Wonderland

Posted on March 3, 2015 by mcrae3051

‘Wonderland’ is the name of Myrna’s latest art exhibition, held at Red Gallery in North Fitzroy with three other artists and opened very kindly by Helen Brack on the hot and muggy evening of 25th of February.

The hordes were in attendance, including other distinguished artists. And good looking hangers on.

Some were a bit cheesed off at having to put up with it all.

There are people who for various reasons couldn’t come. There are others, like us, who might like a record of the occasion and the works to turn back to from time to time. At present about a third of these chaps have found new owners, and we are assured they have gone to good homes.

Remember (and this is for you Baxter Holly with your febrile ways): a painting is not just for Christmas. It needs constant attention and affection. (I think that’s how that goes. Jess will be able to tell me.)

So, four larger works (all approximately 700 x 500mm) and six smaller studies (300 x 400mm) related to experiences in the Grampians mountains in western Victoria where we grew up; three of ‘Fish’ (again 300 x 400mm) favourites of the little girls and destined for their walls; and four abstracts (same size) to some degree influenced by 20 years of lessons from Helen Brack. All are acrylics.

The note attached to Myrna’s paintings (never a more difficult genre than that) said: ‘Famous for its strange rock formations and beautiful trees and flowers McRae has been inspired by the colours and dramatic forms. Through the paintings she has explored the unusual features and meanings of this environment – her own personal wonderland.’ She actually had a lot more to say about it all than that, but that’ll do for the time being.

Names and dates are below the paintings.

Country (Grampians Series, 2014)

Study for Life Cycle (Grampians Series, 2015)

Study for Country #1 (Grampians Series, 2014)

The Entry (Grampians Series, 2015)

Study for Country #2 (Grampians Series, 2014)

Waves (Grampians Series, 2015)

Watching (Grampians Series, 2015)

Study for Country #3 (Grampians Series, 2014)

Study for The Entry (Grampians Series, 2015)

Life Cycle (Grampians Series, 2015)

On the Road to Hamilton (Grampians Series, 2015) This didn’t get an airing. I hung on to it.

Fish #1 (2013)

Fish #2 (2013)

Fish #3 (2013) (in real life better focused)

Conflagration (2013)

Leaning (2013)

Connection (2013)

Equilibrium (2013)

Denying Climate Change #2: Battles in the War

Posted on February 5, 2015 by mcrae3051

There have been some seminal moments in the climate debate where the issues, and attitudes (and tactics) have come to a head and made themselves very clear. Three occasions when the lid has come off and the contents boiled over.

The Hockey Stick

1988. It was a drought in the US and the Senate’s investigation of it that brought public attention to James Hansen’s views that ‘the abnormally hot weather plaguing our nation’ was due to global warming. James Hansen (at right) being at the time head of the NASA Godard Institute for Space Studies, one of the three primary global sources of aggregated climate data (‘GISS’ in the documentation).

That same year, Margaret Thatcher became a vocal advocate for concern about anthropogenic (human made) climate change. It was convenient — she bent her shoulder to this task at around the time she was closing coal mines in the north of England and promoting the virtues of nuclear energy. She was also, of course, a scientist (chemistry) by training. Prince Charles supported her views but, in a very different political environment, her friend Ronald Reagan did not.

Reagan’s administration, worried about the influence and impact of politically unfettered scientists speaking out about climate change, successfully lobbied for the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide reports subject to detailed scrutiny and approval from government delegations before publication.

As such matters go, this all happened fast. The IPCC, set up by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, was created later in 1988. Its formal purpose was to prepare assessments on all aspects of climate change and its impacts, with a view to formulating realistic response strategies. (Although what Roy Spencer thinks is: ‘Unquestionably, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed to build the scientific case for humanity being the primary cause of global warming.’)

Its first summaries were comparatively uncontroversial: human influence was suggested as being only as likely as natural variability to be causing climate change. But by the late 1990s a number of teams of climatologists were producing findings that recent warming was indeed exceptional and suspicion increased that the source of this was anthropogenic.

In 1998, Michael Mann (at left), Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes published a paper subjecting paleoclimatological data (from sources such as lake sediments, coral and ice cores, in this case bristlecone tree rings) to new methods of statistical analysis which they had developed to show variation in the patterns of global surface temperature in the northern hemisphere going back 600 years.

For a scientific paper it drew considerable publicity. The New York Times highlighted its finding that the 20th had been the warmest century in these 600 years. However these proxy data are inherently imprecise. Mann said so himself. ‘We do have large error bars. They become more sizable as one gets farther back in time… . There is still quite a bit of work to be done in reducing these uncertainties.’ But nonetheless the Times quoted Mann as saying: ‘Our conclusion is that the warming of the past few decades appears to be closely tied to emission of greenhouse gases by humans and not any of the natural factors’.

A further paper published in 1999 went back a further 400 years subjecting additional data to the same statistical techniques with the same results.

The Third IPCC Report gave considerable prominence to the group’s findings and the summary graph which encapsulated them. The Report was in fact launched in front of the graph as a massive background image as well as featuring it on the cover. It looked like a hockey stick. For 950 years the trend line was more or less flat then whoosh, up with a rush.

Why did it matter? If it was unusual, if it was as big as claimed, if it was happening now and if, as claimed, it seemed increasingly likely to be the product of greenhouse gases produced by human activity, it provided evidence of what some scientists had been suggesting for some time — evidence, and an image. Without these data, the heart might get chopped out of the argument.

Since 1965 there had been references in scientific and historical literature to a period called the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ lasting from about AD 950–1300. A much cooler period termed the Little Ice Age is believed to have followed. The existence of these ‘anomalies’ was noted in the first progress report of the IPCC in 1990.

In fact the two graphs looked like this. You will note in the graph on the left hand side that average temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period are above those presently being experienced.

But the first hockey stick sidelined the Medieval Warm Period. It illustrated just one big kick-up commencing in the mid 20^th century.

The hockey stick was an easy focus for media coverage, and immediately became a focal point for both sides of the debate.

Astrophysicists Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunus were two of the earliest respondents to these papers claiming that the methodology was flawed, that other data made it clear that warming had ended early in the C20th and that the Medieval Warm Period which provided evidence for alternative views had been ignored. Any contemporary variations would be the result of solar activity.

Members of the US government bought in. A Senate hearing chaired by John McCain was held in 2000 to discuss the report Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change which had been released in June for public comment. Witnesses at the hearing included Fred Singer, whose statement cited the Oregon Petition as evidence of the mainstream nature of his views. He said there had probably been no global warming since the 1940s. ‘Satellite data show no appreciable warming of the global atmosphere since 1979. In fact, if one ignores the unusual El Nino year of 1998, one sees a cooling trend.’ From this, he concluded that, ‘The post-1980 global warming trend from surface thermometers is not credible. The absence of such warming would do away with the widely touted “hockey stick” graph.’

Pat Michaels (contrarian? denier?) emerged as one of the leaders of the anti-Mann/hockey stick movement through his blog World Climate Report. Keith Briffa and Phil Jones from the East Anglia Climate Institute (UK) separately published papers coming to the same conclusions as Mann et al despite using different methods. The battle lines were forming.

The Bush administration’s Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff Philip Cooney, a lawyer who had formerly been a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, edited the first draft of the Environmental Protection Agency Report on the Environment removing all references to reconstructions showing world temperatures rising over the last 1,000 years, and inserted a reference instead to Soon & Baliunas’s papers. It was in this context that Senator James Inhofe made his ‘manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated’ contribution.

Stephen McIntyre (left), a Canadian with a background in mining, appears. He believed he had the skills to audit what Mann and Co had done, and asked for and received the base data. With the help of Ross McKitrick (at right), an economist, a critique of the hockey stick paper was published six months later. ‘The hockey stick shape’, they said, ‘was primarily an artefact of poor data handling and use of obsolete proxy records.’ The Cooler Heads Coalition (a collaboration of most of the major climate change denying organisations) made hay with the paper.

Late in 2004 Mann and nine other scientists including Gavin Schmidt another Director of NASA’s Godard Institute, set up the blog RealClimate ‘a resource where the public can go to see what actual scientists working in the field have to say about the latest issues’. Early in 2005 McIntyre set up the competition, the blog Climate Audit.

If you read recent postings you’ll catch the flavour: Schmidt saying they need some new blood after ten years; McIntyre running through issues of his current court case v. Mann.

These two blogs will take you to most of the more sane tastemakers in the climate debate. If you want a dose you can try the Climate Sceptics Party, JoNova or Watt’s up with that. They are mesmerizing in their intensity. (Andrew Bolt sometimes writes about other things. These folk don’t.)

But if you want to find a source for all the fury, the hockey stick could be it.

In 2005 Congressman Joe Barton, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce demanded that the IPCC and the three authors of the ‘hockey stick’ papers provide full records of their work. The scientists were asked to provide not just data and methods, but also personal information about their finances and careers, information about grants provided to the institutions they had worked for, and the exact computer codes used to generate their results. Amid an outcry focusing on charges of bullying and harassment, the scientists complied. But the controversy has continued.

The blog of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a ‘free-market think tank’, opens an article on Mann with the line: ‘Penn State has covered up wrongdoing by one of its employees to avoid bad publicity.’ It initially included the line: ‘Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky [a convicted child molester] of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.’

This is not atypical of the nature of debate. In this recent case Mann chose to sue. He has by now had plenty of practice in political contestation.

Political scrutiny of climate science funding has continued. In fact a consistent denialist theme, rarely stated so gloriously as this quote, is: ‘The true solution to “man made global warming” is to stop the self-perpetuating funding of the people employed to study it.’

Some of the detail of this debate is dealt with in the next blog••• in this series. But it might be noted that even at the time of its initial publication, the hockey stick pattern was largely confirmed by four other independent studies and has subsequently been replicated by more than 20 different modeling processes using the same, similar and different data. Seven of them are contained in this graph.It might also be noted that contradictory versions, grounded in science and otherwise, are a bob a dozen. This is the deniers’ preferred version.

An Inconvenient Truth: ‘Ok kids I’m going to show you a film. But just before I do …’

(Graphic: Conservapedia)

Al Gore’s talk and slide show was turned into a film released in 2006 and seen by many millions of people. But not by then US President George W. Bush, who when asked whether he would watch the film, responded: ‘Doubt it.’ Senator Inhofe didn’t plan to see the film (in which he appears) either, comparing it to Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf. ‘If you say the same lie over and over again, and particularly if you have the media’s support, people will believe it.’ (Godwin’s Law has proved a popular move in climate change debate. Dr Tim Ball’s contribution can be read here for example.)

The film — which featured the hockey stick mentioned above in such a way that Gore was required to use a platform lift to get to its upper limits — was intended to make a splash/cause a heatwave, and it did.

As it gathered popular momentum some politicians took steps for it to be available for school programs.

However, in the US 50,000 free copies were offered to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) which declined to take them. In correspondence the NSTA explained that the DVDs would place ‘unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA’s] capital campaign, especially with certain targeted supporters’, and that it saw ‘little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members’ in accepting the free DVDs. Different distribution mechanisms were offered via advertising space in the NSTA magazine and newsletter but publicity via paid advertising didn’t quite seem to be the point to those making the offer. Discussing this issue, the ‘Washington Post’ noted that in the previous decade the NSTA had received $6 million from Exxon Mobil, which also had a representative on the NSTA board.

In the UK, as part of a nationwide ‘Sustainable Schools Year of Action’ launched in late 2006, the British Government, Welsh Assembly Government and Scottish Executive announced that copies of An Inconvenient Truth would be sent to all secondary schools in the UK. Study of the film was included in the science curriculum for all fourth and sixth-year students in Scotland.

Early in 2007, Stewart Dimmock (at left, and I’m sorry about the photos but that’s what’s available), a school governor from Kent mounted a legal challenge with the at the time undisclosed assistance of Christopher Monckton (below), arguing that schools are legally forbidden to promote partisan political views and, when dealing with political issues, are required to provide a balanced presentation of opposing views.

In his judgment, Mr Justice Burton, stated that the requirement for a balanced presentation did not require that equal weight be given to alternatives to a mainstream view, and ruled that it was clear that the film was substantially founded upon scientific research but was being used to make a political statement and to support a political program. He went on to rule that it contained nine scientific errors which can be read here.

Make up your own mind. There may well be an issue with hyperbole and wavering relevance. But nine among hundreds ….

The judge made a requirement that these errors must be explained before the film was shown to school children. [Imagine. ‘Hey kids …’] Failure to do so would be a violation of education laws.

The government acted on this ruling. Dimmock complained that ‘no amount of turgid guidance’ could change his view that the film was unsuitable for the classroom. Monckton remains an active campaigner against IPCC views.

‘Climategate’

The Copenhagen Summit of 2009 is a matter of particular interest to Australians because it was when the Government of the time appeared to give up on ‘the greatest moral challenge of our time’ — also known as Rudd’s meltdown. (A sidelight: Edward Snowden’s monster leak of 2014 revealed that the US and Chinese government negotiators had both been spying on other conference delegations at the Summit and formulated their tactics accordingly.)

‘Climategate’ provided some additional flavour to the proceedings. What happened? You may remember.

Several weeks before the Summit, servers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, one of the world’s three main climatic data collection and management points, were hacked and more than 1000 emails and 2000 computer files were copied to various locations on the Internet.

Emails exchanged by Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, Keith Briffa, the tree ring expert, Tim Osborn, a climate modeller at CRU and Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research were the particular targets. These four had all contributed in various ways to IPCC reports.

At the time, a short comment appeared on Stephen McIntyre’s Climate Audit website saying that “A miracle has happened’. Very shortly after excerpts from the material began appearing on climate change skeptic websites and blogs before finding their way into the mainstream media.

The two most publicised quotes are these.

Jones to Michael Mann, Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes: ‘I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.’ [Nature is a scientific journal]

Kevin Trenberth to Mann: ‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t’.

Andrew Bolt’s commentary is reasonably representative of the climate change skeptics’ characterisation of the situation.

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory — a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below — emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

His updates are here.

But a better sense of how they were treated by groups of skeptics can be found in a book called The Climategate Emails (2010) edited and annotated by John Costella and published by the Lavoisier Society. Mining magnate Hugh Morgan wrote the introduction in which he asserts, inter alia:

The Climategate emails demonstrate that these people had no regard for the traditions and assumptions which had developed over centuries and which provided the foundations of Western science. At the very core of this tradition is respect for truth and honesty in reporting data and results; and a recognition that all the data, and all the steps required to reach a result, had to be available to the scientific world at large.

There are two issues which now have to be addressed. The first is the damage which has been done to the standing of science as an intellectual discipline on which our civilisation depends. The second is the status of the IPCC, since that institution is the source of scientific authority on which prime ministers and other political leaders rely to legitimise their statements about global warming.

A portion of a very long response from the US Science and Public Policy Institute (otherwise known as Bob Ferguson with some help from Christopher Monckton and Willie Soon):

Let the climate criminals stand trial, and let them be fined for offenses under the Freedom of Information laws, and let them be imprisoned for their fraudulent tampering with scientific data, and for their suppression of results uncongenial to their politicized viewpoint, and for the sheer venom with which they have publicly as well as privately denigrated all those scientists with whom they disagreed, and for the insouciance with which they interfered with editors of scientific journals and with the process of the UN’s climate panel itself.

Death threats were made against Phil Jones and two of the other scientists. This is not a small matter.

No fewer than seven investigations resulted: the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee; the UK’s Science Assessment Panel; Pennsylvania State University, Michael Mann’s employer; the University of East Anglia; the US Environmental Protection Agency which was consequently petitioned by government agencies, business and industry groups and activists to overturn new regulations related to greenhouse gas because they were based on corrupt science; the US Department of Commerce to investigate whether the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, the third of the key collectors) had been fudging data; and the National Science Foundation to see if Michael Mann had been behaving unprofessionally.

No evidence of professional or scientific misconduct was found in any of these investigations. The two excerpts quoted above are in context quite benign, when explained more so.

Nonetheless, writing in ‘Newsweek’ about the issue, Sharon Begley noted: ‘One of the strongest, most-repeated findings in the psychology of belief is that once people have been told X, especially if X is shocking, if they are later told, ‘No, we were wrong about X,’ most people still believe X.’

In 2011 a second set of 5000 emails apparently from the first hacking was released just before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban. It didn’t have much impact.

The emails certainly reveal informal chatter that few professionals would necessarily have wanted to become public. They’re men (and yes they are mostly men. Judith Curry is the one of the few science women in this argument and she moves from side to side of the fence) in a hurry with a strong sense of embattlement trying to give form to a monster that they have touched and believe in, but whose shape won’t quite make itself known.

There is no bomb to explode to prove unassailably that you can split the atom, and the major end product, the outcome of your work, is something as problematic as persuading others of the legitimacy, and over time the urgency, of your findings.

So what’s true?

Denying Climate Change #1

Posted on February 1, 2015 by mcrae3051

‘Climate change is absolute crap.’ — The Hon. A. Abbott, at the time of writing Australia’s Prime Minister, Liberal Party function, Beaufort, Victoria, 2009

Lake Catani, Mount Buffalo, 1920. Skating on two foot of ice, an annual pleasure often lasting for as long as four months. Still happening in the early ’50s.

Lake Catani, a few months ago in high winter. It’s hard to see but it’s not ice at the edges; it’s reed and sedge. I don’t know when the last time it froze was but it’s a long time ago.

Cresta Valley, same glorious mountain mid-winter, the site of Australia’s first ski tow and the first place I ever saw snow. When I was there 40 years ago there was heavy snow just as there was almost every winter, enough to support six ski runs. Percy Weston who lived on or near the mountain for more than 70 years is quoted in a history of Mount Buff saying: ‘In my boyhood days winters were always 10-12 degrees Fahrenheit colder than they are today.’ Every Antarctic depression brought a mantle of snow that grew to a depth of about five feet and lasted well into Spring.

If you’re reading this in July or August you can see just how much snow there is on Mt Buff right now by clicking here.

The lodge that serviced these runs burnt down, some say for the insurance when the snow went bad but actually during one of the many bushfires, the exceptional number of bushfires, that have run across this high plateau in the last 30 years.

Mount Buff may see five feet of snow again, but if it does it will be in weird and troubling circumstances.

When we go walking we often see changes like this over time. They might be temporary or cyclic. Or they might be something else.

[A salutary deviation. When preparing this I was looking through what Dr Google had to offer and found a link titled ‘Heavy rain melts Mt Buffalo’s record breaking snow’, an ABC report from 2011, which would have put a bit of a hole in my story. But in fact the text indicates it should have read ‘Record breaking rain melts Mt Buffalo’s snow’. I checked the date and can confirm that 180mm of rain in 16 hours is quite a lot. We happened to be there on the day, romping across to the back wall. But if I hadn’t read past the headline I would have ended up somewhere very different. Often people don’t read past headlines.]

••••••

On ‘Lateline’ some months ago Emma Alberici interviewed Maurice Newman, an intimate of the Australian Prime Minister’s and Head of his Business Advisory Council. In this country a powerful powerful man. After not much more than a minute he’s saying: ‘Science is whatever the science is and the fact remains there is no empirical evidence to show that man-made CO₂, man-made emissions are adding to the temperature on earth.… When you look at the last 17.5 years where we’ve had a multitude of climate models, and this was the basis on which this whole so-called ‘science’ rests, it’s on models, computer models. And those models have been shown to be 98 percent inaccurate.’

‘By?’ Emma asks. ‘Roy Spencer’ is the instant and sure reply.

Roy Spencer, I thought. Roy Spencer. Wow. He’s the guy. He’s the one who knows. There are things I need to investigate here.

••••••

Before we chase down Roy let me come clean about my own position.

1) I strongly suspect the climate is changing. And not the weather, the climate. They’re two different things.

I’ve offered an example above of why. But today it’s the 1 February and should be insufferably hot. It is actually 17.9C, which it has been more or less since the Bureau of Meteorology published its findings that last year produced record heat. Anecdotes, personal observations, true enough to that extent, to that context, to that moment — but ungeneralised, unscientific.

That said, science doesn’t begin in the lab or with satellite instrumentation. Science begins with human observation and hypotheses, hunches in all their frailty. The rather unusual job of science is to test such observations and thoughtful guesses; to go with the data, and to say, not just yes or no, but this is how to understand it, and it’s a bit like this, and these are the things we still don’t know. Be careful of certainties.

That’s what we have experts for, and while I am not in awe of expertise I certainly respect it.

2) The second thing I think is that the activity of human beings is causing the change (‘anthropogenic warming’).

There is one ‘hockey stick’ that even Andrew Bolt can’t argue about and that’s this one.Sorry the graph is so small. Human population, earth, 10,000BC – 2000AD. Was less than 100,000 and in 2005, off this scale — 9 billion. A new study suggests that instead of plateauing as previously assumed the world’s population might be 11 billion by 2100. If so Nigeria will probably have a population of 900 million. You cannot alter an element in an ecosystem so significantly without anticipating other changes.

The information in this graph reinforces these presentiments. And I’ve tasted and waded through Beijing’s air.

Among all the argument there does seem to be universal agreement that coal-fired power plants contribute to the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere, and if consumption is growing at this pace, then I fear 1+1=2.

3) I am certain that the climate and its influences are part of a larger platform of environmental stewardship, and am quite sure that climate change has pushed matters like resource depletion, air pollution, ocean acidification and pollution, soil degradation, and destruction of above and below ground clean water systems under the public carpet. I think the next huge war is more likely to be fought over water than oil.

A good example of this displacement are the ‘errors’ the English judge found in Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. (See the next blog.)

It might or might not be climate change that has caused Lake Chad to be less than one-third the size it was 50 years ago. Other reasons may be population increase, over-grazing and overuse for irrigation. Phew, what a relief!

Similarly, it might be the diversion of most of its inflowing sources by Soviet Russians that has destroyed the Aral Sea (at right. You can see its former outline) rather than climate change. But is that enough to cheer us up? Not really.

It’s all hooked up, and not in ways we can necessarily understand.

I believe in careful stewardship of the environment, or we’ll cop it. And I came to writing this thinking we’ll probably cop it and perhaps before climate change really kicks in.

My confession: In daily life I mostly take public transport and walk; but we own a car. I turn lights off when they are not being used, but we’re hooked into the grid which means we are using brown coal-generated electricity. I bucket water out of the bath when there is a bath, but I otherwise water our plants from the tap. We recycle and take our vegetable waste out to where it might be composted. I wouldn’t mind doing more, but I don’t.

I recognize that these actions are negligible and more because of habit or for my state of mind than the environment. I recognise the contradictions present in our use of air travel and consumption of food that has been grown far from where we live. I think the requisite change will require large-scale decisions which will impact on me and everyone else. I anticipate they must reduce the ‘quality’ of material life. But the option of doing nothing is likely to produce far worse results. I am very concerned about what sort of shape the environment our grandchildren inherit will be in.

•••••••••

‘With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.’ — Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican, Chairman of the US Environment and Public Works Committee 28/7/03)

But what’s made people so angry, so divided in their views?

This question might be wrongly framed. Of course we’re going to worry. As J.K. Galbraith wrote in The Great Crash, 1929: ‘People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than to surrender any material part of their advantage’. (He did also note in The Affluent Society: ‘Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.’) Without any doubt at all, we’re people of privilege.

But so angry. And so snarky …

The “climate change” crowd want money and power. There are hundreds of billions up for grabs IF you spout the party line. Power, there are many would be global autocrats among us just looking for a cause. Always have been, always will be. We must reject them. The ordinary true believer is a dupe, and will go to great lengths to avoid facing the fact that they’ve been duped. (Peter Osborne, somewhat typically discussing Dr Tim Ball’s blogpost that we need to go to Hitler’s Mein Kampf to understand IPCC processes. An excerpt: ‘The entire climate change industry is based on fiction. Specifically, the notion that the planet is doomed unless capitalism is paralysed. This myth is gradually being exposed, leading to long-awaited cuts in government support.’)

You can get a big fat read of that sort of thing here.

And so, I don’t know, disturbing?

I’m amazed at the lack of common sense in our world today. If people would just use their brains rather than believe the Man-made Global Warming hype, they’d realize, so clearly, what a farce it is. Even before I watched your documentary [‘Not Evil just Wrong’] (which was great), I didn’t believe in Man-made GW…why? Well again, from a common sense perspective, if it’s true that man and all of our industry causes this, how do they explain the warming during Medieval time??? I’m not sure, but I don’t think they had factories, cars, etc. Or, I’ve often been perplexed by the fact that what we exhale and what plant-life on earth needs to survive is somehow a pollutant. And if Geologists have proven that historically rises in CO2 occur ‘after’ warming periods of our earth’s history…well…then their theories are pretty much bunked. But for me, a picture speaks a thousand words. If anyone looks at the depictions of what a ‘trillion’ looks like, they’d be horrified at what our governments are doing. But applying that…I read that only 29% of our planet is land, and of that, less than 1% of the 29% is actually inhabited by man. And of that…how much is actually industrialized? I just don’t see how we, being a teeny speck on this planet, can possibly cause any Global events. It just seems silly!— Michelle

This almost reads like a plant from an organisation like the Heartland Institute. Covering all the touch sensitive issues in a little girl ‘don’t be so silly, use your common sense’ voice, it’s just a bit too carefully constructed. Am I dreaming or can I see a 35 year-old copy writer grinning away in the background like a Cheshire cat?

And, even if well-intentioned, so seemingly off the beam …

The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. … We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution.

This is The Oregon Petition, apparently signed by more than 30,000 people even if they did include Geri Halliwell, Daffy Duck, Charles Darwin, Chewbacca and I.C.Ewe. But it is claimed 9000 people with Ph.Ds were among them, it was sponsored by scientists and it certainly was accompanied by a letter of endorsement from Frederick Seitz, former president of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Then there’s the nut jobs on the other side like Pentti Likola (at left), an enthusiast for the consequences at least of the Nazi holocaust because of its impact on population growth.

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the hands that cling to the sides.

In which process he will be assisted by members of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement who believe their goals might be achieved by: voluntarily abstaining from reproduction; not using medicine and eating less and less until death occurs; and using science and technology to evolve/devolve into non-sapient photosynthesizing organisms that consume the same amount of energy as they produce. I don’t know how many ‘Hard Green’ followers there are, but there are some. Years ago I was part of a group that turned down a subject to be offered at Years 11 and 12 called ‘Deep Ecology’ which promoted views like this, ‘biocentrism’ I think was its grand theme.

It’s not an issue for everyone. A 2007–2008 Gallup Poll surveyed people in 128 countries asking whether respondents knew of global warming and, for those who were aware of the issue, whether or not they thought it was human-induced. Over a third of the world’s population were unaware of global warming, with developing countries less aware than developed, and Africa the least aware. Of those aware, residents of Latin America and developed countries in Asia were most certain that climate change was a result of human activity. People who lived in Africa, parts of Asia, the Middle East, and a few countries from the former Soviet Union were most sceptical. Opinion in the United States was almost exactly evenly divided. A subsequent poll in 2014 found that that 51 percent of Americans were only a little or not at all worried about climate change, and 49 percent a great deal or a fair amount.

There’s a lot of people whose daily lives provide more urgent matters for attention. A WHO estimate of risk factors in High Mortality Developing Countries (HMDCs), for example — although it aimed to highlight the problem of climate change — discovered that climate change is only one-third of the risk factor of being overweight in an HMDC. ‘Physical inactivity’ and ‘iron deficiency’ both currently kill more than four times as many people as events attributed to climate change. The four biggest threats for people in HMDCs are being underweight, unprotected sex, high blood pressure, and lacking access to clean water and sanitation. These risk factors are respectively 24, 18, 14 and 11 times greater than mortality caused by climate change factors. At the moment. And that’s another important way of inhaling all this.

Finally, as a public issue climate change has gone off the boil. I remember in 1986 having to cull references to climate change out of Year 11 and 12 subjects in the new Victorian Certificate of Education. Just over 90 percent of all the new Year 11 and 12 subjects included climate change as an item of study in their early drafts. It seemed it had to be there. And I remember 20 years ago when heavy duty commercial Channel 9 ran a don’t-miss one-hour special hosted by Ray Martin about environmental issues which garnered a huge and uncompromised audience. This was typical; it seemed the duty of news outlets to promote awareness of the issues. Was this perhaps too successful, enough to mobilise an opposition?

According to a 2012 poll by the Pew Research Center, the proportion of Americans who believe that the earth is warming has declined by 10 percentage points in the past decade. Those who rate it as major issue has declined by 20 percentage points during the same period.

Paradoxically, by their negative stance, it is quite likely that in this country Tony Abbott and Greg Hunt have done more to enliven debate and raise awareness about climate change than any of their predecessors.

There’s a lot to be learnt from these reactions — things about the nature of popular discussion, things about the times, things about social and public media, things about politics, things about the role of experts (can I even write expert without inverted commas?), things about education, and especially things about the nature of knowledge and of science which are deeply disconcerting.

That’s mostly what this series of blogs is supposed to be about.

••••••

And Roy Spencer? He’s a serious climate scientist who believes that global warming is a reality, but naturally engendered.

From An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming which he co-authored: “We believe Earth and its ecosystems – created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence – are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory.”

If you wish you can buy his most recent book here.

•••••••

This isn’t going to be one-way traffic. In fact serious complications will emerge, but to further add to the scenery we are going to look at some events from which controversies emerged.

Wentworth Street

Posted on January 21, 2015 by mcrae3051

Port Kembla. Kembla meaning ‘plenty of wild fowl’ but to all contemporary intents and purposes — Steel City. Also Iron City, Copper City, Coal City, Heavy Industry City and, like all such places, subject to fluctuation.

In the early 1980s the various arms of BHP employed nearly 30,000 people in Port Kembla. That figure is now a little above 3,000. Business pages talk: ‘an oversupply of steel, overseas competition, a stubbornly high dollar and muted domestic demand from the construction sector have again brought steel to its knees.’

Until 20 February last year it was also home to Australia’s highest chimney stack, 198 metres. Impressive or what? Unwind half an athletics track, stick it up in the air and blow industrial waste out if it. Port Kembla Primary School was once located next door but was closed down due to pollution problems including lead-contaminated soil, acid rain and soot. But that’s all. A warning alarm was fitted to warn of high toxin levels. I’m not sure if the kids were sent home or just instructed not to breathe when it went off.

In 2008, an inspection confirmed that the stack had concrete cancer. Demolition was planned for 2010 at a cost of A$10 million. Correct. $10 million. A team of 30 people working on it for 20 months with nine NSW government agencies involved. Taken collectively those factors would slow things down, but there were also asbestos concerns.

Clearly the stack added a certain landmark frisson to Port. The Gong (the city of Wollongong) 10 k.s north and much bigger had nothing like this.

The stack did come down 12 months ago. The Illawarra Mercury had an 8-page commemorative wrap with a live blog. It was a major story in the Canberra Times. Thousands turned out to watch. Many of them would have been sad. The demolition would have left big hole in the landscape.I guess this is relevant. When I was chatting to Julie Howard (at left) about Port Kembla the stack and its fate came up very early in the conversation.

But this is not about the stack. It is about Wentworth St, Kembla’s main artery.

A couple of months ago I was due to make a visit to Illawarra Sports High not far away in Berkeley, had an hour to kill and needed a cup of coffee. I turned down Five Islands Road and took the funny little Darcy St dogleg to get me into Wentworth Street, drove down the hill, up the other side, did a U-turn and drove back again. I bought a paper and was directed to the Enigma Coffee Emporium where I met Julie and her excellent coffee and very fine home made cake.

I drank in as much of where I was as I could, because I wasn’t sure just where that was. And then I came back, twice, because I thought I needed to.

There was the architecture. Let’s call it NSW Deco, certainly with a strong ’40s and ’50s flavour but individual in a Dave Warner (at left and right) sort of way, a not-to-be-denied individuality, coupled with a little bit of ‘theoretically I don’t speak Hindi’ kind of individuality.

And there were the shops. More than half of them are empty. It is a ghost town in the middle of a conurbation.

I am moved by dying towns and we’ve seen lot of them. They are often the beginning of walks. Timber, mining, tourism — they are all likely to be near somewhere naturally beautiful or interesting, and they are all likely to be going up or down. Although I am very anxious in an empty shop, I like the patina of decay. I like thinking about who has been there and what they’ve been doing, the detail of social trajectories.

In that light I wondered what Wentworth Street had been like as a bustling shopping strip, if it had ever bustled because there wasn’t much bustling going on there now.

At left and below are glimpses of how it began, and what it became.

We found the Westfield’s mall — with more than 56,000 m2 of retail space (yes!!! punches air) — at Warrawong a kilometre away when we went to see Penguins of Madagascar. Film and mall were well suited. Both require 8 litres of coke and a cubic metre of pop corn for digestion.

The Warrawong Mall is one of the beasts that have killed Wentworth Street. And yet, and yet …

Let’s see a bit of what the street looks like now. The formidable houses are at ends of the main drag.

The lads have left their mark on some of the decoration.

But art springs up elsewhere.

The International Billy Cart Derby celebrated above, began in 1941, collapsed in the 1980s and recommenced in 2012.

Is this so very different from the Rosalie Gascoigne below?

It is art, decay as art as well as art in decay. But it might also be art growing out of decay — the vacant buildings, the cheap rents, the congenial company — that revitalises Wentworth Street.

Both hills are showing signs of life. Besides a whopping bottle shop, the eastern end is growing a cluster of bric a brac and antique shops, and a bakery with fabulous smells. Amanda Johnson (at left) collects and sells vintage material and makes it up into wonderfully inventive bits and pieces. Dulcie Dal Molin is president of the Red Point Artists Association based in a Wentworth Street property and organises the Billycart Derby. The Illawarra Mercury quotes her: ‘Since the first revived race in 2012, Wentworth Street now has boutique wedding shops and an arts precinct.’

So hooray.

The other hill is dominated by the pub but there’s a chemist, hairdresser’s, newsagent, gift shop, more wedding stuff, flowers, party hire. Kevin Crane (looking fabulous at left) from Broken Glass hairdressers has won awards.

It all just might work. The Wollongong City Council, which has just spent a small fortune on duding up its own mall, commissioned a town planning study about what to do with Wentworth St. It was published in 2007 and the recommendations were pallid, and cheap: work on the main street entrances, emphasis on pedestrians (there’s no one else there chaps), new street furniture and signage.

But, seriously, would you get town planners to sort out something like this? You’d have to agree for start about what the result was going to be.

I left with a sense that it might be women who make Wentworth Street into a home for more than their working sisters. Maybe that’s part of the regrowth phase. Low key projects, low financial investment, moderate to high emotional investment, modest ambitions.

I’ve got to say I like it the way it is right now, but a) I’m a blow-in and b) I’m not trying to make a living there.

But when it’s gone, it’s not going to be anywhere else.

Chuck Close at the MCA

Posted on January 20, 2015 by mcrae3051

This is Bob where I first saw him in 1982, in the Australian National Gallery. It was an early acquisition and at nearly 3 metres high and 2.14 wide competed with Anselm Keifer’s ‘Twilight of the West’ for dominance of the space where they were displayed. Probably like most people I thought, hmm big photo, quality print, caught a moment and, probably like most people, was a bit shocked to discover it was a canvas covered with acrylic paint. However close you stood it was hard to be convinced. Photorealism realised.

Chuck Close was the artist.

I began to follow his career which has at least two unusual aspects. The first was that Chuck has prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, a cognitive disorder where the ability to recognize faces is impaired while other aspects of visual processing and intellectual function remain intact. It can be acquired or congenital and may affect up to 2.5% of the population. The specific brain area usually associated with prosopagnosia is the fusiform gyrus which activates specifically in response to faces allowing the recognition of faces in more detail than other similarly complex objects. Rather thrilling in itself. To date, no therapies have demonstrated a capacity to remediate the condition. Prosopagnosics often learn to use ‘feature-by-feature’ recognition strategies involving secondary clues such as clothing, gait, hair color, body shape or voice. Because the face seems to function as an important identifying feature in memory, it can also be difficult for people with this condition to keep track of information about people, and socialise normally with others. Who else has prosopagnosia? Friend to primates Jane Goodall; French actor Thierry Lhermitte (at left) whose face you might recognise if not his name; possibly accounting for his very wide range of wives and mistresses playwright Sir Tom Stoppard (né Tomáš Straussler, who knew); Dr Karl of Triple J and splendid shirts fame; Oliver Sacks who despite writing case studies of prosopagnosia didn’t realise until recently he had it himself.

There is a major exhibition of Close’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney at present, and Myrna didn’t like it much. One of her reasons was that there were too many self portraits, and yes there were a great many, but maybe it’s a manifestation of his prosopagnosia. Close himself has said: ‘I have difficulty recognizing faces. That occurred to me twenty years after the fact when I looked at why I was still painting portraits, why that still had urgency for me.’ A need to establish your own physical identity?

Perhaps paradoxically, Bob the subject (Robert Israel) has said: ‘I had wanted Chuck to ask me to pose for him, but I really didn’t feel it was proper for me to ask. Chuck’s decision of who he would paint had to do not only with whether you were a friend, but with the topology of your face.’ What’s he seeing there? Close tells his own story about Bob. ‘I had taken a break and was walking back into the studio. Looking at the painting, I realised that a highlight in one of the eyes was too bright. And I said, “Damn it, now I’m going to have to take his glasses off”. But when I realised what I had said, I pivoted on my heel and walked out leaving the lights on, the compressor on and the airbrushes full of paint. When you start believing in your own illusion, you’re in serious trouble.’ Clearly his relationship with his work is complex. Is this another version of the idea of art, high art, fine art, being a product of dysfunctionality? And this is Chuck. (It’s a photo that I took of the desktop of the computer at the entry counter.) He’s in his wheelchair. In December 1988, Close suffered a seizure which left him paralyzed from the neck down. A spinal artery had collapsed. He’s worked hard to get some mobility back and for some time he has been able to paint by strapping paint brushes to his arms and moving them — the second remarkable aspect of his career. So, rather than the very fine work with spray painter, airbrush and so on, his gestures have become larger and his media more wide-ranging. Again, art influenced and modified by infirmity. At left is a detail from the self-portrait on the right. What brilliant colour management.

Another reason Myrna didn’t like the show was its focus on the technical aspects of the work. She had been warned. It was called ‘Prints, process and collaboration’ and it was one of the reasons I enjoyed it.

It was a display of North American can-do technological skill and willingness to experiment in collaboration with master craftspeople. I like that. He moved from paint to print a long time ago but now we have very complex photo processing which produced this lovely portrait in which the whites are stronger than I have been able to make them here. And adventures in paper pulp (above, plugged into the grid at right according to a very detailed ‘colour’ chart), and renaissance games with perspective (below).And this, this, is a tapestry! It was clear how the print series layering colour on colour become their own works of art both as individual pieces and as series. Even the print woodblocks create their own jigsaw of delight. Finally, the audience makes its own contribution. Jacquard tapestries. Roy Lichtenstein on the left. Extraordinary.

•••••••••• Tangential reason #713 for living in one place, or another: in the Wollongong Gallery you get just one pair of Phyllis Stewart’s gorgeous shell slippers. In the metropolis you get more.

Attractive Curiosities: wet and arty

Posted on January 20, 2015 by mcrae3051

Pt Kembla sea pool. Two swimmers. Disappearing into infinity. The colours of ghosts. The terraces at left suggest another different time. Such a beautiful pool.

North Wollongong beach. Hot. From a distance the statue looks, what, Grecian? Up closer, a bit more terrorifying.

The rocks above the Gong’s sea baths.

Wedding Cake Rocks in the Royal National Park.

The Illawarra as described on the outside wall of the Wollongong gallery.

The Illawarra as described on the inside wall of the Wollongong gallery.

The Illawarra as described on the bedroom wall of the Wollongong gallery.

‘Why me?’ Alice McKenzie, Narwan woman. Self-explanatory.

Untitled masterpiece. George Tjungurrayi, Kiwirrkura man. Not self-explanatory.

Lady Di providing direction to three Pre-Raphaelite chaps.

Why this? Why anything?

Sydney.

Pixillated.

Tasmania encore: 2014

Posted on December 6, 2014 by mcrae3051

MONA goes bad!

Headline! Freak out! I have previously expressed my confidence in and delight with Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art. But on our recent trip to Tasmania we went to MONA again and the unthinkable occurred. David Walsh seemed to have lost his touch.

We went. The bottom floor was closed in toto but the upper two floors were still mesmerising. Yves Netzhammer’s giant installation and the welcome return of Nolan’s ‘Snake’ were among the highlights. I also discovered who is singing flat in the Madonna exhibit, and decided it wouldn’t be the same without him.

During a discussion about tickets we got invited back the next night to the opening of the new monster blockbuster — ‘River of Fundament’. The work of the ‘greatest artist in the world today’, or ‘one of the most important artists of our time’ (Nicole Durling from MONA, whose taste I have previously described as impeccable). (Did the ‘possibly’ escape me? I might be being unfair.) Matthew Barney!!! Munich. Beijing. Hobart. 143 crates of material, one casting weighing more than 6 tonnes. Forget Ben Hur. Bigger than just about anything.

And an opening … wooo hooo.

Watching le tout Hobart done up and out and about was worth far more than the price of admission. Special mention to the glittering onesie shorts set. Jack was there (Thompson) and Brian and Rach (Brown and Ward. Come on.) among other luminaries. I don’t know whether that was a bad sign or not. Probably. In the last Monthly David Walsh is quoted as saying, now he just rings up Steven Pinker and says have you got some neurophysiology stuff? And his book’s out. He might have tipped over and gone a bit spack. Or he might just be enjoying the perversity of it all.

‘River of Fundament’ has been growing for decades, longer, from a request by Norman Mailer to turn his worst book ‘Ancient Evenings” into an opera. It is an opera. It is also film described by an art gallery staffer who went to see it as a 6.5 hour marathon (and yes it is) of ‘an artist’s aggressive hatred for his viewing audience.’ That might please David. It would certainly pique his fancy. We didn’t see the film which might provide some sort of entrance to what there was on display in the bowels of Berriedale Point.

What we were left with was (dull)

‘Barney’s three phallus forms, cast in bronze, first appeared during the Khu performance in Detroit in 2010, which is now part of River of Fundament, Act II: when Isis gathers up the scattered physical remains of Osiris, god of the dead, resurrection and Afterlife, in an effort to restore his spirit’s integrity. Dredged from the riverbed in the wreckage of the Crown Imperial, they are a shaft of crystal salt, a muddy twisted root and a silt-encrusted metal rod: here rendered in metal so ‘feathery’ it seems almost organic.’

and (heavy, in literal usage)

‘The physical and iconographic origins of this powerful, immensely heavy (I think The Mercury, VOICE OF TASMANIA, said six plus tonnes) and more than car-sized form, completed just this year, lie in Barney’s great sculpture Djed which was cast on site in Detroit during the live Khu performance in 2010 (now seen in Act II of River of Fundament). Both Djed (too large to be brought to Tasmania) and the present work, Rouge Battery, are part re-embodiments of the Chrysler Crown Imperial that was beaten and ritually torn to pieces in Act I.

and sometimes big (although I quite liked this one. It’s Norman Mailer’s attic where he writes/wrote, upside down. Yeah I know, I know. Obvious.) But really …Excrement, putrifying matter, fighting or copulating bodies, all glisten with moisture. Sulfur is dissolved in urine. Organ pipes bubble. Molten metal flows. Mercury runs across a bathroom floor or falls from the cavities in a murdered car engine. Buffalo blood pours through the attic floor and down Mailer’s apartment walls when Norman III finally dies there. In the exhibition, the phallus forms in Coming Forth by Day [first pic above] seem to ooze into the base of their vitrine; something has drained out of Crown Imperial’s polycaprolactone tomb. The after effects of electrical actions, set solid in sculpture, seem still almost alchemically charged with metamorphic potential. And this great Boat of Ra is cast adrift here with its bronze mooring ropes, almost as far from either Egypt or New York as it is possible to be.

Mmmm obvious. You’ve now seen the highlights. It’s a mash-up of the end of the Detroit car industry, Mailer’s life and book, Ancient Egyptian mythology and the detritus of Barney’s mind. It was never going to be very engaging but without the 6.5 hour experience I’m afraid it’s nothing, just puzzlingly dull and trivial.

And we were left wondering if David had been seduced and violated by celebrity, one of the oldest and saddest stories of all. Or even, horror of horrors, whether he just might be bored.

But let’s be clear. Emphatic. This Emperor has no clothes. And now there’s whole floor of space that needs filling with good stuff. Like before.

••••••

TMAG

So let’s turn to quality. TMAG. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. It’s been done up, completely re-thought, and it’s terrific. I loved it.

After a few hours you leave it with a very powerful sense of where you are, what it’s about and how it’s been with a very fine art experience thrown in for good measure.Upstairs is one of the two extant versions of Benjamin Duterreau’s ‘The Conciliation’ — George Augustus Robinson rounding up what he thought were the last of the Palawa Tasmanians and doing good by carting them off to Wybalenna on Flinders Island in Bass Strait where almost all of them died.

There is so much that could be said about this: the unintended irony of the title, the dog and the pademelon trading glances, the European obsession with the Palawa method of spear-straightening, the record of shell necklaces. And Robinson with his florid cheeks. A joke figure? It’s hard to read otherwise. But what gets me most is that, just like the other version in Canberra’s National Gallery, the paint is cracked and beginning to peel, mostly from the distinctive grey skin of the Palawa. They’re disappearing in front of our eyes. How appropriate.

Below from right: Woureddy (Truganini’s partner), Truggernana (Truganini), Tanleboueyer

The Bush

We climbed The Mountain up the Ice House track

(That view is in front them and they’re taking a selfie! Ha ho.)

and the scoparia was out. Below the very top it was a blaze of floral colour.

We spent some time on Bruny Island, visible off the coast above. I like the complementary lines in the pic. below of the Neck. So much beauty everywhere.

National Park. Russell Falls falling.We were there to climb Mt Field West, a very rocky traverse of the Rodway Range before the Mt Field plateau. We were going the long way via Tarn Shelf for reasons of scenery. But when we got up the top, it turned out to be for reasons of self-preservation. The wind was strong enough to blow me off the duckboards. The horizontal sleet would come from one direction and then suddenly shift to the opposite. It snowed. This is an effort to take photo of snowing.

Rarely have we encountered so many varied types of precipitation (mostly violent) in so short a time.

And this is how it looked at brief moments. Glorious.

But, we were rebuffed. The track up the Newdegate Pass was a river, the wind noise from the tops sounded like a steam train driven by dervishes, and I’d lost the feeling in my fingers. We turned back. What a place.

The new header pic is the view across the D’Entrecasteaux Channel out our Bruny Island shack window with Hartz Peak in the background.

Labilladiere Peninsula walk: 28 Nov 2014

Posted on December 3, 2014 by mcrae3051

First, this is a public service rather than the standard gripping entertainment.

After finding an official-looking correction in our Bruny Island rental premises indicating that the Labilladiere walk was not 14 kilometres but 18, and not 5 hours but 7, I spent an hour on the net looking for information about which I could be confident and failing to find it: could have been five hours, or eight; could have been 12 k.s or 28. There’s a lot of cups of tea difference in those figures. As it is, the finger post immediately behind this sign says 5.5 – 6.5 hours rather than what’s here.

The maps were generally execrable. The scale on one suggested about 8 k.s all up. The most common map, on the Island brochure, suggests a mystery gap of about 2 k.s between where the track is supposed to start and ah… where it does start. So this is an effort to provide reasonably accurate up to date information about this very pleasant walk: times, directions and what to expect.

Second (even though his actual patronymic was Houtou), ‘Larbi-yardi-air’. It makes it easier to remember.

Jacques L. (at left) was the naturalist on Bruny (or really Antoine Bruni, below) d‘Entrecasteaux’s voyage to try to establish what had happened to Lapérouse. (A failure. Authentic remains were subsequently found on an island not far from Vanuatu.) Larbi-yardi-air made a number of major contributions to the collection and description of zoological, botanical and geological specimens novel to Europeans. Tasmania provided a party in this regard.

* * * * *

Despite what the board pictured above says, the walk circumambulating the Peninsula is probably a bit more than 14 k.s but not more than 16; and it took us a bit over six hours with two long breaks, or close to five hours of steady walking. There is, as occasionally advertised, a steep section over Mount Bleak gaining about 130 meters, but it’s short and the track is quite nicely graded.

The rest is the very definition of ‘medium’. If it wasn’t quite as long it would be ‘easy’. Painless exercise in a delightful environment.

While there is water at the camp ground, there is none available on the track.

The track traverses four distinct environments: heathland, very thick bracken, beach walking, and a sandy littoral track through reasonably open grey stringy-bark forest.

The one thing about which there is absolute consensus is that the walk, a circuit, should be done clockwise. I agree, but not emphatically.

On the first north-westerly leg, clockwise does give you an intermittent series of long and attractive views over the beginning of the d‘Entrecasteaux channel, the coastline of the peninsula and the mountains of the southern range including Hartz Peak lowering away over in the background. On the other side direction wouldn’t make much difference.

The track starts at the car park in the Old Jetty camping ground at the very southern end of Bruny Island. (The Jetty served for decades as the access point for getting supplies to Bruny Lighthouse keepers.) Allow at least an hour and quarter for the drive from the ferry dock. And you can actually park at the track entrance in something helpfully called ‘Track car park’.

And if that’s what you want to do, start here.

You walk a couple of hundred metres and are confronted by a choice. You hit a fire trail which will eventually take you almost the whole length of the walk on that side of the peninsula. (There’s a footpad over the hill.) If you’re me, there is some inclination to turn left because you’re a bit turned around by the drive in and you feel a (valid) need to cross the peninsula — and that might be the way.

But it’s not. Turn right. That’s the last unguided directional decision you will need to make for the whole walk.

After 20-30 minutes you will come to a clearly signed option to turn right for the shorter Luggaboine Circuit (about 2.5 hours). This was described by the owner of the Adventure Bay general store as ‘the same, but shorter.’ Your choice.

You’ve been walking through heath, sections of which are well above head height and some of which is waist high with the consequent effects on the view. In late November, and slightly past its best, this still provided a floral wonderland with hundreds of various types of orchids. In the longer views you can trace the course of the track as it wanders up and down over what looks like dune formations. There are two picturesque rocky beaches one of which, Hen and Chicken Rocks, is close to the track. The birdlife was exceptional all the way.

After about an hour and three-quarters, and just past Hen and Chicken Rocks, you will come to Mt Bleak. It took us about 15-20 minutes to get to the top. Views from the top are incidental rather than pronounced — you are still in fairly thick vegetation — but what you can see is lovely.

It is an easy descent from there towards Partridge Island which is appended to the tip of the peninsula. It took us a bit longer than I thought it would and if I’d been patient for another 5 minutes we could have had lunch at Hopwood’s Beach rather than parked on the side of the fire trail. This is after about two and three-quarter hours.

You climb out of the bush onto the beach for 200 or so metres before the signed entry to the trail on the other side. Then it’s about 15-20 minutes through some very dense vegetation with a lot of bracken where the track aperture is about shoulder-wide. I’d already nearly trodden on a two-metre black snake and I was pleased to get out onto Butler’s Beach. Below: this was after it had thinned out considerably. You’ve turned the corner by now and the track takes you perhaps a bit over a k. on reasonably solid sand with lovely views.

Up off the beach, again well signed — in fact once you actually get there the signage and information are fine. Then a bit less than two hours of trucking through open stringy-bark forest along a gently undulating sandy track (with occasional patches of roots and rocks just to remind you that you’re in Tassie) sticking with the littoral at not much less than footpath pace.About 25 minutes from home, you’ll come to this, the second intersection with the Luggaboine Circuit.

And this is the end. Note the track off the other end of the beach for the light house provisioning.

One foot either side of the Equator: and other stories of derring-do

Posted on October 22, 2014 by mcrae3051

Despite the quality of her outfit, this woman is making an unforced error. If she puts her right foot a little further to the right, just the other side of the grout, she’ll be doing the right thing. One foot in the northern hemisphere and one foot in the south. A thrill may travel up through her body although I’m not sure it will. I was left unmoved.

We’re just out of Pontianak (which also means ‘ghostly vampire’ in bahasa) on the banks of the mighty Kapuas, the biggest river in Indonesia, rising in the hinterland of Kalimantan. We’re near its mouth on the west coast where the Dutch decided to conduct a careful latitudinal survey in 1928 and at longitude 109⁰20’E they placed a monument to precisely define the Equator. The Indonesians roofed said monument in the 1970s, and it is now Pontianak’s prime tourist attraction.

Pontianak is more than one-third ethnic Chinese and feels like it. To indicate its diversity, it has a huge Buddhist temple, an enormous Muslim mosque and a gigantic Catholic cathedral (below).

When I was there it rained. Only for half an hour but by that time the surrounds were flooded.

This must happen a lot. No one was fazed.

And while we’re on educational, what’s this?

Rubber drying.

But to move from the paltry to lay some more important matters out.

Apart from the quality of its food, for which it is renowned, the really important thing about Pontianak is that with very little trouble you can balance an egg on its end. I did this, me, moi, so no special gifts required. This is anywhere at the Equator. Look at this. They’re at it everywhere.

Now how come?

There is a tradition elsewhere of balancing eggs on the vernal (and presumably autumnal) equinox — days of equal night and day. And although the National Geographic includes in its games for kids: ‘Some people believe that the gravitational pull of the sun that occurs on the equinoxes can help keep an egg standing on its end’, there is a tradition of rubbishing the whole idea on the internet. And there’s, you know, the direction water drains down plug holes separated by a couple of feet either side and … how come you lose all strength standing on the Equator? And what if you slip and fall through the cosmic doorway to a brighter future. (Ah no, that’s definitely just been made up).

I tried to balance an egg on its end at home and although, notionally at least, you ought to be able to balance almost anything, I couldn’t. In fact they were keen to just flop over. A little man in each of them threw himself sideways immediately the eggs were placed upright. It is suggested that you shake them so that the yolk settles at the bottom. I couldn’t make that work either.

I’ll leave that with you as one of the ineffable thrills available to the traveller to Pontianak.

• • • • • • • • •

Just while I’m here, I want to place on record that I got from Citadines Apartotel in central Jakarta to Terminal dua F of the Soekarno-Hatta Airport in 27 minutes. About 38 kilometres. To properly understand the dimensions of this feat it is necessary to understand that it has taken me 2 hours and 50 minutes, and that you always try to allow at least two hours.

I don’t take photos on this route. You think you’re going to capture the experience but it’s impossible. Coming the other way, arrival in Jakarta is usually a depressing experience — for me. Some people thrill to their first smell of kretek and fish paste. Tired, you forget to pay your US35 at the door and, despite the presence of his fixer, some morbidly obese anglo-celt has an incomprehensibly complex negotiation to complete which causes the payment queue to stall. There are 10,000 cabs (with 10,000 people keen to assist you to find one) waiting outside but none with your name on it. That will take an hour to appear because it must be arranged through Golden Bird not Silver Bird, although you are assured they’re the same company.

But in the end you are tucked up in the back seat of a Toyota Avanza and, once you’re shot of the airport proper, progress is good. You’re on a jalan tol, a freeway of sorts. Modernisation you think. Splendid.

But about 15 k.s later — by the time you get to Slipi when you’re struggling to make out the lights of the tower blocks through the tangible, cuttable, air — the true horror of it all hits you. It’s hard to believe that you could ever find a way through this wall of traffic. You’re stationary behind a bus belching partially digested diesel through your aircon and between a truck carrying scaffolding on one side and one with a very rickety looking load of wood on the other. And when I say behind and between I mean, you know … 10 centimetres.

Arriving this time we hit a giant wedding at the Hotel Mulia and didn’t move except for slight creepings sideways for 20 minutes. We didn’t move because there was a food truck delivering food to the wedding parked perpendicularly across two and a half of the three lanes of traffic. Selamat pernikahan Shana and Dewis. Best wishes. (But with an Indonesian pronunciation.)

To the right, Jalan Rasuna Said at 6am.

It is 5.45 in the morning, not my best time I readily confess. My driver has been waiting at Citadines for 45 minutes, arriving an hour early. Reception has rung twice to say he’s there. Could that have provided a motive? I don’t know. But he escaped from Jalan Rasuna Said almost instantly and headed off through the kampong lanes. Always up for something new, this is good I thought. I had enough time to get my flight, if no more than enough, but anything to get off Rasuna at six in the morning.

It was just a little like Hollywood. You know. Boom go the chook cages. Squash go the paw paws. Through the chicken rice shop. As we cut to local peasants fleeing with motor scooters crashing into each other and flying into the air, it occurred to me that I was about to witness a formidable display of Indonesian manhood. Can be good; but as the excitement mounts might just tip over into something not quite so desirable, especially when you’re a participant.

I’ve watched these performances of weaving through the traffic, often big black Mercs with windows even more heavily tinted than usual. No, you think, he can’t. He’s not going to make it. But he does, even if three scooters have to commit to the shoulder which in Jakarta could mean anything. And he does it again. It’s a bus, it’s a bus, it’s … and then as the jalan turns into a high overpass, you can see in the distance he’s still going, still at it. But I’d never actually been in the vehicle before.

It was far too early in the morning to think of what ‘slow down’ was in Indonesian, and ‘Stop’ which would be understood but unexpected might have produced a calamity. Zoosh we went, just missed him. Zhang, into that impossible hole. Pass on the left, bus in front, he can’t, it’s not poss … Ah my Lord.

On the jalan tol I peered over his shoulder and he was doing 147 kph. Oooo pak, I murmured. Pak pak pak. Phlooot, straight through the middle of two trucks with millimetres to spare. He was good. Outstanding of his type.

The ‘Kurangi kecepetan’ (‘reduce speed’) sign on the outskirts of the airport building seemed to induce a new rush of testosterone. Zhinnnnngg we went, round the clover leaves like a roller coaster. Dua F. Ya pak, ya. Ini. Two F, we’re here pal. He even stopped quickly.

I had some money in my pocket for a tip and I got it out thinking no way no way no way, although with qualifications. I was alive. I was here. I was even early, never a bad thing at CGK. He had shown me his best. There was a blue 50,000, 5 bucks, in the roll. That was never going to be included in any tip. But he snatched, too strong a word, Indonesians don’t snatch — lifted, yes lifted, the 50, cackled like crazy and was gone. I looked at my watch. 27 minutes, door to door.

• • • • • • • • •

I had some time to spare on the first day so after I’d got something to eat at D’ Stupid Baker I thought I’d go for a walk. Midday, no hat, no map, no water, sandals not shoes — d’ stupid walker. But I thought I’d probably survive, and I did even though when I got back I was a startlingly sweaty spectacle.

There were some shady alley ways besides the building sites along with a fetid waterway that kept pushing me further away from my planned route. If I’d tried to wade through it I think I would have gone fizz like a Fruit Tingle and dissolved. I also had a chance to walk through some proper food courts.

And then I came to this. Jakarta isn’t awash with remarkable modern architecture like Beijing, Singapore or the Emirates cities, but it does have the Bakrie Tower.

Which goes with this —

Why, you may ask?

Indonesia is a country exceedingly rich in natural resources. On 26 May, 2006, PT Lapindo Brantas, an Indonesian company exploring for gas and oil, began drilling near the town of Sidoarjo in east Java.

In the first stage the drilling went through a thick seam of clay, then through sands, volcanic debris, shales, and finally into permeable limestone. Steel casing was installed in the borehole to help stabilize it. During the second stage the drill went deeper to about 3000m, this time without a protective casing. A series of small eruptions of water, steam and gas occurred near the site.

Then on the 27^th a 6.3 magnitude earthquake occurred with its epicenter at Yogyakarta, 250 k.s southwest. Seven minutes after the earthquake a mud loss problem in the well was noted at the drilling site. After two major aftershocks, the well suffered a complete loss of circulation. This happens when ‘drilling mud’ — necessary for maintenance of the stability of the bore — pumped down a shaft does not return to the surface but is lost into some opening or a fault system. A day later the well suffered a ‘kick’, an influx of fluid into the well bore. This problem seems to have been rectified within three hours. Then, the next day, 29 May, steam, water and mud began erupting up to 200 meters above the well, a phenomenon that is now known as the Lusi mud volcano. (Lusi from Lumpur (mud) and Sidoarjo, the town, a very Indonesian piece of language construction.)

So it could have been the drilling, it could have been the earthquake, or it could even have been the sort of seismic fracturing that occurs on a day-to-day basis in many parts of Indonesia which is a very lively part of the ‘Fiery Circle’ which surrounds the Pacific tectonic plate.

But whatever it was, the mud (at a temperature of about 60C) erupted out of the ground initially at a rate of 180,000 cubic metres a day, now after 18 years slowed to a regular pulse. 1000 hectares, 13 villages and 28 factories have been inundated. Thirteen lives lost. Estimates vary but around 70,000 people have been forced to relocate.The mud stinks (of hydrogen sulphide among other things) and is described as toxic. Berms and levees have been built to contain and channel new mud flows into the nearby Porong river, which might not be everybody’s first choice. The levees have also collapsed quite frequently with the inexorable increase in the volume of the mud.

At the time this disaster was overshadowed by the impact of the Yogya earthquake: 6,234 deaths, 37,000 significantly injured and 1.3 million left homeless. However Lusi continues today, as do the demands for compensation which remain unresolved.

Who pays? Not us say Lapindo. Its Australian multinational partner Santos (18%) paid up ($US22.5m but not because they were responsible, just being good citizens) and fled. It was an act of god. The earthquake caused it. Etc. The government has in fact, after 18 years, provided about 20% of the agreed compensation.

This is an intriguing case of scientific uncertainty. Apart from its profound political sensitivity and financial implications, what happened was a matter of great geological interest. Thus a large number of studies were mounted of what actually had happened. Several teams of expert foreign investigators have concluded it was the drilling that did the damage. ‘The impact of the earthquake would have been no more than that of a heavy truck passing over the area.’ However round 2009 Lapindo’s PR firm started circulating new research that proved ‘beyond doubt’ that it was the earthquake, and in fact there is independently generated research claiming to do so. The cause of the disaster is not firmly resolved.

For animists and environmentalists alike, however, there is something viscerally authentic about sticking something three k.s into the earth and the earth jacking up, blowing its top, spitting mud. Maybe nuts, but an attractive idea nonetheless. In 1928 that mighty metaphysician and superior spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle published a story ‘When the World Screamed’ which pretty much follows that scenario.

The owners of Lapindo have gone to considerable lengths to distance themselves from the tragedy. They have tried twice to sell the company for nominal amounts (in turn US$2 and US$1m.), but were blocked from doing so by a governmental agency. Lapindo was initially asked to pay 2.5 trillion rupiah (about US$280 million) to the victims and about 1.3 trillion rupiah in additional costs to stop the flow. Thirteen of Lapindo’s executives and engineers were charged with violating Indonesian laws. This legal action subsequently stalled and SBY’s government took over the payment of the reparation funds (most of which have not yet been paid).

Local and in fact international protests continue. The mud now contains sculptures depicting the suffering and despair of the residents. And this man here. Quite a good likeness. (The signs I can read say, left to right: ‘Our lives have suffered much destruction because of Lapindo’, ‘Justice must be served. No more waiting’ and ‘Machines are the destroyers of nature’.)

Who owned PT Lapindo Brantas? Indonesia’s richest man, Aburizal Bakrie, chair of the Golkar party for many years, a key figure in SBY’s government, the owner and developer of the Bakrie Tower and at the time, with spectacular irony, the national Welfare Minister.

From the Jakarta Post of 1 October this year:

The House of Representatives on Monday unanimously passed into law a bill that allows president-elect Joko “Jokowi” Widodo to force chairman of the Bakrie Group, Aburizal Bakrie, to fulfill his Rp 781 billion (US$65 million) financial obligation to the victims of the Lapindo mudflow disaster in Sidoarjo, East Java, next year.

Aburizal, who is also Golkar Party chairman, has lost the privileges he has enjoyed between 2007 and 2014 courtesy of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s administration.

The President had allocated more than Rp 6 trillion of government money in 2007 to compensate villagers living in the vicinity of the so-called ‘affected area map’.

Such generous financial protection for the Bakrie Group was among the reasons why Golkar helped the Yudhoyono government remain stable in the face of nationwide protests at the President’s generosity toward the conglomerate.

• • • • • • • • •

There are I think about 2500 people in this room, the waiting room at Yogya airport. I have counted a block of 100 heads and there are about 25 of these blocks. If there are 2500 people here then I think it may have been built to accommodate, under some pressure, 1800. There is, of course, no escape. You can’t just stroll back through the wall of officialdom to go for walk ‘land side’. You can’t. You’re in airport limbo land.

But, the real point, there are no planes leaving. When I say a waiting room that’s correct. Not a transit room. I know this because I have been here for more than three hours. From time to time another surge of occupants arrives, but the most visible aircraft sitting taunting us 40 metres from the glass wall which separates us from the runway has covers on its engines.

There may be some air conditioning, although I think not. If so, it is easily overpowered by the energy given off by this mass of human flesh.

At my nominal departure time a lone and lonely Garuda man says my plane has not arrived yet. When will it leave? He doesn’t know. Where will it leave from? Which gate? He doesn’t know. What time is it scheduled to arrive at Yogya? He consults his computer thoughtfully. Can’t help me with that. No information.

I’m asking because a power outage has blanked out all the information systems and while the lights are on again, the flight boards haven’t recovered. A nice young girl is forcing her way through the throng saying ‘567 Jakarta Li-ron Air. Li-ron. 567 Jakarta.’ This is a little like me going through the crowd calling out ‘2015 Footscray premiership. 2015 Footscray premiership’, although people are gathering in one corner and beginning to jostle one another with packages and huge items of cabin baggage. There is a hint of some cut durian filed away over there. But nothing happens.

Somewhere in the hubbub a voice is announcing something. It is completely non-competitive. I can’t even tell what language is being used. Could be anything. Could be the end of the world.

I must be clear. It is not the black hole of Calcutta. In fact I’ve noticed that the streamers attached to the air con grills are gesturing limply that they are being disturbed. But I’ve been here for four hours now and I am torn between choices. If I leave my seat for a visit to the kamar kecil (room small) which is becoming increasingly desirable, I won’t get another.

A middle-aged woman trips on the tiled floor (how?) and collapses into my lap. Sooory sooory pak. Her male companion looks at me angrily. I hold my hands up to activate the no fault clause, but if he had a gun he’d still shoot me. There is quite a lot of oblivious Indonesian good humour here, but it’s not the dominant mood. It’s not resigned good humour, just resignation. I can feel the slightest hint of panic appearing somewhere low in my belly. I’ve gotta get out of here.

Dozens of people are appearing with packages of ‘Yogya chicken’. They smell quite good and breakfast was a long time ago. I investigate. These packages are being given to all those whose flights have been cancelled. Hundreds of them.

Just as I wrote that magically one of the gate boards lights up its red letters: GA 252 Denpasar. Praise be! It’s a sign. What’s the time? 6.45. What time was I due to leave? 2.25. What the. Who cares? I could be an ebola victim. I could be trekking on the Annapurna circuit. I could be … travelling in Asia. But if it’s the wrong plane, I don’t care. I’m still getting on. I have a very urgent need to escape.

Which is not immediately satisfied. I join the surge towards the gate. I note that the Papuans who have been sitting opposite are going to Denpasar too, probably one hop on their way home. Interestingly, just as space appeared round the banks of seats they were sitting in, so an unbridgable gap, a force field, emerges around them in the queue. Altho I’m conspicuously old and white, and I’m wearing a white shirt with a collar AND I’ve got a briefcase, not even I can pull that off. There might be signs of bigger issues here, some cultural and racial distance waiting to be traversed.

The lights are on but nobody is answering the door. The minutes tick by. This is just a tease. The gate sign may simply be an indication that the plane has arrived, or that it might arrive, or that it had left its destination. Or that they want to test the gate sign.

Where I’m standing is at the main thoroughfare for any cross traffic, and there’s plenty of that. Back and forth back and forth. This way, that way. Like many Indonesian queues I’ve noted, this queue moves forward without anything changing at the front. Nothing is resolving; it just gets more packed up. 15 minutes. 20 minutes. What IS going on! The door opens. The door closes. People who look like they might be passengers go through, but only three. Or one. And then they come back. When the door opens, there is a comparatively pleasant gust of kerosene fumes and damp tepid air. The queue tightens up further.

There’s a commotion behind me. Twenty or so tourists with very loud voices which project remarkably well force their way down the middle of the queue following a German with a tour leader flag. I don’t know she’s German; she’s just speaking German. And possibly because of some money passing hands earlier they muscle their way to the very front of the queue while the flag bearer thrusts a mountain of paper at the gate staff.

After another five minutes, a purge. The boil is lanced. Other slightly disgusting body metaphors. The gates fly open and a torrent of travellers burst through. It’s 55 minutes since the GA252 sign came up. As I pass under the gate sign the information board clicks back into life distracting me from the fact that I am about to be hit by a blast of jet exhaust which has just knocked over the three people in front of me. I thought at first it might be some spectacular gust of wind. But it wasn’t. I laughed.

I wave my boarding pass at people I take to be staff but can’t arouse any interest. I flop into my seat. Hoo-rah. It was actually very nice out: a breeze, the prospect of rain. The hostess stands on my foot and I hear an unusual noise and look up at her horrified face. I turn to my left and across the aisle a chunky older man is in the throes of what could easily be a stroke. His face is contorted and his leg is very strangely bent up. Bloody hell.

So we disembark while he’s carried from the plane. I‘ve stopped looking at my watch. It doesn’t matter any more. The patient? Sure. Yeah yeah. I hope he’s ok. Yeah yeah.

And of course we will have wait our turn in the queue to take off anyway. The other night in Jakarta I counted 13 planes in our queue. We waited 50 minutes while other planes came and went. How does all this work? Think. Just how does it? Why doesn’t it all just implode? It might be like the traffic as it converses. The slightest tap of a horn, and it says ‘I’m here.’ or ‘Go.’ or ‘Move over.’ or ‘I’m passing on the left with two wheels in the snack shops.’ or ‘Make room. I’m coming regardless.’ There is no need to say thank you. That would be a waste of time and energy and it might be confusing. Everyone knows the conventions even if they are invisible to an outsider. But planes. They’re big, and when they crash …

Into my seat again. In my row of three there is an attractive young Indonesian woman. Next to me is her very unhappy infant.

What the rich pay for. Comfort of course, but also access, and also space. And also the right, uncodified to the best of my knowledge, not to have to wait.

Tour de Wimmera

Posted on September 24, 2014 by mcrae3051

Mt Arapiles, the very end of the Great Divide, poking its head out of a canola crop.

Victorian city mice tend to forget they have country cousins. It’s not deliberate. They just get bound up in the haste of the city and the rather limited boundaries of their geographical horizons.

That’s a shame, because there is so much to enjoy in the extra-urban world.

With two friends, Barbara and Graham, we thought we’d design a little tour, just a week, to revisit where we’d grown up, to chase up some of our favourite places but also to stretch out and drink in some of the less familiar big skies of the northern Wimmera, a region not famous for its tourist draw cards. What follows, however, provides some evidence to the contrary.

Would you travel with these people?

We drove up the Western Highway for lunch at Lake Wendouree Boathouse and some testing of the quality of the recent products from the Langhi Ghiran winery.

The destination was the Grampians. Graham and Barb were interested to see the burnt relic of Girin Flat; Myrna wanted to get some stimulus material — photos, vegetal matter, images — for a current painting project; and we all wanted to see the wild flowers.

The wild flowers were only just coming out; they’d be at their best in another three weeks or so. The big interest was in what we could see of the recovery from last summer’s fires. The blackboys (Xanthorrhoea Australis, Australian grass trees) in particular had shot and for long stretches of the road round the northern Grampians were everywhere. It’s rare to see them quite so floral.

Hollow Mountain still looked its distinguished self even though much more naked than usual.

Trip Advisor moment: we ate and drank well at the newly duded-up Kookaburra Bar and Resto and, as part of a theme, enjoyed the Kookaburra Motel as much as we usually do.

Meanwhile in Hamilton Keith was casting through the personal ads (‘Mature, full-figured woman. Ask for Jazz…’) in the Hamilton Spec when his eye fell on an ad for opera at Alan Myers‘ remarkable establishment in Dunkeld. His three-chefs-hat gourmet restaurant/pub, the Royal Mail, enables one to explore simply all the varieties of foam available … let’s just say food adventures, and so they are. Bar, bistro, fancy bit — all at the foot of the looming Mt Sturgeon. The establishment over the road, next to the antique bookshop, holds the RM’s wine collection. But then there’s the family gardens (do check this link out, a great description of an extraordinary place) and so on and so on. The opera was on at the auditorium /gallery, newly minted out of Grampians sandstone and attached to a portion of the house. (Adjacent to the croquet lawn, but some distance from the tennis area, etc.) On its walls were, I would say, 3-4 million dollars worth of art: Martens, Piguenit, von Guerard, 15 or so early Australian masters, and a version of Benjamin Duterreau’s ‘George Augustus Robinson’. The other is in the Australian National Gallery.

Robert Divall introduced himself and the artists, Antoinette Halloran (at right) and Dimity Shepherd. Both were fine singers.

They sang the hits, we marvelled and then went off to eat shaking our heads in just slight wonderment. When we discovered that our 50 dollar tickets included payment for our meals at the RM they wagged violently. Graham led the flight to the car before those in charge changed their minds.

A night at the Rippon Road premises and a tour of Arborline is always highlight of a trip to Hamilton; then to Horsham up the Henty Highway the surrounds of which were looking magnificent. Then to Horsham … where I didn’t take even one photo despite seeing houses where Barbara, Myrna and I had lived, the schools we had gone to, the hospital some of us were born in, the stretch of the weir in which I turned into an ice-block during a three kilometre swim. But it was busy, Horsham, making Hamilton which is about the same size look sleepy. We like towns with signs of life.

Then west to Natimuk and Mt Arapiles, home to Brigitte Muir the first Australian women to climb the Seven Summits, the highest peak on each continent. The sharp face of Arapiles contains series of famous climbs.

The main reason though was for a detour through the Little Desert, an arid but complex paradise of small things.We lunched at Nhill. After dallying in the Little Desert we got the tail end of the offerings at Oliver’s, a resto set up to employ disabled people and going very well by the look of things.

We chose to spend two nights in Rainbow because it was a suitable step off to Wyperfeld National Park which had adherents in the group and also because Rainbow has its own low key delights.

We drank the Eureka Hotel out of red wine for example — monumental drinkers in our party! But, yes, while plenty of beer was available, that bottle of Shiraz we drank was the last one they had. And it was 10 dollar parma night! (For those overseas: parma = veal parmagiana, in this case highly and variously modified.) And there was a very attractive open fire. It gets cold up there on the edges of the desert. And it’s got a fine set of silos, very clean air, a school fete featuring jumping castles which we just missed, and an IGA which sells most of the things you might like (including some well-aged St Hugo’s shiraz that the owner keeps largely for himself).

There were also several interesting pieces of public art. Graham said this was picture of the station to substitute for a real one; but there was a station even if the passengers getting on were bushells of wheat and barley rather than people. The centre of the end of the main drag, and I think rather lovely.

For the purposes of orientation, this is the main drag, with returned servicemen memorial.

Then the paintings on the butcher’s shop — the butcher sold very good meat which we barbecued at the motel on our second night having exhausted some at least of the delights of the Eureka (the Royal’s lights were on but no one appeared to be home) — these really got me in. The way they had degraded increased their solemnity and knocked some of the folk art edges off. The diversity of what time had done to the medium was also most engaging. Wild. Appropriate. (The posters in the window are the work of Rainbow PS students advertising their fete. Inter alia, it had a football theme; 11 of the 18 AFL guernseys got a run on the poster nearest the door.)

And there’s a big house at Rainbow — Yurunga.

It was built in 1909, a bare 20 years after Europeans settled this part of the Wimmera, and when more grain was loaded at Rainbow than at any other station in Victoria. The town had reticulated water — goodness knows where they got it from, almost certainly artesian — 30 men were employed as blacksmiths or wheelwrights; there were golf, football, cricket, gun, coursing and turf clubs, a brass band, a debating society, a progress association. Currently, with a population of 525 at the last census, most of those are historical memories, but there’d be worse places to live.

We’ve watched the decline of small towns happen in our life time, as farms get bigger and more industrialised, and people drive more easily and willingly to bigger centres to shop and do their business. So while Horsham (population round 14,000) thrives, the death spiral hits places like Minyip, Murtoa, Rupanyup, Jeparit, Beulah and Rainbow. (Altho something seemed to have happened in Birchip to keep it kicking.)

Yurunga was built by the Cust family who had also acquired a shop and 6000 acres. The shop burnt down one year later, but they built another. However, after three years they’d had enough and moved back to Melbourne, a very common story in this marginal country, never really meant for agriculture, paying costs in perhaps one of five years.

(Not the Custs, the Liesfields in whose family Yurunga remained until its acquisition by the Shire in 1969. History in Australia runs in short spans.)

The house has a certain splendour nonetheless, verandahs all round, a climatic accommodation completely ignored by the chaps currently building houses in Horsham where even eaves are considered anachronistic if not obsolete. As long as the refrigerated aircon works, I suppose, who cares … This house had a coach house, a school room, a tennis court, a kitchen garden and an underground dining room. Not to mention pressed tin ceilings and a fine view of unused municipal conveniences at the end of its very grand passageway.

But, despite beguiling Graham (we still haven’t heard the outcome of his offer for the whole of the main street), we hadn’t come for the built environment. Nature beckoned.

The Wimmera River rises at Mt Cole quite close to Langi Ghiran where we’d begun our business. It runs through Horsham and Dimboola on its way to nowhere. It has the distinction of disappearing first into Lake Hindmarsh, the largest body of water in Victoria when it is full (almost never), then on into Lake Albacutya, then into Outlet Creek and on into a series of mysterious sites: Black Flat, Lake Brambruk, Lake Jerriwirrup, Lake Agnes and finally the Wirrengren Plain. And if you think Rainbow is a bit out of town, try the Wirrengren Plain. Although amazingly, whitefellas have tried to live there running sheep and cattle. Dingoes got the sheep, and the dry got the cattle — the shortest of shrifts.

There is a record of water covering the Plain in 1854. In 1917 Pine Plains some kilometres to the south got wet to the extent of flooding. In 1957 it covered Black Flat and with record rainfall in 1975 (when I was trying to build our house in the Grampians) Lake Brambruk filled. Since then, due partly to the imposts placed on the river downstream (weirs, irrigation, town water), these ‘bodies of water’ have almost always been dry. This means that the red gums which fill these depressions will die. They need wet feet at least every 20 years to keep going, and that will change the landscape forever. This is Lake Brambruk today.

The Wimmera river doesn’t run anywhere. It just disappears into the sand.

Apart from the two big ‘lakes’ these places are all in Wyperfeld National Park, a collection of different semi-arid environments with astonishing bird life and a wonderful sense of quiet.Sand dune country with stands of callitris, native pine, which does not regenerate after fire. After recent huge fires about 60 percent of the callitris in this area has been wiped out. More cheerfully, Graham and Barb proved their indomitability here with a very satisfying walk.

If north is up, it was mostly downhill from here, except for one great drive almost along a line of latitude: Rainbow, Kenmare, Beulah, Birchip, Wycheproof, Boort. It was very interesting to look at the variation in the crops over this 150 or so k.s. Those near Rainbow needed a soak, near Boort they’ll have a good year. But round Beulah and Birchip they might as well be putting their money on horses. This is what tens of thousands of dollars of seed, chemicals and labour sinking into oblivion looks like. These crops won’t even provide feed.

I’d been to Boort not long ago to talk to a teacher of Indonesian there, and found the delight pictured below. Great home-cooked food, good coffee and the sort of individual flourish that, sometimes, rural Australia allows. Look at the windows. This is a masterpiece of the genre.

You may be wondering about the stock in this area. Fortunately we have renderings of same. Big fellas aren’t they? There is even a town, district maybe, named after the Durham Ox. The caption on the pic reads ‘Henry F. Stone and his Durham Ox 1887. The early colonial cattle were of extraordinary proportions.’ (But um … that extraordinary?) The sheep was found in the Bendigo art gallery and the cow was wandering the streets of Boort, just over the road from ‘The Cup and Saucer’.

We did go through Birchip, for one year my home and, albeit a slightly different colour, this was my home.

And I found it difficult to resist this pic from the top of Mt Wycheproof, billed locally as ‘the smallest mountain in the world’, towering a grand 43 metres above the surrounding plain and consisting of a unique substance known as Wycheproofite. How good is that!

Its the first frame of my first film and featured me driving along that long straight line of latitude towards my first job.

Before getting back to a more contemporary home, we drank in the delights of Bendigo where Barbara grew up. When I think of gold field towns I always think of people who found nothing and went home disappointed. But some people made some money. Obviously.

These were the days when public building was public building and meant to last. I give you Camp Hill Primary School.

The Bendigo Oval.

The Town Hall.That’s pretty Bendigo. But so in it’s way is this.

This is the interior of the Great Stupa at Myers Flat perhaps 10ks from the centre of Bendigo. It is only half built, will cost upwards of $20 million and is designed to last 1000 years. It will have attached a convention centre, a hotel, a monastery (built), 80 houses, a school, etc. The (somewhat unprepossessing I’m sorry to say) Buddha has been carved out of a single piece of jade and is the largest, most expensive etc etc etc. Like so many other things on this journey this all appeared as a delightful surprise.

How busy we ants are! What a piece of work is man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties. In form and moving how express and admirable. However, along with my Danish friend, there has been a stern inclination of late, for reasons which I’m sure are widely felt, to lose all my mirth.

So what better way to conclude than with something which has not lost any of its splendour after 30o0 years. It won’t always be in Bendigo but it was when we were there.(Just one more big sky …)

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Denying Climate Change #2: Battles in the War

Denying Climate Change #1

Wentworth Street

Chuck Close at the MCA

Attractive Curiosities: wet and arty

Tasmania encore: 2014

Labilladiere Peninsula walk: 28 Nov 2014

One foot either side of the Equator: and other stories of derring-do

Tour de Wimmera