Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Another flea market expedition

Five thirty in the morning is not early to go to the local Sunday flea market near our house. All the Rolex watches and gold jewelry have long been snapped up by the pros. Well that’s the urban myth anyway.

I bought a few jazz and soundtrack CDs this morning, perfect condition and mostly a dollar each or two dollars max. Amongst the dollar titles was B.B. King - The Collection. The original price sticker revealed someone had paid $18.44 when it was new. Another one dollar jazz CD was titled The Quintet of the Hot Club of France. Originally $23.94. This is the second Hot Club recording I’ve acquired recently. The other was from the Rock & Roll Collector’s Fair last month. See October 12.

I paid two dollars for a s CD boxed set titled The Original American Decca Recordings - Black Legends of Jazz. I thought it might have been expensive, but new copies are listed on Amazon for about US$15. There are many artists in the compilation, mostly names I’m not familiar with. There’s a very nice 80 page booklet with the set which I’m sure will bring me up to speed.

The American singer John Denver was going for a buck too. I’m wasn’t sure if I was a fan but seeing as this year is almost at an end I brought home his album, Christmas Like a Lullaby. I’m playing the first track now and he’s singing about Christmas ‘down under.‘ Checking the artwork I can see it was recorded in Nashville, which is where my long time American penfriend Stephanie lives. So I’m glad I bought it. I guess I am a fan, but it’s the only one of his CDs I have. I’ll have to ask her if she has it.

Of course I’m familiar with lots of his music. For example ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane.’ I looked up his bio and was surprised to discover he was killed in a private ultra-light plane crash in 1997. He was born in Roswell, New Mexico - the place where the space aliens used to hang out.

I was planning on putting up the Christmas lights on the front of our house today, but son number two and his companion have just gotten off the jet plane from Vietnam and have confirmed they are coming to lunch.

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

About the writer

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!

Current Music: Christmas Like A Lullaby - John Denver

A 'quiet' Saturday

All is quiet today in our street, unlike yesterday. It was the day the grano workers determined for pouring the upper-floor concrete slab on the two new slums which are being constructed over the road from our house. There was supposed to be six führerbunkers crammed onto the quarter acre block, but there’s apparently been some sort of hesitation by the separate owners of the four at the back. Usually with such developments the most efficient way to build multiple dwellings is to start at the rear of a block and work to the front. If these rear dwellings are ever built at all, it’s going to be an increasingly expensive, and inconvenient logistical exercise. All the building materials will have to be moved uphill between these first two. There’s nothing we can do except grit our teeth for the next year or two and treat the circus as a form of entertainment.

Urban infill nightmare

There will be some entertainment at our house today. Our youngest son is having nine friends to a lunchtime pool party to help him celebrate his fifteenth birthday. I get to cook the sausages and fried onions on the barbecue. Here’s a flashback photo I took of him in April 1974.

Our youngest Merman is sweet fifteen

The following day on 17 April 2004 I wrote my first weblog entry for Fremantlebiz. In those early days I wasn’t able to include photos.

I need to go to the kitchen and start slicing onions - and find the mustard.

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Current Music: Oliver! - 'Food, Glorious Food' - Lionel Bart

The new hi-fi

Well the old Sony hi-fi has been junked. I had to pull it apart yesterday to check that none of my CDs were trapped inside its 5 CD changer. I was amazed at how many self tapper screws had been used to assemble the unit. I’ve kept them and some of the circuit boards because they contain a lot of ‘useful parts.’ Its an incurable habit from my ham radio days.

We went on the prowl for a replacement. The usual trail - JBs in Myaree, Harvey Normans and The Good Guys in O’Connor. I like all these stores, but at the end of the day it’s the price that matters. JB’s have started to become expensive and are reluctant to compete when confronted with lower prices elsewhere, so I don’t go there as often as I used to. We ended up saving about $40 on the JB price by buying a tidy Panasonic SC-PM38 stereo system from The Good Guys for $209. Our cat Mad Max has already inspected it and decided it’s too small for him to snooze on. The new unit sounds pretty good, and is relatively simple to use.

The Good Guys have an enormous modern barn-style store nearby on Stock Road, O’Connor. It’s directly opposite where the meat works fire was a few days ago. The staff are always genuinely very friendly. The young woman who stitched up our deal said they’d had to evacuate the store through their rear entrance and close for the day of the fire. They’d been very worried because the premises were in the direct line of all the smoke and ash.

It appeared yesterday that some work had already been started to clear the meat-works site. Apparently it’s loss is having a major impact because there were many farmers depending on selling their prime stock to be sliced up just in time for Christmas.

When we came home there were some water department workers digging up our neighbour’s verge. They were replacing a huge valve in the main water pipe about ten feet down. So for a while we had no water. We didn’t mind, but one of the workers told me other people in the street had complained. Bloody whingers at it again. I said they should be grateful to live where we have a water department which does some serious maintenance. Three cheers for the water department workers and all the other skilled utility employees who keep our lifestyles maintained.

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Current Music: Shopping Spree - John Powell

A lesson in electrostatic principles

It’s like winter outside, strong winds, torrential rain, temperature reading a chilly 60 degrees F on our front verandah thermometer.

I had a sad realisation this week. The Sony hi-fi in our sitting room room is in it’s death throes. It’s the one I mainly listen to my CDs and FM radio on. It also the one which my cats have enjoyed soaking up the heat from in winter.

A flashback to better times

For the past couple of weeks the 5 disc changer mechanism has been playing up. Sometimes it wouldn’t eject a disk or suddenly change to another midway through a track. Occasionally too there’s been noticeable distortion on the base notes of orchestral CDs. That was very annoying. Another more recent symptom was that when the mode was on FM radio, (I only listen to ABC Radio National) the system would shut down completely after about 10 minutes. That was extremely annoying.

I decided I had better lift the lid off and look inside. (After I disconnected the power of course.) The circuit boards were not a pretty sight. It would have made any NASA Mars-lander engineer wince. There was an amazing covering mat of animal hair and assorted grit. I knew immediately what and who to blame - electrostatic induction and our much loved whopper tabby cat, Mad Max and his jet-black partner in crime, the adorable Miss Bubbles.

Not a pretty sight - a hairy hi-fi

I did the logical thing and tried to remove the layer of felt with a soft artist’s brush and vacuum cleaner. This was only partially successful. I turned to the air compressor in our garage and was able to clean out the rest. I crossed my fingers and switched the hi-fi on. The display lit up, but the function selector didn’t work. The whole gizmo appeared to be cactus f…tus. I’ve been stewing over the prospect of having to buy a new hi-fi for a couple of days now. I liked listening to music CDs while I read in a comfortable chair.

Hot news! I’ve just tried the old system again and it’s come back to life. This is a pity because I’d sort of got used to the idea of buying a new, less complicated one - certainly not one from Sony, not because they don’t have a cat-hair barrier, but because their systems are too complex for easy operation.

This unit was originally bought as a ‘home theatre’ system. I think it cost about 1,200 bucks maybe eight years ago. There are 52 buttons on the hand controller and 21 on the unit itself, and after several years I still don’t understand what most of them do. The system became semi-redundant when we went fully digital in the TV department. We bought a Sony LCD digital TV, but that’s quite complicated to use as well. Sony designers have a thing about lots of buttons on their gear - far too many for this PhD.

Wait! Suddenly I can tell there’s no music coming from the sitting room. The Sony hi-fi which encouragingly lit up five minutes ago has switched itself off - it’s for the last time. I’m sorry to say that in this disposable era there’s no prospect of me putting into a service centre. Parts and labour costs for such old technology would be prohibitive.

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Current Music: Video Killed The Radio Star - Buggles

A political correctness update

Rain is pouring down outside but I’m no longer sure if that’s the politically correct description. The drongos at the weather bureau have been messing about with the English language and decided that they are no longer going to uses the word ‘fine’ in their weather forecasts because it might be offensive to farmers. The logic is that when a farmer looks outside and sees a bright sunny day it will not necessarily be ‘fine’ for him because he (or she) might have been hoping for wet weather which would be finer than more dry and sunny tedium. Presumably in American-speak the break of a drought might be ‘fine and dandy’, but in Australian farming parlance it would more likely be ‘bloody bewdy’. That’s unless there was too much precipitation and then it would be a ‘flamin’ bloody flood.‘

So it’s official, there is to be no more ‘fine’ weather in Western Australia, unless it’s pouring with rain outside like it is at the moment and you happen to be a farmer living on some parched dirt. Then it could be fine. Got it? I feel like I’m repeating myself.

We have a lot of political correctness in Australia. I’m pretty sure there would already be nest of nutters somewhere who’ve been inspired by the recent move to eliminate the display of Christian crosses in Euro-schools lest they offend some minority. Of course it’s politically incorrect to call people nutters. They are persons with divergent opinions. Some people also take offense at being described as a minority. They’re called whingers.

One of the bonuses of living near Fremantle is that we get a free independent newspaper called The Herald delivered to our letterbox every week. Over the past twenty years it has covered many local stories which were avoided by the ‘mainstream’ media.

Last week there was a front page story that an Amnesty International affiliated youth-arts festival performance of a controversial ten minute play titled Seven Jewish Children had been cancelled in the port because of pressure from The Jewish Community Council of Western Australia.

Click up the clipping to the max to read the story for yourself if you can be bothered. The Herald doesn’t have a website.

Pseudo censorship strikes in Fremantle

Never mind. What has been banned in Fremantle can easily found online via Google or Wikipedia. I suppose my name will go on a list for telling you all this. Curiously enough the play has been performed in Tel Aviv and London with Jewish actors. There’s also the playscript readily available online and a monologue performance produced by none other than Britain’s respected Guardian newspaper. It was originally written for multiple voices, so with a single reader the Guardian effort is an economy version.

The play has lessons for everyone. It is about how religious dogma, bigotry, ethnocentricity, intolerance, fear and confusion justify and desensitize perceptions and teachings. It happens to relate to the situation between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, but it could easily be applied to peoples anywhere - Moslem Arabs and Australian Christians included.

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Current Music: Good Day Sunshine - The Beatles

A local meat-works fire

There’s a light industrial area slightly to the south of where we live called O’Connor - its named for 19th century civil engineer C.Y. O’Connor. The northern boundary is shared with our suburb. Just before lunchtime yesterday a family-owned export meat packing works with a 29 year history went up in flames. sending plumes of smoke north east into another neighbouring suburb of Willagee. Police closed off the surrounding roads and media choppers hovered overhead as some 40 plus firefighters went to work for a few hours. Jill and I were traveling south on Stock Road when I took this picture of the smoke. It had been much blacker and nastier looking when we first noticed it from near our house.

Smoke belching from a local meat works fire

Our eldest daughter was working in her brewery office job a few hundred meters from the meat works. I was a bit worried for her safety. Fortunately she was upwind of the smoke, which a representative from a state government air monitoring team quickly claimed was non-toxic. Not sure that he convinced anyone.

There’s currently a major political battle for hearts and minds with an impending by-election for the state seat of Willagee. It probably wouldn’t have been good for the government or the opposition if the population believed they’d been poisoned by the initial swathe of filthy black stuff which was swept over them by the wind.

Over a hundred workers from Western Meat Packers are now in limbo with their jobs. Possibly tough times are ahead for many, but apparently other sympathetic meat businesses in the area have already offered to take some of them on. Another problem for the workers was that their locker room went up in flames and essential things like handbags, wallets and car keys were destroyed. The latter could be very expensive. Modern electronic car keys such as for our Toyota Yaris cost hundreds of dollars to duplicate, and if the main master key is lost without a duplicate available then a bill of thousands to replace all the remote door locks can be expected.

Apparently Western Meat Packers were processing about 2,000 beef carcasses a week. The animals were slaughtered elsewhere. With the factory now destroyed it’s possible there’ll also be negative consequences for some of the state’s cattle growers.

This is the second family-owned meat-works in the area we’ve seen go up in flames. D’Orgsogna’s on the corner of Stock Rd and Leach Highway was badly damaged in 1990. The business survived and is now a major producer of smallgoods - hams, bacon, salami and the like. Value adding pork has long been their specialty. They recently celebrated 60 years in business. As with Western Meat Packers, the animals were slaughtered elsewhere and the carcasses trucked in for processing. When I first saw yesterday’s smoke I thought it was them in trouble again.

Thankfully no one was killed in either of the fires. I’ve put a high definition version of the above image on my Panoramio website.

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Current Music: Backdraft: Show Me Your Firetruck (Theme to Iron Chef) - Hans Zimmer

Nuclear nightmare?

My wife Jill felt the need to go to Bunnings yesterday to check out a stash of remaindered sample pots of paint which she’d heard were on sale for 50 cents. I parked next to a black vehicle which I later realised was a Hummer. Yes we have a few idiots on our roads here who think that Hummers represent the pinnacle of social achievment. Personally speaking, I favour the Yaris.

There was something different about the Hummer couple. They’d loaded their Bunnings hardware purchases in the back and then realised they’d lost their keys. There was this gargantuan spinoff of US military technology sitting in the car park as useless as could be. A gun nut could have opened up with an AK47 and they wouldn’t have stood a chance.

I suggested to the man he should unpack the vehicle and check if the keys were under the stuff he’d bought. He thought that was a good idea. I hoped if he found them he wouldn’t cave in the side of our Yaris as he backed out of the parking bay.

As Jill and I were walking through the gardening section entrance of Bunnings I asked the disingenuous greeter and watcher person for people pinching stuff from the store if anyone had handed in some keys. They had. I went back the the Hummer couple and told them how to solve their problem. The moral of the story is that people who drive small cars are smarter than people who drive Hummers.

Inside Bunnings we soon discovered why there was a mountain of paint samples they were trying to offload. They were crap colours, otherwise known as puke. Even if they were free. probably no one would would want them.

I remembered that we needed a 9 volt battery for one of the smoke alarms in the house. These batteries have become very expensive. I suspect a conspiracy. A couple more dollars buys a new smoke alarm with a battery. We decided to buy four new smoke alarms and replace the old ones.

They have a component which uses a radioactive element, Americium 241. I thought these things had to be disposed of carefully - that's what it says inside an old one. However, I found an Australian Nuclear Safety Agency website which says they can be tossed out with the household garbage.

An alarming smoke alarm

According to Wikipedia, Americium 241 is a fissile element. A critical mass of about 60kg will theoretically support a violent chain reaction. The element has a half-life of 432.7 years. It decays into neptunium-237 which has a half-life (about 2.14 million years). The americium in a smoke detector resides with about 3% neptunium after 19 years. It’s also a fissile element. I can see in the picture of one of our old smoke detectors we replaced that I wrote it’s installation date as 31 July 1994. That makes it about 15 years old. Should we really be sending this sort of stuff so indiscriminately to landfill?

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Current Music: Nuclear Nightmare - Jerry Goldsmith

Flea market treasures

I scoured the local flea market at about 6am this morning and came home with a few treasures. The first find was a large professionally glass-framed print of marine life on an ocean reef. The seller asked for twenty dollars, but agreed to my offer of ten. I should point out that I didn’t buy it for our house. It’s going to be a Christmas gift for someone I know will appreciate it. It’s signed in the bottom right corner with the name R. John and the date 1995. That’s Jill and Millie holding it for the photo.

A reef print

The second find was a pair of framed original watercolours of Rottnest Island. I bought the pair for eight dollars. They have the undated initials JMB in the bottom left corners. The one on the left is of the northern end of Thomson Bay. The other is a view facing east between two 19th century rental cottages in the main settlement.

Two Rottnest watercolours

I found a few CDs for a dollar each. One of them was titled Araluen - a 2001 set of ‘easy listening’ compositions overlaid with natural bushland sounds by a Western Australian musician named Robert Boyd.

Araluen is a shady 150 acre botanical park in the Darling Escarpment a short distance southeast of Perth. It was created in 1929 as a fitness and recreation camp for the Young Australia League. The YAL was founded in Perth in 1905 to encourage nationalistic sentiment amongst young men. As a young kid in the early 1950s I went to a week long camp at Araluen. Fortunately I escaped the attention of homosexual predators amongst the older boys, but others were not so lucky. The organisation withered in the late twentieth century and Araluen was sold to the state government in 1985. The park has since been restored by a not-for-profit volunteer organisation and is now a popular picnic destination. They have a tulip festival every spring.

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Current Music: Araluen: 'Joy Of Spring' - Robert J. Boyd

A mid-November garden report

The petunia seedlings have nearly doubled in size since we planted them in our new stone-walled flower box earlier during the week. I reckon they’ll be showing a good display before Christmas. We chose ‘Bonanza’. It’s a mixed colour selection which has been around for decades and never fails to please. We used to sell them ourselves when we owned a small garden business over thirty years ago.

Currently there are a few plants in our garden giving us visual pleasure. Near our back door there is a brick pier supporting a grape vine. On the western side in the full heat of the sun are a couple of very small ceramic planter pots containing what I suspect is a form of Kalanchoe.

A spring selection
The two specimens have been thriving in this situation for several years and flower for many months. They rarely get watered. I saw some examples for sale at Bunnings last week, but forgot to check the name. Jill recently took some cuttings from ours about a month ago and they seem to be taking root.

Out on our front verge we have a row of alternate red and white roses against our brick wall. They’ve been in full bloom for the past few weeks. The white ones are the ever reliable ‘Iceberg.’ The red ones are ‘Satchmo’, named after the famous jazzman Louis Armstrong. Both varieties are similarly prolific and respond very well to a hard pruning every mid-year. These roses are drought tolerant and flower for long periods through summer.

The strelitzias in the bottom-right image are in our back garden. These also produce many flowers every year. An African species, they are very drought resistant. We often see the honey-eater birds giving them a workover. Strelitzias are named for 18th century Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, queen consort of King George III. How about that?

Charlotte, Queen of the strelitzias

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Current Music: Ain't Misbehavin' - Louis Armstrong

Rottnest Island - A new view of a fragile environment

Now here’s news of something really interesting involving Rottnest Island. It’s a locally produced challenge to Google Earth called NearMap. There’s a fabulous aerial view of the island online. It’s a recent effort and clearly the island is looking a bit dry and fragile.

NearMap’s Rottnest

After you hit the NearMap link, as with Google Earth you can zoom in or out and drag the image back and forth with your mouse. I was astonished at the new clarity. It’s much sharper than Google Earth. You can even find footprints on the beaches. You can also drag to the right - across to the metropolitan area.

‘Leavers’ week’ is not far away for Rottnest Island. It’s become the traditional period when cashed up children, mostly so-called ‘schoolies’ from elitist boys and girls private schools who have completed their final TEE exams, head to the island without parental supervision.

Unfortunately in the past it’s been an excuse for some of them to partake in the infamous Australian art of binge drinking and generally being socially obnoxious. According to the suburban media, the police have made special visits to Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Iona Presentation College, Shenton College and Methodist Ladies’ College this year to warn the prim and proper female socialites to behave themselves.

Preying on these vulnerable ‘schoolies’ will be the ‘toolies’. They’re the slightly older individuals who are more streetwise. Reputedly, ‘toolies’ tend to be alpha males who specialise in sexual predation and the purveying of illicit substances to those who can afford it.

The authorities justifiably fear the worst and this year have imposed more stringent precautions. These have included raising accommodation fees for the week and imposing a $2,000 accommodation bond. The schoolies also have to wear ID wrist bands for the duration of their stay so they are not mistaken for the evil toolies who’ll try to sneak onto the island.

Leavers’ Week promises to be an exciting time for everyone involved, police, medicos and newspaper reporters included.

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Current Music: Arrival At The Island Of Octopussy - John Barry

Music lessons

The most active musicians in the family at the moment are our two youngest children. Our eleven year old daughter is an alto sax player who can quickly extract a recognisable tune from any wind or brass instrument she can lay her hands on. This year she has had the good fortune to receive weekly lessons from a man of colour who is keen on American jazz, and particularly the music of the famous sax player John Coltrane. So for her age she is enthusiastically playing far more complex pieces than would normally be expected for a child of her age.

In addition, our fourteen year old number six son has been going from strength to strength with his trumpet playing at high school. He now does his practice without being told and it has made a great difference. As well as working on his set pieces for the concert and swing bands, he’s started to improvise in the last couple of months in ways I’ve never heard any of out other children attempt. Quite frankly I’ve been thrilled when I’ve heard him practicing behind the closed door of his bedroom.

The improvisor at a concert last month

We were warned many years ago by the man at Zenith Music in Claremont when we bought our first Yamaha student trumpet for son number five that there might come a time when the need for a better quality instrument was apparent. It didn’t happen for son number five, but our number six son, the improvisor, has been dropping subtle hints to my wife for the past month. Apparently he’s on the short list to do some solo performances next year and this has stimulated his enthusiasm.

Good student trumpets like the Yamahas cost about $700 new. The next jump into the advanced student, semi-pro range is a completely different ball game. Our son has expressed interest in an American Conn trumpet. They have a famous design known as the Constellation which has been a classic favourite for jazz players since the 1950s.

I sneaked over to Zenith Music yesterday to do some reconnoitering. We buy all our instruments from them because they give excellent advice, offer very competitive prices and free after sales service on what they sell. We periodically get instruments serviced which are many years old and have never had any hassles.

The list price for a Constellation 38b is currently about $2,500. Gulp! With a discount with could get one for about $2,000. But before we commit, and we are still unsure if we will this year, we’ll need to take our son and his favourite mouthpiece for a test run on it and some others in the semi-pro category. Might also have to keep an eye on eBay for a while.

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Current Music: I'm Old Fashioned - John Coltrane

Getting on the road safely in Western Australia

There was a bit of disappointment here yesterday. Daughter number two had her test for a driving licence and failed. According to the kindly examiner she’d done everything pretty well as required except that when she changed down gears to enter a roundabout she kept her foot on the clutch and freewheeled until she came out at the other side. It’s a good thing he noticed. So she’s had to book another test for next week. Then, if she does everything okay, she’ll graduate to the next stage - another learner permit and at least another 25 hours of supervised driving with ‘L’ plates and a log book to record them in. It would make more sense if the log book was issued with the first learner permit.

A minimum of six months must elapse between issuing of the first permit and the practical driving test. Then there must be a minimum of six months supervision on the second stage before the first of two types of probationary ‘P’ plates are issued. A red and white one for six months, then a green and white one for the next 18 months. After this the novice driver is automatically awarded a full unrestricted licence which includes the right to drive under the influence of alcohol so long as it doesn’t register .05% on a breathalyzer. Confused? Here’s the full guts of it in the latest official table.

One suspects the driving licence situation in this state has long been designed by retired circus clowns. The requirements get changed every couple of years. They’ve now become so convoluted that irresponsible people simply don’t bother. The purported aim of all this complexity is to lower the road toll, but it’s not working.

There are a couple of simple solutions for lowering the road toll. Firstly there should be compulsory accident insurance requirement for all vehicles, and secondly a zero tolerance for any person driving under the influence of alcohol. The latter probably won’t happen because Western Australian political parties have long supported the interests of the liquor industry.

At any given time there are probably thousands of inebriated drivers on Western Australian roads. Almost every day there are serious road accidents involving alcohol. Many of these drivers are unlicenced. The social and economic cost to our state is incalculable.

Beware - drink driving to .05 still tolerated in Western Australia

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Current Music: Highway to Hell - ACDC

It’s a recessionary jungle out there

The militant Tamil economic opportunists are still holding out on the Australian chartered customs and research vessel Oceanic Viking at Bintan Island, Indonesia. By hook or by crook they are adamant that they won’t leave the ship until it delivers them to Australia for a bite at what’s left during this worrying recession.

There’s another wooden boat in Indonesia with 250 Tamils aboard. Apparently they’re making the same sort of demands on Australia. The leader has admitted he has a serious criminal record in Canada and now believes he and his followers should be accepted into this country as refugees. Read the news report for yourself. One of the other things he admitted to since he was deported from Canada was that he worked in an Indian call centre. There’s considerable public ill-feeling towards Indian call centers in Australia because Australian banks and phone companies have been allowing them to incompetently handle confidential customer business.

Call me xenophobic if you wish, but I think such individuals will bring a whole heap of trouble to Australia if given the chance. I’d like to see the actual cost to the nation for the interdiction, processing and ongoing social security, education, accommodation and medical support for a single individual. I bet the figure would be humungous. My restated view is the Prime Minister Mr Rudd has to stand tough on this one.

When I was reading up on the modernist Arab Government of Dubai for last Tuesday’s essay I noticed that the emirate depends heavily on temporary Sri Lankan ‘guest workers’ for it’s labour force. Maybe they’d like some more? There must be someone in Emirate Airlines who could pull a few strings.

And what of the recession in Australia? Last week there were some announcements that the worst is over. I’m not sure it is. I was in the local Coles supermarket yesterday and the shelf stock-level situation didn’t look encouraging. It seemed obvious that there was significant mercantile restraint taking place. Indeed, more than I have ever seen before.

Coincidentally yesterday there was substantial coverage by the Australian news media alleging that an OECD report confirmed Australians enjoy the fastest-rising food prices in the developed world. It may or may not be true. I visited the OECD website this morning and was unable to confirm the press reports.

Last week there was a story that Hungry Jacks, the Burger King spinoff which is the main rival to McDonalds in Australia, has dumped its network of Australian potato growers and is now importing it’s frozen French fries from the USA and Canada. McDonalds have since stated they only use spuds from Australia and New Zealand. Even that’s a drama because Tasmanian potato growers are suffering because of the NZ imports. Interestingly, our youngest children have declared without any coaching from me that they’ll not go to the local Hungry Jacks any more when they get any spare pocket money.

No Aussie potatoes at our local HJ’s

There are plenty of once trusted Australian businesses who have dumped reliable Australian agricultural growers in favour of cheaper foreign imports. We’ve tried to scrutinise the labels when shopping, but labelling laws are a joke in this country. Recently were learned that one of the leading small-goods producers in this state has been importing foreign pork for its ham and bacon products. Because the curing process is done here they can be labelled as “Made in Australia.” So we've crossed that brand off our shopping list. We'll avoid ham entirely this Christmas if we discover other leading brands are doing the same.

“Product of Australia” is another confusing description, not quite as shonky as the “Made in Australia” one. Click here for the definitions. A lot of “Made in Australia” fruit juice contains cheap concentrate from Mexico and has Australian water added.

I could go on and on - its a dodgy jungle out there.

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Current Music: Potato Walk - Danny Elfman

Another reject-stone project for our 'secret garden'

My wife and I fancy ourselves as pretty good amateur stone masons. I’ve described some of landscaping our projects in Fremantlebiz during the past few years. To name a few there was the Chinese herb garden with an echelon of reproduction antique warriors, the Greek garden replete with reproduction Doric columns salvaged from a nearby demolition and the Roman enclave garden with stone walls and arched windolettes. These creations are all standing as good as ever and starting to take on the patina of age, which is the effect we want to achieve.

One thing we don’t do is throw out any scrap limestone. We keep every little bit in a ‘tidy’ pile because we know from our experience that we’ll possibly be able to use in in some future project, no matter how irregularly shaped it might be.

We’ve just completed a stone flower box in our Roman enclave. It’s a sad fact living in suburbia that border fences tend to pollute the vision, so the best solution is to grow stuff against them, and what better way than from a stone flower box. We did have a nice moon creeper doing quite well in the same position for a couple of years, but it went manky.

We started the flower box a couple of weeks ago. We used old bricks for the foundation. (We have a small stack of them in reserve as well.) Here’s a sequence of pics.

Construction of a stone flower box

We are always very careful to keep things plumb. A string line and spirit level are our best friends in this regard. We always find the entire process in these sort of jobs very satisfying. We hand mix the mortar in a wheelbarrow. A stone capping was laid along the top of the wall to finish the job. On Friday we filled the flower box with sand and mixed in a few bags of sheep and cow manure.

We were going to make our first planting to be three types of basil to compliment the summer salad season. We bought the basil seedlings yesterday and actually planted them. However I decided to check on the safety of food plants in the proximity of chemically treated greenish-coloured wood posts. There were a couple on the new bed supporting the old red lattice. I found a blog site called Fits and Starts with some useful information links. What I read persuaded me to replant the basil elsewhere and we’ll go for some petunias instead. We’ll buy some today. We also transplanted a stephanotis creeper yesterday from the Chinese herb garden where it had been struggling against summer heat. We’re expecting it to recover quickly in the new position.

Millie inspects the finished project

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Current Music: Secret Garden Theme - Zbigniew Preisner

Cubilee 2009 at Wanneroo Showgrounds

Yesterday was set aside for Cubilee 2009 at the Wanneroo showgrounds north of Perth. Cub Scouts from around the state rocked up for a day of concentrated Scouty fun and games. Last year Cubilee 2008 was held at Bunbury to the south. I wrote about it on 3 November 2008.

I was the chauffeur for my wife Jill and our youngest daughter and Cub Scout. Our daughter’s tonsils were very much improved yesterday thanks to the antibiotic she received via the excellent Australian health system.

Jill is the leader or ‘Akela’ of the 1st Fremantle Sea Scouts Cub Scout Pack. About 18 of her group of boys and girls paid up in advance to attend Cubilee yesterday. The $12 charge provided them with a bag of goodies and a ticket for food and drinks, plus free unlimited-access to the many adventure activities. Each Cub also received a special cloth badge to commemorate the day. Some kid from another pack won a bicycle for designing it.

The Cubilee badge - 2009

Jill staked out a tarpaulin beneath some shady trees for her group to stash their stuff. Parents who wished to stay for the day after delivering their youngsters were free to do so. After the opening ceremony the Cubs were allowed wander about in pairs enjoying the supervised activities as they wished. Camel rides went non-stop throughout the day. They seemed to be very contended animals. Probably because they were slipped a free food treat for every load of passengers they didn’t traumatise. Here’s a picture of our daughter doing her 'Lawrence of Arabia' act with her companion. It was their first camel ride. Our daughter reported that there was a lot of swaying in all directions.

Camel riders pitch and yaw

I had a half hour power-nap in the shade after lunch. For the kids it was non-stop free action all day. There was always a queue at the climbing wall and the popcorn and fairy floss stalls. Luckily girl Cub-Scouts didn’t seem as attracted as boys to the dunking machine or the water slide. The end of the fine-weather day came about 3.30pm. All the Cub Scouts and leaders gathered together in a great circle for a traditional Grand Howl and then it was a case of “Home James!” - except with this chauffeur it was “Home Paul!”

Our Akela Jill surveys the Cub Scouts at the end of Cubilee 2009

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Current Music: Camel Race - Jerry Goldsmith

Marine turtle writings

I was recently sent a draft of an excellent research paper on the history of marine turtle exploitation in Western Australia. Exploitation meaning hunting, killing and butchering for commercial purposes. These graceful creatures were not always accorded the protection they are now. The paper was by Brooke Halkyard who has affiliations with the Wildlife Research Centre, Dept of Environment & Conservation.

I was pleased to see that my former effort, (Weaver P. 1998. An Oral History of Ningaloo Reef. Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia) was of some use to Brooke. Apart from collecting anecdotal data on marine exploitation I devised a focussed methodology specifically intended to assist future oral historians maintain a focussed approach. I’ve uploaded my original 1998 final report to my popular Scribd site with the title An Oral History of Ningaloo Reef - Weaver 1998.

Her working paper is titled Exploiting Green and Hawksbill Turtles in Western Australia. A Case Study of the Commercial Marine Turtle Fishery, 1869 – 1973 It’s now publicly available as WP 160 on Murdoch University’s Asia Research Centre website.

I was interested to read in her study that the Point Peron turtle soup factory slightly south of Fremantle was established as early as 1903. I recall my father pointing out the quite large wooden building when I was a boy in the early 1950s. It was very close to the shoreline, which is logical considering that the live turtles brought down from the north used to be kept in adjacent pens to await their awful fate.

The area has a diverse heritage of maritime exploitation. In the 1950s there used to be whale hunting vessels tied up at the nearby Palm Beach jetty. The Point Peron area was also used by Sicilian fishermen from the 1880s. Exactly how and when they arrived is uncertain because they are not mentioned in official immigration records. An Austrian registered ship Honor which called at nearby Rockingham to load timber in 1883 and 1885 is suspected of being their carrier. This ship also visited Spencer’s Gulf in South Australia on at least two occasions and is believed to have unlawfully landed Italian fishermen there. The push factor for these ‘boat people’ from the Mediterranean is thought to have been the collapse of the Sicilian tuna industry.

There was a comment on p16 of Brooke's paper that there was little public sentiment for the fate of turtles in the past, but obviously this attitude as changed. Like whales and dolphins, turtles have become anthropomorphised for many ppeople. I wonder if popular childrens’ literature such as by the Australian author leslie Rees played a role in reshaping post-WW2 public attitudes in Australia? For example his enormously popular 1947 work, The Story of Sarli; The Barrier Reef Turtle which was beautifully illustrated by Walter Cunningham. Many of the Rees books encouraged in their whimsical way a greater awareness amongst ‘baby boomer’ children of Australian fauna, and of course those children grew to be much more environmentally aware adults. Just a thought.

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Tonsillitis outbreak; and boating on the Mekong

We’ve now got two daughters suffering with tonsillitis. Both girls have twice been seen this week by our GP and are now on antibiotics. We’ve never had anyone in our family suffering from this illness before. Indeed Jill and I were unsure what tonsils were, or what they actually did. We’ve learned it’s not that dangly thing at the back of the throat which is called an uvula. Tonsils are ‘fleshy glands’ on either side of the throat just beyond the dangly thing. They are part of the lymphatic system which is supposed to respond to infections. Tonsillitis is when the tonsils themselves become infected and swell. This creates much unhappiness. Swallowing is difficult and painful. One of the main visible symptoms is that the tonsils show white blemishes or ‘spots’ on their surface. A penlight torch is useful for viewing them. We’ve noticed that the visibility of the spots can vary over a period of a few hours. They can fade then reappear. I've come to the conclusion that there's a lot of vague theories about this affliction.

In spite of her miserable condition this week our seventeen year old sat through two TEE exams - Environmental Science and English. Now she can relax until the next one in about two weeks. We are hoping she’ll be in top form by then.

We’ve had a brief communication from son number two who is touring in Vietnam. He was boating on the Mekong River yesterday. He’s enjoying the experience. “Better than Bali.” Here’s a photo I took while boating on the Mekong many years ago. I think it was late 1966. Blame my memory lapse on ‘the fog of war.‘ I was a passenger on an Australian Army amphibious cargo vessel traveling from Saigon to Vung Tau.

Australians boating on the Mekong - c1966

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Current Music: The Fog of War: 'Return from Vietnam' - Philip Glass

A vexed crisis of leadership for Mr Rudd?

I think Australia is seen by many outsiders as a land of milk and honey which offers quick and bountiful wealth by a variety of easy-street options. All one has to do is step ashore and the authorities will ensure that all newcomers are placed on the gravy train where in almost no time at all they will receive subsidised housing, free medical and dental care, free education and all the other advantages which those of us who live here tend to take for granted. Then in a few years when they are rich, they can choose to stay and sponsor the immigration of other family members, or alternatively return to their still impoverished countries of origin and become the new economic landlords over those less insightful wretches who stayed behind.

Currently there is a small armada of economic opportunists trying to reach Australia from Sri Lanka. The popularised term is ‘asylum seeker.’ Acquiring political asylum and refugee status in a developed nation with a generous track record is understandably highly desirable for them.

Reportedly they are paying people-traffickers large sums of money to make their clandestine passages. According to various media reports the fare may be between $5,000 and $14,000. The intrepid voyagers are mostly men and youths and although there are some women and children reported as well. They are apparently Hindu Tamils, which is the ethnic identity of the dissident peoples in Sri Lanka whom earlier this year finally lost a long and murderous civil war to the majority Buddhist Sinhalese. Both sides have had an unfortunate track record of intolerance, but one of the more despicable recent strategies of the Tamil Tigers was the use of suicide bombers.

Going by the BBC profile of the country there are estimated to be between 70,000 and 200,000 dissatisfied Tamil civilians in the recently pacified conflict zone. Possibly many of them would like to come to developed countries like Australia and reestablish? The Sri Lankan government might like it too. It seems reasonable to also suspect there may be more than a few Tamil war criminals on the run in many directions.

A few days ago there was a boatload of Tamils which foundered in the Indian Ocean west of Cocos Island. A few were rescued, however most perished. The difficult search for survivors ended yesterday.

A couple of weeks before that incident there was another boatload of 78 rescued near Indonesia by the Australian chartered customs and research vessel Oceanic Viking. Here’s a picture I took of the ship at Fremantle in March last year:

Oceanic Viking - Fremantle, March 2008

The rescued Tamils from a few weeks ago are still aboard the ship demanding they want to come to Australia rather than be landed in Indonesia. Reportedly suicide has been one of their repeated rhetorical threats if they don’t get their way. Apparently some of have also been to Indonesia previously as ‘refugees’ and the experience wasn’t as good as they hoped. Reporters from The West Australian newspaper can’t have endeared themselves to the authorities by throwing the Tamils a mobile phone from a small boat last week in order to get a scoop.

The Tamils have provided a vexed situation for the Australian Prime Minister Mr Rudd. Politically, he doesn’t want to be seen as being too tough. He was a strong critic of the former Howard government’s asylum seeker policies. However many citizens might argue that pragmatic caution is required when dealing with economic opportunists and fleeing dissidents, especially when violent threats become part of their gameplay to try to gain entry to Australia and access it’s increasingly overburdened social resources.

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Current Music: 'Refugee Status' - John Williams

TEE exams off to a rough start

This week marked the start of TEE exams for final year high school students. TEE stands for tertiary entrance exams, which are independently organised by the state government's Curriculum Council. They’ve long been the cause of dissatisfaction and this is is the last year they’ll be run. They are to be replaced by a system that takes greater consideration of a student’s long term schooling performance.

Our number two daughter has her first TEE exam scheduled for today - Environmental Science. It’s going to be touch and go whether she makes it because yesterday morning our GP determined she had tonsillitis. She’s been on penicillin and another antibiotic for the past 24 hours and been very miserable. The exam is this afternoon, so we are keeping our fingers crossed for her. She had her H1N1 swine flu injection last week, but the doctor didn’t think there was an association.

Fortunately it won’t be the end of the world if our daughter misses today’s exam. There is a system in place to accommodate ill students if they can produce a medical certificate. Previous school grades are taken into account to establish a mark and hers have been pretty good for that subject. In any case she already has an offer of a place in the TAFE draftsmanship course she wants to do next year. She was an A student at school in both Technical Graphics (drafting) and Graphics and Media Design. She’s a tenacious kid and and will front up to today’s science exam if it’s physically possible. She’s already awake and been perusing a stack of junk mail from the letterbox, so that’s a good sign. Here’s one of my favourite photos of her from 1993. She got a A-grade in mud-pie making.

Top mud-pie chef - 1993

Our youngest daughter has a throat infection too. We whizzed her in to see the GP yesterday afternoon. She hasn’t got tonsillitis so there’s no antibiotics her her. Just medicated cough lollies from the supermarket and throat gargles. Nevertheless, she’s still a bit unhappy this morning.

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Current Music: Nixon in China: 'Let us examine what you did' - John Adams

First Tuesday in November - a day to remember blogger Kareem Amer

It’s Melbourne Cup Day today. The horse race which has become synonymous with Emirates Airline Hostesses hovering in the camera background with perpetual Mona Lisa smiles welded into their faces. Emirates is owned by the modernist Government of Dubai which according to Wikipedia currently has a foreign debt of about US$100 billion. The airline has an annual turnover of about US$12 billion and has been the major sponsor of the Melbourne Cup for the past few years. It has always seemed ironic to me that an Islamic government sponsors an event where gambling and alcohol consumption is so much part of the action.

As usual there is a family sweepstakes being run in this house today. No-one actually contributes any money to the kitty, so the winner can only look forward to sharing something like a Mars Bar with the losers.

I was allowed to pull the names of three horses from the hat when it was passed around yesterday, Kibbutz, Leica Ding and Ista Kareem. I thought Leica Ding sounded like a veiled insult to Italians, but no one else seems to have noticed.

The last name is more interesting because ISTA is an acronym for the Internet Sacred Text Archive. It’s a collection of intercultural public domain texts dedicated to religious tolerance and scholarship. Kareem is the name of an Arab blogger Abdul Kareem Nabil Suleiman (aka Kareem Amer) who has been rotting in a squalid Egyptian jail for the past three years. His blogging crimes included criticism of the intolerance of Islam, and insulting the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak.

Blogger Abdul Kareem Nabil Suleiman (aka Kareem Amer)

In 2006 he was also expelled from the fundamentalist Al-Azhar University for calling it a university of terrorism which suppressed free thought. He chillingly describes how he escaped being murdered by religious zealots shortly after his expulsion in a 7 May 2006 blog-post titled ’The University of Terrorism… And An Exposed Security Connivance.’

There has been a lot of international support for Kareem since his conviction. Today is the 1,093rd day for the blogger behind bars. A couple of weeks ago his appeal was postponed yet again by an Egyptian court. This coming Friday there is to be ‘Free Kareem’ rallies in Bern, Switzerland and Washington DC.

There is a ’Free Kareem!’ website which has English translations of the offending words which earned him four years in an Egyptian slammer. If the collection of translations are a bit hard to find then click here.

There’s also a prison address for sending him letters of encouragement. The envelope has to have an Arabic translation to stand any chance of reaching him, but apparently he can read and write English.

It will be interesting to see if Ista Kareem wins the big race today today. I’m betting the Australian media will be concentrating on the usual trivia and completely miss the point about freedom of speech.

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Prison address for blogger Abdul Kareem Nabil Suleiman (aka Kareem Amer)

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