If it doesn't rain this spring/summer over there then it's global warming and Sydney (and elsewhere) are gonna have a doozt of a water problem.

It's a Matelock Moon and the Marri is flowering heavy

2005-02-23T22:07:00.000+08:00

It's a full moon and, last night, I watched it rise over the Rugged Ranges, these days known as the Stirling Ranges, but known by many other names by the Noongar who lived under the shadow of it's array of solitary peaks. The sky was shaded mauve and malachite in the still singular air of the Great Southern, the Minang region of the south west. There is a deepness of hue in the air just after dusk on still clear days here that is uniquely captivating.

The Matelock moon marks the commencement of the gnurri season, these days misnamed as salmon. These fish come in schools, chasing schools of pilchards on the edge of the surf breaks on beaches and bays open to the Southern Ocean. On the seaward side of the Quaranup peninsula the surf line off the beach is broken by a small island, Mistaken Island. On this beach in March 1830, Mokari and Collet Barker walked along the shore following the salmon until they were close enough for Mokari to leap into the waves and demonstrate his prowess with a fishing spear.

This year, Piroe, the two moons of December and January, has been a dry and hot. The Marri, Eucalyptus calophylla, is flowering spectacularly. The wildflower experts say it's the best they've seen for 5 years. It's widespread and heavy, from eprth down to Albany, her branches are drooping with white blossoms and birds and unexpected bounty. The vinyard owners are laughing because they've had no problems with parrots for the first time in years.

On the ground the bandicoots are getting thin while in the trees the possums are getting fat.

I'm told that old timers reckon it means that we'll have a good winter. We shall see.

The Minang and the destruction of the Southern Right Whale

2005-02-07T22:53:00.000+08:00

Here is a tale from the 1840's.

A taap knife (from King, 1827)

The South Coast and the West Coast of Western Australia are worlds apart. Overland as the crow flies the colonial settlements of Albany and Perth are 400kms of rough sandy track that takes 2 weeks on horseback, if you don't get lost. By sea, it's a week minimum, and with a lee shore much of the way around Cape Leeuwin, treacherous in winter. By virtue too, these outposts are separated, Perth is all private vice and Albany is public virtue. Albany was by far the smaller of the two and although the local Minang Noongar had not been the subject of punitive massacres as in Pinjarra or wide scale settlement of their lands, it was still tense. It was clear that what had happened in Perth could happen here.
The Noongar response to invasion is, and was often unappreciated. The Noongar considered themselves highly civilised and the behaviour of the invaders to be barbarian. A response that they shared with their Chinese and Japanese counterparts at the time, was to call the British, 'white devils'. 'Djanga'. or 'djanak'.

The British misunderstood this to mean that the Noongar saw them as reincarnations of their relatives. That's what the Noongar said but what they meant (and kept saying) was that the British could not take their land without taking responsibility for the Noongar who, inseparable from their land, would become like a relative to be cared for and considered.

Of course, the concept of family was already breaking down in Victorian England where families were being ripped asunder by the industrial age. The Noongar, I suspect, sensed this need in this pale uncivilised creatures. A need to belong and a sense of having been ripped asunder and tried unsuccessfully(at least to date) to use this as a bargaining tool.

For the Noongar, kin was, and is, everything. Daisy Bates wrote that after the Pinjarra massacre a number of people died because it was the custom not to eat the totem animal of people after they had died for a number of months. So many people died in the massacre, that many of the survivors starved themselves to death.

Noongar culture in 1830, was built around songs and singing. Important news was delivered 'in recitative'. Performance was an everyday occurrence, songs and dances were practiced as people crossed the country. Young men decorated themselves with feathers and ochres. Dances were taught and traded at fairs, (Mandurah is named after a place where a traditional Mantjar [fair/festival] happened ).

The barbarian invasion at Perth and the massacre at Pinjarra sent shock waves trhough the south west. Many Noongar wanted nothing to do with the British, but at Albany the locals had established an uneasy accord. The settlement, small in number, survived on kangaroo and quokka meat. The fishing was excellent Only half a dozen farms existed in the hinterland and it's main purpose was to supply the passing shipping. Which it did, badly, when the ships could get in.

Elsewhere the sheep spread like lice.They and their shepherds consumed the kangaroo feed like an inexorable tide. In 1840 on the South Coast, the sheep were still lucky to survive without any Noongar intervention. Many of the local plants were poisonous.

But for the Noongar what was really troubling was what was happening at sea. For Centuries, the Minang had come to rely upon regular strandings of whales during winter. At least 3 strandings a year were expected. Along the South Coast, Southern Right Whales and Humpbacks bred in the bays and inlets. The Southern Rights in particular lived close to the shore. The Noongar believed that the whales could be sung ashore as they often were. The Minang had invented a knife, the taap, specially designed for cutting whale meat. A unique utensil in traditional Australian tool cultures, fashioned from pieces of flaked quartz , glued in place along a stick using an admixture of balak (X.preissii) resin, dung and ash.

In 1837, George Cheyne and Thomas Sherrat pioneered the onshore whaling industry on the south coast, using boats to capture the breeding southern right whales. They did well in that first year. Soon, the whole colony was afloat on whale fever and but for the want of boats, they would have prospered. The slack was taken up by the Americans and by 1840 it was estimated their were up to 150 whalers visiting the south west in a year. By 1843 it was over.

From then on, only one or two southern right whales were taken a year from the south or west coasts. How the remaining ones survived is a mystery. To this day, the population is still critically endangered. The onshore whaling industry continued in fits and starts until 1870 by which time the humpbacks were so few that they too were not worth the hunt.

It was the winter of 1844 that the consequences of this profligate slaughter began to hit home. Although some cattle had been speared and the occasional theft had occurred on stations in the bush. The isolation of the few farms established away from Albany itself meant that getting on with the traditional owners was necessary to survive. But the colonists were fearful and misunderstood the land and it's people. Tension was clearly rising on both sides. Petitions for more soldiers had been submitted in 1840 and two native constables had been sworn in.

The Noongar were appalled at the destruction of the southern right whale. Years later Daisy Bates was to record how the whale totem had died out along with the whales on the west coast. The loss was felt for a long time.

By the 5th April, 1844 seven Noongar men were being held in the single room jail on a variety of charges. The jailer, who had the use of only one arm, made the mistake of leaving the outer door open when he served the meal and was overpowered and all escaped. Then over a six week period from the 11th April to the end of May, the Noongar systematically raided every storehouse in Albany. One hundred weight of flour from Mr Belches by digging under the floor. Flour, sugar and knives from Mr Townsend while he was being distracted by Wylie, the native constable and heroic companion of Mr Eyre. Mr Belches for a second time (after he had taken ever step to secure it) rice and sugar were taken before the thieves were disturbed and finally 4 cwt of biscuits from Mr McDonalds. The spree continued - money from Mr Warburton's, Sherratt's and Taylor's houses were rifled.

The galling thing was that, from the first, the thieves were identifiable by there tracks. Three men, Norn, Teyning and Bobby, were identified –although it's clear that the only people who could identify the tracks were there own companions. A tracker was employed to follow them and after several miles 'could go no further'.
Eventually, Norn and then the others were 'recaptured' through the offer of judicious rewards, namely rice. Although by this time the price of rice in Albany had gone from 3d a lb to 2/6d a lb.

An eyewitness to their trial in Albany, Robert Neill, records that Teyning defiantly admitted his guilt and, moreover, that he was also responsible for the cow speared on Mr McDonald's farm as well. They were clearly willing to risk the rest of the winter on Rottnest for the sake of making their point loud and clear. The Noongar could and would work as one to resist the wasteful desecration of their food supplies.

Wylie was never trusted again, although he was back in favour a few years later when he was made a constable by Mr Camfield. Although the Noongar clearly wanted to make the point as to how vulnerable the colonists were, they also recognised the superior fire power of the Europeans and their lack of civilised morality. They could not seriously threaten the colony without risking the lives of their children and old people. At the same time, they could not stand idly by while such a wrong was being committed on their land.

Scepticism and Science

2005-02-05T13:21:00.000+08:00

The publication of Michael Chricton's latest novel has occasioned much discussion about the nature of scientific knowledge. Are global warming sceptics engaged in scientific discourse or dissembling, themselves. As I'm typing I'm listening to the first of a 4 part series being presented on the Science Show(Radio National) over the next four weeks. I want therefore to summarize the variety of arguments that have been raised in the philosophy of science over the last 100 years to deal with this issue. I learnt some of this from a delightful little Aussie book called, "What is this thing called science" by David Chalmers who has just started a philosophy blog.

Karl Popper was one of the protagonists of the 'positivist' argument, which states that 'nothing is provable, theorems can only be disproved'. This is the most conservative of views – that there is no provable knowledge only exceptions that can be observed to break the rules. The problem with this point of view, is that it says nothing about, how exceptions are acknowledged, or more likely ignored. As well, many of science's most useful inventions rely upon an edifice of theory such as quantum mechanics that provides much of modern electronics. Or upon the strength that theories gain when they are proved later on, such as the confirmation of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution by the discovery of the structure of DNA.

The strongest answer to these shortcomings was formulated by Thomas Kuhn('The Structure of Scientific Revolutions') with the concept of 'paradigms' Kuhn pointed out that there would be no scientific activity at all if Popper was right. Kuhn described science as undergoing periods of 'normalcy' and periods of revolutions, when a scientific paradigm is overturned by the establishment of a new theory and a new program of research. The classic examples are, of course, Einstein's revolution in physics, and Wegener's continental drift. During 'normal' periods of science exceptions can be safely ignored, until they become an elephant at which point somebody notices the appearance of the elephant.

But this concept introduces a relativism and uncertainty into the nature of scientific knowledge which needs to be explained or explored. One direction, taken by Polanyi ('Personal Knowledge'), is that all kinds of knowledge are equally useful, thus astrology can co-exist alongside astronomy, as different kinds of knowledge. He presaged a viewpoint that was later elaborated by the post-modernist schools of thinking. However, like post-modernism, this relativist point of view is unsatisfactory because science clearly has economic consequences whereas astrology does not.

The next point of view represented by Stephen Rose and Brian Easlea is that scientific paradigms are defined and constrained by the ideological and material paradigms that are at work in the world. Stephen Rose applies a Marxist interpretation to his exploration of science. As such he presents an accurate description of the scientific process as it occurs in organic chemistry and as scientific agendas have been determined by the needs of the military – industrial complex.

Easlea ('Liberation and the Aims of Science') presents a similar point of view but his book is infused with the moods of the sixties and he hints at the role of masculinity in his discussion in scientific knowledge. Susan Griffin("Woman and Nature") and other feminist writers have expanded further upon this direction with a critique of the whole scientific enterprise built as it were, on the burning of witches. Griffin's critique is the most interesting, IMHO. She does not dispute the sceptical gaze, but rather focuses her critique upon the lascivious gaze of the scientific enterprise to 'rip aside the veil' from nature.

Applying this knowledge to the debate about scepticism and global warming, we can see that scepticism must be evaluated firstly in terms of the ideological paradigms that are at work. In this the case, the sceptics ideology and commitment to a petrol based society.

The sceptics contention that 'scientists' are captive of their own research programs (and paradigms) begs the question as to who funds the research programs. In fact, the paradigm that is being shifted, is the result of unpleasant facts accumulating as the result of a scientific program (based around NASA) which was intended to pursue a different agenda (the conquest of near earth space). Nearly all, the basic knowledge upon which various climate models are tested was a result of this program. The facts that accumulated from an attempt to present a caring and all knowing image to the world through the space program and it's earth observing off shoots.

PBS approval process goes west with new FTA

2005-02-02T23:51:00.000+08:00

The PBS approved two new drugs for schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder today. And it's an indication of what may be to come.
One of these drugs, Zyprexa, has been linked to a significant increase in the risk of diabetes amongst people taking it. In fact, it's dubious improved efficacy (as compared to similar drugs) and it's price (twice that of older drugs) are the centrepiece of allegations regarding ties between it's manufacturer, Eli-Lilly and the Bush Adminstration.
The other drug, risperdal consta, is an older(introduced in the 1990's) anti-psychotic in a new long acting form.It uses an innovative new form of sustained release encapsulation which enables it to be given up fortnightly instaed of daily. But, although, it is an 'atypical anti-psychotic' it still has typical symptoms that it shares with the older anti-psychotics such as librium and haloperidol. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is the most likely of these newer anti-psychotics to have 'extra-pyramidal syndromes'. These are involuntary movements, that can be quite severe and can lead to permanent disabilities.
Whilst one can make out a case for the latter drug(the long acting formulation is an innovation), the case for zyprexa is surely contentious. Is this a sign of things to come?

Tales from the past – The Chinese in Albany

2005-02-01T15:41:00.000+08:00

The occupation of Western Australia by the British was closley linked to the fortunes of The British East India Company which was making the usual 1000% profit on trade between South East Asia and Britain. Stirling, who was instrumental in founding Perth(and was it's first Governor) was married to the daughter of one of the Companies major shareholders. The direct route from Perth to Singapore and Jakarta was one reason why Albany(on the south coast) was not chosen as the capital of the new Colony.
In the 1860's

Messrs Stweart & Nairne, a commercial firm trading at Penang wished to establish trade with Albany and to purchase ship runs and town lots – the trade was to be carried on by means of two vessels from Penang to Sydney and regularly calling at Albany. These gentlemen expressed their willingness to import Chinese mechanics and labourers on reasonable terms either for private individuals

John Hassell, who, by then had control of a large sheep run at Jerramungup, took up their offer and requested a dozen, specifying the numbers of each trade that he required.

He was by no means the first of the Colonists to import Chinese labour. The Rev Wollaston who arrived and died in Albany in 1855, bought with him an adaptable gardener named Ah Quin. His grave along with about 20 other Chinese bought to Albany between 1850 and 1900 is identifiable at the Albany Cemetery.

Two brothers, Ah Kit and Ah Loo, who were employed at Strawberry Hill Farm in 1890, married Noongar women. The Loo family prospered and has descendants living in Albany and around the Great Southern. The Ah Kit's had only one son, who became a well known footballer during the 1920's. At a time when being Aboriginal and playing football still required one to jump a few hurdles, most Albany football clubs seem to have maintained a quiet integrity in their treatment and respect for Noongar players.

His father, Ah Kit senior, was the gardener at the Hassell town house, Hillside, in Albany. Ethel White(nee Hassell), recalled him keeping the chooks in three separate groups with a stock whip. As a child she was fascinated by the fact that he could tell which chook belonged in which flock.

In the 1890's the Chinese became a significant economic force in Albany establishing market gardens at Gledhow and on the Kalgan River to supply vegetables for the booming goldfields at Kalgoorlie.

Mr Chip, as he was known to locals, was one such. In those days there was no bridge across the lower Kalgan River where he maintained several gardens. So he had a "tiny" coracle which he would row across the river. One fine day the coracle was loaded with some chickens and several bottles of whisky along with Mr Chip when it capsized in the river. Fortunately, their were other's about, waiting for the ferry pontoon perhaps, and their heroics were evenly divided between assisting to keep Mr Chip's chickens afloat and trying to find where the bottles had sunk. The chickens survived but the bottles, so it is said, were never found.

Ian Melrose and the East Timor Campaign

2005-01-28T22:40:00.000+08:00

Ian Melrose, a virtuous soul from the suburb of Booragoon, has funded ads promoting a better deal for the people of E. Timor. He refers people to the Timor Sea Justice Campaign who have an excellent web site dissecting the various ways that Downer and co. have said take it or leave it the East Timorese.
It makes strategically good sense that we should not behave like a beadle when it comes to East Timor which may potentially be our window into Asia in the future if we play our cards right. But for a penny was a pound lost seems to be the truith of this deal.

Lula flying

2005-01-28T22:09:00.000+08:00

They say that great times make great leaders, and that great leaders take their chances and surely that's true of Lula da Silva. Google news 'lula' and no more is needed to demonstrate this fact. No other leader can claim such objective recognition, nor I dare say can one claim as many stories as does the President of Brazil on this sunny summer day down under.
His people can sense their moment of history as they booed him on his way to Davos, surely no reater sign of hope in leader, can be given than this. For the Brazilian population has undoubtedly seized the moment that Lula has come to represent.
Today he is ineffectually papering over the over the outbreak of hostilities between Colombia and Venezeula, the next proxy war for the USA. The problem is that the Columbians went after some FARC commanders in a cafe in Caracas, Venezuela, that is. FARC, aka the Revolutionary army of the Resistance in Columbia, have had a safe haven in neighbouring Venezeulan coffee houses and with Venezeula not exactly in the U.S good books at the moment. Well you see what I mean...

Anyhow Lula's doing the double act at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre and the Davos forum in Switzerland. He got booed at the former and will probably get treated sympathetically at the latter, cause you know what they say when a leader starts going on trips abroad...
Umm.. didn't I hear somethin' about Johnny Howard's itinerary...

Kinship and masculinity

2005-01-17T21:40:00.000+08:00

I was listening to Ted Egan, grand poobah of the Northern Territory on the radio tonight. He was commenting abut how we need as Australians to understand the first people's kinship system. As he put it, they could teach the kings and queens of Europe a thing or to about breeding" The kinship system gaurantees that even in the smallest bands they could ensure that in breeding did not occur. Although it's probably facile to discuss (s)kinship as being concerned with biology, it also dominates traditional thinking about psychology, sociology and ecology. In practical terms the consequences of kinship underlie the economic failure of many aboriginal people. In practical terms many indigenous people prefer the ties of kinship to economic success. The choice clearly depends on which you find the surer.

Geoff Bardon, 'Mr Patterns', in the recent documentary(ABC), talked about his relationship with men in Papunya during the 1970's when he was midwifing the birth of the Desert Art movement. He found the individual relationships he had with the Western Desert men to be profoundly moving and different from any others.
It's an experience that I've shared with him. Adult men are not individuals set against each other in traditional society. Even in a camp distant from your homeland, your place is defined by by sister or brother or mother or uncle. Someone will know exactly where you fit, because the system inherently acknowledges the 'small world' theory of networks.

What this means is that no matter what you do, your family will stand by you and this can be expected of your 'extended' family. It also means that you are expected to behave with a degree of circumspection and avoidance of conflict in the same way that you do in a family. Noongar women from the south west consider their sister's children to be their own and these children will call their maternal cousins, brother or sister, similarly, the word 'cousin' frequently refers to what English people call 2nd Cousins.

But in the traditional world there is not just one family. There are two families, that sit on either side of the fire. Each family provides the other with their spouses. Each side(or moiety) symbolically represents a dualism akin to the Taoist Yin Yang symbol. Symbolically, the crow and the eagle, the sun or shade side are refered to in the kin system.

This dualism in different places by a variety of sub divisions - often based upon intergenerational differences - so your grandfather, grandson are like your brothers and so on. This is at it's most elaborate in the Walpiri/Pintubi system where there are 8 subdivisions. Four within each of the two main family systems. Wife, wife's mother, children, mother, father, grandmother, wife's father,wife's mother. It looks a bit lopsided but the reasons is that there are four divisions on the maternal line and two on the male line. One needs to actually look at a diagram or live with people to fully understand the subtleties. This system spread to other neighbouring communities during the 20th Century.

The upshot of this system is that everyone and everything is related by a s(kin) name. The term 'skin' is used in the Northern Terrritory to refer to people's classification. This means that 1/8 of the world is your classificatory mother, 1/8 are your spouce, 1/8 is your mother-in-law or son-in-law and you must avoid any contact with them at all costs. We don't have equivalent words in English for the skin names, our best approxiamation is to use them as sirnames as in Alice Nampitjimpa, or Bob Tjampitjimpa or Fred Tjungarrayi or Mary Nakamarra. Alice and Bob are brother and sister. Fred is Mary's son.

Traditional people have a complex and subtle philosophy surrounding this basic description. But the most important thing to recognize is the consequence of our lack of 'skin' terms. They define an ontology, a way of thinking, that is different to most modern thinking. In social terms, kinship divides society vertically, somewhat like astrology, rather than horizontally in terms of class or caste. Although the Australian system makes a lot more sense than astrology, astrological signs and the meaning we invest in them suggests that this sort of vertical division makes some sort of fundamental sense to most people.

However, this is not the end of it, since kinship can also apply to a person and a particular animal or plant. This is not based upon the complexities of the desert skin system but on a perceived affinity between an individual and their particular totem. This is similar to the North American understanding of a totemic animal, often being ascribed at birth or early on in life by a significant elder based upon intuition and spritiual signs. People have a particular obligation towards their totemic spirit, usually they cannot eat their own totem and are responsible for it's increase Daisy Bates, wrote that after the Pinjarra massacre of 1834, many of the Murray River people died of hunger and grief, because it was a local tradition not to eat the totem of a recently deceased person. So many people had died that some people felt they could eat nothing.

Although this is a description based upon my own perspective. How the skin system is interpreted is different in every part of Australia not least because of the differing degrees of destruction of traditional society.

In the South West, the matrilineal terminology has remained largely intact, albeit in Aboriginal English, whereas the patrilineal system underwent a hiatus for several generations while English patrilineal sir names were adopted. Today, many Noongar are recovering from old geneologies the moieties and totems of their ancestors.

Blog therapy

2005-01-17T21:38:00.000+08:00

I'm posting a link to Scary Duck on the blog list as a public service. It might just be a matter of taste but I laugh out loud every time I go here...now back to the real world... the next post is about Kinship!

Titan in the gloamin'

2005-01-15T23:52:00.000+08:00

Stones on Titan in an orange atmosphere

My friend can't see the point. But the little Huygens probe worked like a charm and came to a landing amidst a field of worn pebbles, possibly of ice, worn by rivers of ethane. They mobilized the deep space network in Australia as Cassini passed out of contact with the probe and picked up the telemetry. There was a last minute rush to swing radio telescopes in Europe and Asia into action as it continued to transmit for 70 minutes on the ground. They needed the radio telescoes though because someone turned off one of the two Cassini receivers accidently and they lost a critical part of the data that was to be used for calculating wind speed. Fortunately the data will be recoverable with a some work for the radio telescope feeds. Keep up to date at the Planetary Society's Huygens blog

Safe as houses, Aboriginal women stranded in the desert's pain.

2005-01-14T16:45:00.000+08:00

From the letters column "West Australian" Thursday 13 Jan

Having worked for some time with the women and children affected by family violence in a remote Aboriginal community, I was heartened to learn that the Federal Government has promised legal and support services for indigenous victims and potential victims of family violence and sexual assault.
The Aboriginal women of Balgo Hills have been trying for many years to get funding for a safe house. The only safe place for these women is on my living room floor. Food, clothing and other essentials, such as transport out of the community when necessary, are all supplied from small donations from outside supporters. The nearest safe house is 275 kms away in Halls Creek.
We can only hope that some time soon the WA Government will stop paying lip service to its supposed commitment to "doing something about family violence in Aboriginal communities" and actually provide the funding for a safe house.
Funding is available to "raise awareness", but the women of Balgo Hills don't need awareness raised about family violence and sexual assault, they need a safe house.

Judith Nampitjin Power, co-ordinator, Kapulalangu Aboriginal Women's Association, Balgo Hills.

I remember when women were trying to establish a refuge in Alice Springs in 1981, they used to say that the last 400 yards was the worst, they had to run. The Alice Springs Local Council thought it was being run by witches so they bulldozed it!

The confluence between racism and sexism in Australia is truly the most shameful part of our colonial history. We have yet to seriously address this problem. Where is there a male politician with the courage to speak out. I'll lay garlands at his door.

Back to the drawing board - red shift conundrum

2005-01-12T01:04:00.000+08:00

Anybody who thinks that astronomers actually know what's happening out there should see this latest observation shaking the bars of the current paradigm regarding the expanding universe.
A quasar has been discovered within a galaxy 300 million light years away. The only problem is that the quasar has a redshift indicating that it is billions of light years away!
The quasar appears to be affecting the galaxy and there is observational evidence that it really is in the galaxy and not just behind it.
Given that the relationship between red shift and distance has been a core doctrine since Hubble made his observations back in the 1920's this recent discover raises some seriously uncomfortable questions.
Mind you we should wait until there are further observations - another explanation may be forthcoming - the evidence that the quasar is actually part of the galaxy will need to be critically examined for robustness.

Looking down from above

2005-01-11T23:56:00.000+08:00

NASA has released a topographical radar image of Australia from it's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission The full size image is on this page . The image is color coded for topography and shaded from the north east. The full size jpg image file is 3.4mB in size so don't click on it and expect it to open easily in your browser! Right click and save it to your hard drive and view it a graphics program. The shading in the full size image highlights the deformations in the bedrock in places like the Flinders Ranges and the South West.

God amongst the trees, Crooked Timber and the Tsunami

2005-01-10T22:13:00.000+08:00

The "Problem of Evil hits the papers" is the headline of the blog at Crooked Timbers and the comments blog is up to 75 not out. That the first 50 at least are worth the read is indicative of the freshness and urgency that this new discourse can create.
But God does not decide who shall be good, God smiles upon our goodness. Here's a song that is 20 years old but seems to speak to the tsunami.

Words like Dvorak strings
pull at the beard of time,
While dreamers at their walls
where every thought does shine,
drunk on every corner,
at every crossing and every line.
Like a soldier drunk on duty
drunk on the edge of time

Oh lord above shine down on me a while
My tears cannot hide your smile

A go-between who needs a poem
A light in the darkest zone
Someone to explain
was it for me
or just a show
that all this life and death
that tears children from their homes
Is that our song or are we lost
or are we just alone?

Oh Lord above shine down on me a while
My sadness cannot hide your smile

Ask me no more these questions.
Leave well enough alone
Against the never ending sky
of nature must we roam.
Like liones on safari
or vultures sucking bones,
the quest is never nearer
than the birthing or the holy stone.

Oh Lord above shine down on me a while
My tears cannot hide your smile

Watch the skies!

2005-01-09T14:33:00.000+08:00

An exciting time for space enthusiasts this year.

We've just seen the mars rovers celebrate their first birthday

it's only five more sleeps to go until Hughyens descends on Titan! The planetary society is a good place to keep up with the science and comment on these two missions.

and Swift has turned on and is detecting gamma ray bursts(GRB's).

This last satellite probably promises to have the most scientifically interesting results. GRB's are thought to come from exploding supernova,black holes and other energetic phenomena. They are the most energetic particles we can detect. The bursts are usually very short and identifying the source is very difficult. Swift is designed to automatically turn towards the source within minutes once it's fully operating. But it's aready seeing more GRB's than was expected which is good because it's confounding expectations. More power to the unexpected!

Spatial networks and 'small world' theory

2005-01-09T11:36:00.000+08:00

In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals,they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a
fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple, and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears

Charles Mackay, 1841, "Memoirs of popular delusions"

The opening paragraph of Charles Mackay's work poses the central question that is at the heart of the 'small world theory' of networks. The mechanics of the 'madness' that Mackay describes are also the mechanics of the coherence of fireflies and crickets all chirping at random to produce a single pattern.

Doug Simpson's review of "Six Degrees:The Science of a connected age" by Duncan Watts provides a concise overview and introduction to the scope of this aspect of network theory.

Ahmed Helmy has taken network theory and applied it to geographic(spatial) graphs such as radio networks which provides for some really interesting practical consequences of utilizing network theory to develop mobile ad hoc radio networks. In an interview for Technology Research News he describes how the introduction of a small number of random links can greatly reduce the path length of messages in these networks. Radio networks are much more highly clustered and limited by distance and energy constraints than informatinal networks traditionally studied in 'small world' theory. As such they represent a more realistic model of economic networks.

In his original paper(.pdf) he shows how geographic networks can be transformed into small networks by the presence of a limited number(0.2 - 20%) of random links with a median distance of 20-40% of the network diameter.

Consider the grid of streets comprising the centre of Melbourne(say) - if there are 10 by 10 streets, then a random single link (1%) stretching across 3 blocks will turn this into a 'small world' network! Interestingly this is almost precisely the size of the network of arcades and plazas that connect the central area of Melbourne (Bourke and Swanston Street to Flinders and Elizabeth Street)

Oil, Tsunami and Howard

2005-01-07T13:25:00.000+08:00

The $1b aid package announced bu the oz govt is by all reckoning a generous commitment and marked change of heart for JH in dealing with the region. But it's worth noting that the prize in the region is the now devastated oil fields of Aceh.

This is just a test post.

Link to South East Asian Earthquake Blog