School….

A Mackellar Girls’ (public) School student protesting about her cancelled Yr 10 2022 graduation ceremony, in which she was to be awarded a dance award. The ceremony was cancelled because a number of girls turned up to school with fake nails/manicures, thus violating the uniform code.
Our local, regional public high school often experiences multiple lockdowns per week due to extreme violence.

I live in regional Australia and my kid goes to a private, independent school. The entire debate around private schooling in Australia is oriented around urban schools and urban children. This makes sense – most people live in urban areas, so they’re the biggest chunk of the demographic.

I’m a strong proponent of the public school system, but the reality is that where I live, the difference between sending your kid to a public school, and sending them to a private school, is having a teacher in the classroom. Many kids at our local public high school don’t have access to a maths teacher, for instance. I know two teenagers who didn’t have a maths teacher for an entire year (year 9). This actually makes quite a difference to your education, unsurprisingly. Other classes are supervised by teacher aides, but no teachers. The purpose of school teeters towards ‘childcare’ once you remove teachers from the equation.

For ‘gifted’ children the public school offers an online school, hosted in a small, dark computer lab, where the nerds run the gauntlet to slide in the door before getting hammered. For everyone else, there’s no ‘online’ option.

Our local public high school has a unit at the back of the school where children with behavioural problems are housed. This is effectively a lock up. It is known as, ‘the cage’. It holds approximately 90 students, one third of the school’s student body. There’s no teaching going on in there, obviously, but these kids are removed from the rest of the student body.

Half of the high school aged children in our area attend private high schools, compared to about 40% in NSW. Our region is characterised as a low socio-economic area and I would strongly suspect that regional areas would have the highest level of kids at private schools, despite having the least ability to pay the fees.

Our local public high school (one of two in the region) has facilities that put the private schools to shame. Multiple rounds of ‘capital funding announcables’ provide periodic upgrades. The problem of course, is that there aren’t enough staff. Teachers are paid relatively well, but not well enough to subject themselves to endless violence from adult sized children, and certainly not well enough to afford to buy a house in the area. Like everywhere, the housing crisis is acute.

Add to that the reality that many children arrive at high school completely uneducated. And, many of the teachers themselves are poorly educated. This is not their fault – we’re now looking at two generations of under-resourced education. This makes for a really, really tough job. It enrages when I hear politicians shift the blame for poor education outcomes onto teachers. The problems are almost entirely structural. Well-paid. educated and supported teachers can do excellent work.

When I hear smarmy toffs like Jane Caro suggesting that everyone who sends their kid to a private school is a boater-donning wanker, all I see is the staggering privilege of a woman can’t imagine that a public high school with 300 kids might not have a maths teacher for a year or two. Jane Caro sits in her lounge room surrounded by houses that cost upwards of 3 million dollars and sneers at regional parents playing 5k a year for private school fees. If I lived in Warringah I’d send my child to the public high school too. I bet they have a maths teacher.

In many smaller regional areas the Catholic schools specifically provide education services that the government simply won’t. The Catholic archdiocese cross-subsidises regional and remote schools with income from the urban counterparts. In terms of utility, that is, ‘bang for buck’, Catholic schools in remote areas probably provide more educational improvement than any other school in Australia.

Of course, this is deeply problematic – this is the church’s ongoing attempt at inculcating generations of young people into the faith – but it is also motivated by charitable intentions. In a Good Australia, schooling would be completely secular.

Next time…..how Foucault changed my view on chaplaincy (and I’m still a left-wing atheist)

The Voice

The Salvado memoirs : historical memoirs of Australia and particularly of the Benedictine Mission of New Norcia and of the habits and customs of the Australian natives / by Rosendo Salvado ; translated and edited by E.J. Stormon

A gnarly quote to kick off this Monday morning.

Yesterday I saw ‘polling’ that suggested that most Australians would vote ‘no’ to what has become known as ‘The Voice’ referendum. It is by no means accidental that this political movement shares its name with a TV program showcasing en-glittered bakery assistants blinking into the industrial strength lighting like a possums in the day-makers while belting out saccharine pop songs with the verisimilitude of a substitute Hillsong pastor.

What’s also interesting is that this referendum showcases the worst excesses of modern media in Australia. It is simply impossible for most people to get a real sense of what The Voice actually is, or does. I know and work with quite a number of Aboriginal people, and while I’m quite used to pretty frank conversations about lots of contemporary issues, the referendum is hardly discussed. The general consensus seems to be a half hearted ‘vote yes, but it probably won’t matter’. I think that’s a completely legitimate position. I myself will vote yes because Marcia Langton told me to, and if there is one rule for life it’s that you don’t fuck with Marcia Langton.

The Voice has of course attracted some of the usual racists. Bronwyn Bishop was cracked out from under her hairspray to mawp her way across every TV network that would have her. For anyone younger than 60, TV just isn’t ‘a thing’ anymore, so it’s very difficult to get a read on what most people think, but if anything, having Bronwyn Bishop condemn something is a sure sign that most Australian voters (the bulk of whom are under 60) will vote in support of it.

I should also say that I know quite a few Aboriginal people who aren’t in support of The Voice, for various reasons, none of which I’ve seen trotted out in mainstream media.

That’s not really what I wanted to talk about. The Voice has breathed life into a discussion around ‘the gap’ (in the standard of living between Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders and Everyone Else), amongst other things, which always and ultimately comes with some pretty hairy-chested pronouncements about, generally, the relatively poorer standard of living faced by Aboriginal people in Australia. All the usual suspects are trotted out but what I’ve noticed is that there is such a tendency to try to blame just one factor, a kind of cultural determinism. That is, the statement that Aboriginal people are somehow culturally determined to live worse lives than the rest of us. Now, whatever I write from here on in could be viewed as anti racist or racist or ethnocentric or not etc.,. so I’m not going to try to couch this in anything other than the language that I write on this blog. My starting premise is that humans aren’t really different to one another, and that there are social and historical reasons for, ‘the gap’. That should be clear, and it’s well accepted.

But, there are a lot of people who are of the opinion that there is something in the culture of Aboriginal people (as if this is a unified culture, rather than a wide collection of different people). I’ve posted this screenshot of ‘contact’ Australia above – it describes some pretty hair-raising practices. The argument, generally, is that the Europeans at the time were more kind or caring or moral or ethical or something, because they weren’t practising things like infanticide.

The thing is though – every human group throughout the entire history of time has practiced population control through something like infanticide or some level of hectic birth control. It is only extremely recently that we have had populations of humans that have had more than enough to sustain them, and often this was only for short periods of time. Everyone is aware of the history book narrative where humans develop agriculture and therefore society. Society is based on excess – enough food to enable people to do something other than expend their entire caloric intake on just staying alive. Archeological evidence of pots and discarded lanyards illustrates a society that began to specialise into bakers, potters and mid-level public servants.

But even groups that had enough food produced and stored to sustain larger organised communities suffered periods of famine and death. History is littered with mass deaths caused by everything from crop failures to ergotism.

Population control – working out exactly the carrying capacity of your environment – is perhaps the most enduring characteristic throughout human history. Birth control has been practised through various methods across time. Māori women would ingest teas made from particular abortifacients – a practice that was common (obviously with different plants) across the world. Some groups of Aboriginal men practice subincision where the underside of the penis is cut and ‘spread’ during an initiation ceremony (I should point out that this is not categorically a birth control method – and I need to note that it is considered to be privileged information so if you’re looking into it, bear that in mind).

Babies throughout history have been smothered, starved and shunted into the freezing wind on slabs of ice for all of human history. At different times, up to 50% of babies would have been killed.

My point though is that all people, no matter where and when, have faced the same problem – the carrying capacity of their environment. We like to tell ourselves that European or western society is somehow kinder and more generous towards the non-productive members of society because of christianity or Greek philosophy or some other vaunted thing, but this is errant bollocks. The only thing that dictates a willingness to support the vulnerable is carrying capacity – everything else is marketing to make ourselves feel good. It’s worth noting that even the idea that we have entered the period of ‘excess that lifts all boats’ is itself a fallacy – we are clearly existing well outside the limits of the planet’s capacity, and will no doubt suffer a widespread reckoning as many generations before us have.

My point is that the tendency to characterise humans as either innocent noble savages or violent uncivilised brutes runs deep through the history of western thought, but it’s a relatively new and entirely false proposition.

The literature on this is so fraught, prone to exceptionalism, racism and ethnocentrism. When I first entered university our lectures frankly discussed, from a functionalist perspective (that is, social and cultural norms perform a life-preserving function) the ways in which various societies managed and continue to manage their population in terms of environmental constraints. We were confronted with the question – why was Australia populated by one group of people for so long, and not colonised until relatively recently?

Directly to Australia’s north lies (modern day) Indonesia – a series of islands with enormous populations of people with incredible cultural diversity. The seafaring technology was certainly capable of bringing people from the north into the continent of modern day Australia and yet for thousands of years this did not take place. Where interlopers repelled? Or did they find that the conditions in northern Australia were simply too harsh to support sustained populations of incomers? Or, was it a combination of both? Or, is our preoccupation with colonisation simply a reflection of a western mindset, that assumes that it is entirely natural to explore and ‘conquer’ new territory?

Perhaps the environment in northern Australia was sufficiently harsh that it dissuaded would-be colonisers. I think this is represented in the kinds of population management strategies that we see above. Australian Aboriginal people faced exactly the same problem that all humans have faced throughout our history and addressed it in pretty similar ways.

The tendency exists to draw a line between these practices and the contemporary situation facing Aboriginal Australians but I just don’t buy it. The impact of three or four generations of what we politely call ‘dispossession’ is a far more compelling reason for contemporary dysfunction than anything extant in ‘the culture’. Different people do different things at different times but what’s clear is that throughout history, having a rapid change in your cultural and social circumstances is difficult. Being born into a low socio economic situation is difficult. Racism makes life difficult. And, importantly, there’s no one reason why there is, ‘a gap’ but I’m pretty sure it’s got bugger-all to do with pre-colonial cultural practices.

Hiatus

Such a hiatus!

I really underestimated how much work two jobs would be. Of course, as with all things, there are busy and quiet times, but when both jobs hit the busy period it gets quite busy indeed. Fortunately, both jobs were contract work, and have now ended, and so I now find myself employed more in line with my proclivities – that is to say – surfing.

I wrote a little while ago about ticks, specifically the the holocyclus species that we have locally. Ticks are the perfect example of a zoonotic clusterfuck – they perfectly illustrate the hubris of modern medical science. Ticks give people diseases in curious, non linear ways, with often ill defined pathologies and vastly different levels of severity. Oh, and some people, like myself, are naturally, genetically immune. The dullards amongst us might suggest that this is something that can be mapped onto my particular ethnicity or bloodgroup, but in the age of ‘identifying’ as various things that one is quite evidently not, I have concluded that the most logical explanation for immunity to alpha-gal allergy and disease is that I am three parts bandicoot.

Bandicoots live here, they are a stalwart of coastal NSW. Bandicoots are common and also, helpfully, really really cute. They have long prehensile noses that they use for spreading diseases around corners. The funny thing is – you never see them. They’re nocturnal, so that doesn’t help, but there are plenty of nocturnal Australian animals that you see all the time, everything from possums to those gamers with those pale, vestigial legs. Unlike the gamers, bandicoots spend a lot of their lives snuffling around in the leaf litter getting things done.

I’ve only seen them a couple of times, but I know there’s heaps of them. Bandicoots are absolutely essential to the life cycle of the paralysis tick. Without bandicoots there would be almost no ticks at all. Yes, ticks live on all sorts of animals, but bandicoots provide the nursery for the ticks. Without them, the numbers drop precipitously. Bandicoots are the only animal that is completely immune to the tick venom -they can literally carry thousands of ticks with no ill effect. And, as I said, they like to hang around in the leaf litter, which is an excellent place to acquire four million of your closest friends.

Paralysis tick – holocyclus

Ticks also like it wet – their eggs and larvae are prone to drying out. Indeed, the only truly effective treatment for tick control is diatomaceous earth – it essentially glues up with the eggs and, to a lesser extent, the larvae, and they dry out. When it’s wet there are more ticks. Usually, winter is a quiet time for ticks locally because our winters are pretty dry but the last two winters have been very wet, and the ticks have been on a rampage.

Currently, we haven’t had any decent rain for about a month – we appear to have returned to a more typical weather pattern, where the winter days are sunny and dry and reasonably warm. I would have expected the tick numbers to drop away to almost nothing however, that’s not the case. The ticks are going crazy this winter.

For the last six months or a couple of local government bodies have been shooting foxes. Foxes eat bandicoots. You can see where this is going. Indeed, there is such a boom in the bandicoot population that areas of suburbia look like they’ve been shelled by the world’s cutest and most poorly organised military (bandicoots leave little holes surrounded by a mound of dirt). Naturally, Australian suburbia has little time for Lawn Assaults, and so the level of consternation is high.

What’s really fascinating though is that there is so little research and information about ticks in south eastern Australia. We know how the mechanisms by which they fuck humans up, but we know surprisingly little about their life cycle and numbers – their ecology. Aside from the statement that bandicoots are important to the life cycle of the ticks, there’s almost nothing that gives any idea of how important. Now, as the bandicoot numbers explode, we’re getting a sense of the impact on tick numbers.

An example – I was talking to a landholder last week who did a cool burn years ago through a patch of Red Gum forest on his property. What returned, after the burn, was a monocrop of needle grass – basically, sharp pointy grass that foxes don’t like. So, the bandicoots were most impressed with the new digs and moved in in their thousands, and the tick numbers increased dramatically.

Coastal Red Gum

The importance bandicoots also helps answer some of the weirdest aspects of ticks – why are there so many in some places, but none nearby? I think it’s got something to do with how suitable the habitat is for bandicoots. Are there dogs around? Is the leaf littler thick enough? Bandicoots are also territorial, so there is an upward limit on how many one might find in an area, but that number is high.

I suppose what I’m most fascinated by is the lack of knowledge about the ecology of ticks. We live in an area where ticks regularly sicken humans and kill dogs (and other mammals) and we really don’t know that much about them.

School bullshit

My kid went to our local public school. We live in a regional area, and when she started school, a good number of years ago, this place was quite a bit poorer than it is now. Gentrification, like lots of coastal Australia, is on the razzle.

That’s not to say our local school community was desperately poor, or particularly rough. Our neighbours still left their doors unlocked a lot, and although there was a burgeoning meth appreciation society, it wasn’t dire. So, off to school we went.

And that was when the violence started. My kid got bashed, every, single day . Some days she was just kicked or spat on, others she was knocked unconscious, requiring a 3 hour ambulance trip to the paediatric hospital. (That was her last day at the school). She also experienced sexual assault, from another 6 year old. She lost teeth, but also her sense of self. She could not understand why it was OK for kids to hit her, but not for her to hit anyone. ‘I guess I deserve it’ she told me once, through tears.

This is the logical conclusion for many kids who are bullied. The principal told me she was ‘quirky’, the implication being that she had it coming. It wasn’t just my kid either. Others were bashed, stabbed (rarely) and bitten (frequently). There was a special classroom for the especially violent kids, with bars on the windows and no sharp or heavy objects. This is a primary school. Many of these kids were, however, allowed ‘out’ of their enclosure during breaks, to hit and bite the other kids. One memorable child liked to pick up rocks about the size of a 2 litre bottle of milk, out of the garden, climb the tree and then drop them on the kids walking below.

To be clear, most children weren’t like this, but a few were, and if you happened to be the target (there seemed to be about 5 targets in every year), then you would cop it. One parent was attempting to get the NSW department of education to pay for her child’s physical therapy after he lost an eye during a particularly savage beating.

I was not aware how bad things were, until I pulled my kid out of school, and she felt she could tell me what was happening to her, in full. She was too scared to ‘narc’. I am ashamed to say that I let my kid stay at that school for a year and a half. Thankfully, the other local public school let her in, and although still bullied, she did not experience any more violence.

It would be easy for me to say that this was simply a better school, and it was. The principal was committed to her staff, and the school worked well. The teachers were happy, liked working with each other, and generally, things worked smoothly. The previous school was characterised by bullying, and the principal disregarded female teachers’ concerns in particular.

The fish rots from the head, as they say, but was this just a case of bad management? I don’t think so. The first school serviced a much poorer school population. There was a much higher number of kids with social and behavioural problems. 40% of the pupils’ caregivers were grandparents, not parents. A stressed, harassed and underfunded school environment is the perfect medium for growing lateral violence and workplace bullying. Every P&C meeting was completely dominated by discussions about violence, and how to manage difficult students. At the second school, every meeting was dominated by endless discussions about why the canteen wasn’t breaking even.

So, when it came to attending high school, we had two options – the online, ‘Aurora college’ (a selective school for regional kids, where my kid would sit in one room with about 10 others kids, and look at a computer all day, only leaving for lunch and recess, where these ‘nerds’ are relentlessly bullied, including physical violence. Or, I could send her to one of the two local private schools.

I chose to send her to the private school. And I’m not alone. Our local public high school is rapidly emptying, as its problems become more entrenched. People often say things like, ‘Oh it’s a shame when the good students leave because the poor students don’t have the company, help and inspiration of the good students’. This criticism is like lamenting the lack of oat milk in Goulburn SuperMax.

Not wanting to be bashed every single day is positioned as a boutique lifestyle choice.

I said to my kid’s previous principal,

‘If I had a boyfriend who bashed my child badly enough to knock out her teeth, or send her to hospital, I would be complicit in a crime. And yet, somehow everyone thinks it’s acceptable when it happens within the bounds of these four chain link fences?’

The reason that our two closest local public schools are losing students to the private schools isn’t because people are getting richer, or because they’re choosing a wholesome religious education, or because they’re snobs who think their child will ‘grow up with the right connections’ (the last one is particularly laughable – the kids all know each other here anyway). The majority send their children for two reasons; safety, and the ability to have a teacher in the classroom.

Until a few years ago, our local public high school had a program where violent students attended school ‘off campus’, at a facility about 2km from the main high school. This worked – these kids had a small gym, a teacher who was particularly good at dealing with them, and some tailored support – including lunch. It kept the rest of the high school population safe. And we’re talking about 500 kids (on the main campus), so it’s not like it’s a small number.

This program was cut, presumably due to inadequate funding. Now, I am told that the school goes into lockdown often, sometimes several times a week.

The second is staff – some kids go an entire year without a teacher. Maths, for instance, is something that actually requires a teacher, as many parents, even relatively well educated parents, don’t have knowledge of higher level maths. So, there are entire cohorts of children who just simply miss out on a maths education. There is so much angst about how to get regional students into university, but seemingly no recognition of the fact that these kids are emerging from regional high schools with a year 5 education.

There is so much prognosticating about education – how to improve scores etc. But the biggest, most obvious thing is the violence. If a student is constantly told that it’s OK for them to be beaten, they quickly learn that this is their self worth. And everything follows on from there. Everything.

Every time a school prioritises the rights of the abuser over the victim they send a clear message to both parties. It is the ultimate ‘teachable moment’.

Yes, there are other differences between the private and public school, but again, these mostly flow from the violence. The public high school, for instance, has no functioning doors on any of the toilets now, because they are constantly smashed, so there’s no point in repairing them. There are no plants in any of the gardens because caretaking staff spend all their time (and more) fixing the damage from violent students. There are limited facilities because they all get smashed.

Teachers leave because they are fearful of the violence, and know that teachers/staff cannot physically touch any students, so the students cannot be restrained if they attack someone. There are almost no volunteers to run all the usual things that happen at school, because older women (the majority of volunteers) are too scared.

And anyone who reads this and says, ‘Oh just expel the bad students’ doesn’t understand that this is not how it works. Students cannot be expelled. And, they shouldn’t be. But equally, they shouldn’t be in an environment where they can harm others. This is why the ‘off site’ school worked.

There are solutions to this stuff, but no one is remotely interested in them, they would rather resuscitate the endless culture wars about why people who send their kids to private schools must be rich wankers etc., etc., a conversation almost entirely furnished by those who have paid millions of dollars for a house that just so happens to be located in the zone of an excellent public school that they attend for free, in postcodes so exclusive they might as well be gated communities.

“Can I say, our goose is cooked”

Today, for the first time since the beginning of this lockdown, I realised our goose is cooked. 

Those of you in regional NSW will have woken up to the news that masks must be worn outdoors in NSW. Previously, the rule was indoors, or in proximity to other people-snouts.

Outdoor mask wearing is the first restriction so far that is not based in strong health evidence. NSW’s CHO would not defend it on health grounds when questioned yesterday. The new rule was brought in at the request of NSW Police. 

To be clear, masks *do* limit transmission of SarsCov2 between people, somewhere in the order of 30-70%.  However, you can’t give it to yourself. The new rule means you can be fined up to $5k for standing, on your own, outdoors, without a mask on. 

It’s a small thing though, yes? And it’s only temporary? Probably. But this new rule indicates the beginning of the end for NSW’s lockdown. 

Gladys Berejiklian indicated that a curfew and outdoor masks were the ‘final measures’ NSW would take to curb the spread of SarsCov2, a subtle nod to the carping twitteratti who cite Melbourne’s successful lockdown last year. 

Melbourne had outdoor mask wearing and a curfew. The outbreak was contained. 

However, Victoria brought in one other measure; THEY PAID POOR PEOPLE TO STAY HOME FROM WORK. This is something the twitterati and chattering classes often overlook, because it does not affect them. 

The Victorian government realised, like NSW Health has acknowledged, that most transmission occurs in workplaces.  Sick people and their contacts were continuing to go to work because they had no choice. 

Victoria introduced payments so they could stay at home. It worked. 

NSW’s ‘final measures’ do not include payments to stay at home. This is why the outbreak remains mostly confined to Sydney’s boiler room. Outdoor masks and curfews may limit some spread. They will not reduce the outbreak if the main cause of transmission is not addressed.

Premier Berejiklian’s outdoor mask rule is performative authoritarianism in response to political pressure from the Federal government, who are in turn, deflecting her criticisms about the slow vaccine roll out. 

We are told the outdoor mask rule ‘sends a message’ – blaming citizens for ‘not doing the right thing’. 

If you had to choose between buying food for your kids or going to work with a cough, which is ‘the right thing?’ Poor people aren’t naughty or stupid.  They don’t need ‘another strong message’ to remind them they are in a lockdown. 

The outdoor mask and curfew send a very different message;

1. this government will not introduce the only measure proven to work against containing the virus – paying sick people to stay home. It has given up on the outbreak in NSW and is now focusing on vaccination. 
2. The punitive ‘final measures’ attribute blame firmly onto citizens, to deflect from the government’s lack of management. If we are squabbling between ourselves, dobbing and arguing while hiding from cops, apparently we won’t notice the absence of leadership.
3. Berejiklian’s time is up. She is making political, rather than evidenced-based, decisions to illustrate to the political classes that she is ‘doing something’. 

This is a dangerous move for Berejiklian. The Premier has mistaken her constituents’ willingness to pull together and get something really great done for a love of performative authoritarianism.  Punitive measures only work if the majority understand why they exist. So far, the measures have been difficult but defensible on public health grounds. Until now. 

With a heightened public awareness of Ggovernment control, thanks to paranoid stats-bros on instagram et al, this is not the time to be cavalier with the NSW Government’s increased powers. Measures must be rigorously defensible and based in evidence (as they have been up till yesterday). 

No-one in Western NSW has forgotten the last time the government gave themselves ‘special powers’ and the military rolled into communities a la, The Intervention, all on the basis of a concocted moral panic of an ‘epidemic of sexual abuse of children’.

This is a very, very silly game.

Choose your own apocalypse: COVID and bushfires.

As many others have noted, the coronavirus pandemic is illustrating the peculiarities of our relationships to one another as individuals within a society. Indeed, most historians would argue that communicable diseases initiated the modern state as we know it. In short, there’s death and taxes but the buck stops at plumbing.

I used to live in California, and my friends give an interesting and troubling insight into daily life in the age of the pandemic. Most of my contemporaries have children, all are educated and financially secure, and all have been self isolating to various degrees since about February. I should say, I haven’t lived there for years so I can only make statements on what I see from my friends and in the news.

School goes back in California this month and Governor Newsom has declared that children will return to online learning only. For my contemporaries this means they continue to live in isolation whilst working from home. In some ways our lives are similar – I’m working from home, although I could go into the office and be relatively safe. I would be temperature checked, logged in and there would be a limit on the number of people I could be in a room with. However, in other ways I’m realising that we’re on quite different trajectories.

For us in NSW, schools closed for 6 weeks early on in the pandemic (about March). Despite some local cases, schools have remained open with some restrictions around adults on campus, hand hygiene and group gatherings. Mostly though, school is back to normal.

I can go walk down the street in my local town and see maybe only one or two people wearing a mask. I can go shopping more or less as normal. I can visit friends for a cup of tea. e’d probably sit outside. Many councils are now relaxing rules on outdoor seating so cafes can close their indoor spaces.

In areas where social distancing is not possible, people are asked to wear masks, and almost entirely comply. In short, the government has explained the risk and the conditions under which masks are appropriate, and by and large, most people follow the guidelines. Our local supermarket is sometimes quite busy and has asked all patrons to wear masks. Everyone does. It’s not ‘required’ and no-one will be thrown out of the shop, but so far I’ve not seen anyone without a mask. Other smaller shops, the butcher for instance, have limits on customer numbers. People wait outside until they can go in. It makes sense – you’re just waiting anyway.

Mostly though, people aren’t wearing masks unless they’re asked to (the chemist for instance, asks people to do so, and people do). Aside from a bit less social interaction, our lives are more or less unchanged.

For my friends in California, life seems to me to be more restricted. People appear to be consciously living in ‘bubbles’, children largely remain within their family ‘bubble’ and food/supplies is managed either through online ordering or strategised procurement.

A friend’s online posts on show her hiking in the wilderness with a friend, for miles in solitary wilderness, both of them wearing cloth masks. I wonder if the cloth masks (rather than N95 masks) are to protect others – it seems to be the case, signalling inclusion in a community of likeminded people who care about one another and have a sense of social solidarity. When venturing out of this community, however, they will encounter much larger groups of people who’re not wearing masks – generally poorer people who’re performing essential work (like delivering groceries) and will likely get the virus soon if they haven’t already.

And this is the point: In essence, my friends are waiting in virtual gated communities for the virus to reach some level of herd immunity in the surrounding population. In other words, at a certain point, rumoured to be around Christmas, the virus will reach a tipping point between susceptible and infected in the population at large.

Let me tell you about birds.

Last month a flock of black cockatoos stripped every nut off our huge macadamia tree, screeching and dropping the shells onto the driveway. We’ve always had black cockies in the trees out the back but this is the first time they’ve been hungry enough to have a crack at the tree.

They’re here because we live in a small patch of unburned bush, not more than about 20 square kilometres in size. The fires that ripped through our area on New Year’s Eve and then twice more in the coming weeks were stopped by the river, a natural firebreak, on our northern boundary.

This small oasis of bush, which is now a refuge, groaning with hungry birds and animals, is now considered ‘safe’ – because it’s been effectively back-burned. 

I can’t help thinking of my friends in California, living in small, largely COVID-free havens where people work hard to reduce both their personal risk and the risk to others in their small, likeminded community, waiting for the surrounding population to backburn an ‘asset protection zone’ around them and effectively reduce the risk to zero.

Of course, you can’t account for a random lightning strike.

In Australia, we’re all more or less susceptible to COVID19.  The numbers of cases in Victoria are shocking for us, but they’re actually comparatively small. In NSW for instance (my state) we’ve recorded 3 new cases today, all linked to existing clusters. The numbers are declining daily. We may get to ‘effective elimination’ where we assume the disease is still around, but in very low numbers. There’s an enormous, continuous testing effort, and an elaborate contact tracing and testing program. We are unburned forest. Our ‘asset protection zone’ is the ocean. It’s no surprise that so much focus is on Australia’s borders. New Zealand is in a similar situation.

In a way, California seems more like a tale of two cities – a small, relatively wealthy community of people living amongst a much, much larger service class. This itself isn’t new –  California’s economy is often described as suffering from a form of Dutch disease – there’s a huge discrepancy between the small, high income elite and the much poorer, much larger majority who’re participating solely in a domestic economy (both working and consuming in the service and retail sectors).

Will these ‘two countries’, one ‘letting it rip’, the other ‘waiting it out’ make it to the Christmas herd immunity, with a small non immune population surrounded and protected by a much larger immune population?

In Australia we’re all sitting it out, waiting while the rest of the world ‘burns’, only our borders between the two groups is physical, whereas in California, it’s simply money and fragile networks of separation.

Interesting times.

Bushfires and kids

Just before school finished for the holidays the RFS and ‘State Mitigation’ (such a great Orwellian name) undertook a controlled burn in the bush immediately to the south of our suburb. These burns are not usually advertised in any way, except on facebook which means most people don’t know about them. Obviously then, these proscribed or controlled burns usually elicit some level of panic.

We knew about the burn because we know the landholder. However, many did not. In fact, the first we knew that the burn had started was a flurry of frantic text messages from friends in the area – ‘where’s that smoke coming from? what can u see from your place?’

The kid was on the school bus. As it wound its way alongside the river, the schoolkids caught sight of the huge plume of smoke rising out of the bush behind their homes. They all began screaming and crying, and asking the teens on the bus (who had phones) to call their parents to find out if the fire was coming to burn their houses down.

Imagine sitting on a bus with 30 odd kids screaming and crying at the sight of a controlled burn.

That’s the impact of the 2019/2020 fires. I know kids who can’t sleep, still. Kids who started wetting the bed. Kids who became overly worried about every small thing. Then, when Covid came along, these particularly anxious kids were affected particularly badly. Others, often those who hadn’t experienced the fires (many families had left the area over Christmas as the air quality was so poor) mocked and teased the more anxious of their number.

We’re fortunate – our lives are relatively un-touched by the fires. We’re adults, we can monitor and mitigate risk, and had a sense of control over it. We knew, for instance, that we needed to stay awake and monitor the bush behind us for fire, as the RFS comms was not reliable. We also knew that our suburb was one of the safer areas, skirted by a large river that acts as a fire break. Finally, we were prepared to GTFO. We had several options, so if roads were closed there were other ways we could get to the river or the beach. We’d been thinking about this for literally years.

Kids don’t have this adult thinking.

 

Mental health and other fables

I drive a lot. And when I drive I listen to podcasts. I’ve been listening to ABC’s The Health Report for a very long time. It’s always good, and often covers things that I wouldn’t encounter elsewhere.

Yesterday as I drove through the gathering dusk of a rainy Tuesday evening, I heard Norman Swan interview a woman called Christine Morgan. 

Christine Morgan has found herself, quite willingly, at the intersection of a multi-faceted political shit-storm. Bushfires and now Covid-19 are, quite predictably wreaking economic havoc on regional communities, many of which are already the poorest areas in Australia.

Quite naturally, the usual cabal of self interest carpet baggers have rolled up with their grab-bag of expected demands – MORE FUNDING FOR MENTAL HEALTH. Apparently we’re on the precipice of a suicide crisis.

Public health funding for interventions is so hard to come by, and usually requires robust proof of efficacy. In mental health though, evidence is often optional.

And yet, in light of no evidence of efficacy, the government announced 19 million dollars for some kind of regional mental health thingo. I say that, because, under sustained, direct questioning from Norman Swan, a medical practitioner who, no doubt, is acutely aware of the punishing requirements of funding, Ms Morgan could not tell him what the plan would actually do.

Morgan emitted some garbled fuck-speak about connectedness and resilience and intersectional community based oriented interpersonal directed tailored appropriate interventions. 

‘Social determinants’ got wedged in there, but as an afterthought.

She was pressed again, and again, spent five minutes wittering on about the same key jargon terms above.

Swan was magnanimous in defeat.

I live in post-bushfire regional Australia. It’s obvious that the mental health that Morgan is talking about is actually social ‘health’ – insecure housing, no money and poor physical health. 

Solving that problem is very expensive. So instead, people like Morgan label people mentally unwell, eagerly ‘treated’ by an ever increasing number of graduating psychologists who talk about ‘connectedness’. Connected to what? A job? Enough money to live on? A course of ivermectin for scabies so everyone can get some sleep? A trip to the dentist to treat an abscess?

No. It connects them to a psychologist. Economists call this ‘supply side market manipulation’. If you ask a psychologist if you need government funded psychological help, what are they going to say? No thanks, we hate money?

Every morning I take my dog to the beach, early. We park in the carpark and walk the track to the beach. About a month after the fires I pulled up and saw a guy getting out of his car, with some difficulty. His leg was in a full cast, up to the thigh. He managed to manoevre himself out of the car, across the carpark and down to the toilet block. He was sleeping in his car, with a broken leg.

I saw him most mornings for about a month. Then there was another guy with a clapped out green Hyundai. He usually put the bonnet up during the day so people wouldn’t call the Council. Then there was another guy in an old Mazda Astina. He gave me a fright, because his face was pressed up against the window as he slept. In the dim dawn light he looked as if he was dead.

These are the ‘traumatised people’ that these mental health practitioners are ‘helping’. They meet with them in a warm office and offer them instant coffee and biscuits. They make suggestions and ‘develop strategies’. They ‘put them in touch with local services’ – as Christine Morgan outlined for us. These local services are organisations like Campbell Page, a company that exists to operationalise the punitive end of the Centrelink system.

Does this assist their mental health? Of course it doesn’t.

So how is it that people like Christine Morgan manage to extract literally millions of dollars out of the public purse to employ an ever increasing cohort of graduate psychologists? Who wins?

Well, obviously the psychologists. After all, this is corporate welfare, no different than the ‘Employment Agencies’ who also happen to be generous donors to the Liberal Party.

The big winner though is the government.

Convincing people their problems are caused by mental illness, rather than social inequality individualises the blame & undermines their sense of personal strength. It tells them, ‘Your misery is your fault. It’s because you’re mentally unwell’. It enfeebles and depoliticises them. In individualises them and makes them feel like they’re unusual.

‘Mental health’ is an effective strategy for defusing real social change. 

And who are the losers in this game? Well, obviously those who’re suffering from real social disadvantage, those who could do with secure tenure in a rental property and a trip to the dentist.

But there’s another set of losers, those with real mental health issues. We never hear about these people until it all goes wrong – the young man who murdered Eurydice Dixon in Melbourne, for instance.

Reallocating finding into ‘lifestyle’ mental health instead of ‘real’ mental health services for people who have illnesses like schizophrenia and bi-polar is bloody criminal. And yet these are the people who’re least able to advocate for themselves. Psychologists won’t advocate for them because these people actually need real help, and that’s not something they’re in the business of providing. Once again, it falls upon real medical professionals to try to secure funding for a pressing and serious group of illnesses.

The mental health gravy train is also an artefact of middle class, professional psychologists, who’ve seldom experienced real, grinding poverty. For them, it’s inconceivable that a person might find their circumstances so bleak that they would consider suicide as an ‘out’. For these psychologists, suicide is, by definition, a mental health issue.

It’s not.

We could halve the suicide rate in Australia in six months. We would ensure people’s social health. We would give them secure housing, healthcare, dentistry, access to work, education, good food. We could stop denigrating and humiliating them through the Centrelink/workfare model. We could address homelessness. Some suicides are undoubtedly caused by very real mental health problems, but most are caused by social problems. This is indisputable and reflected in the real rise of suicides with every economic reversal.

We should stop lining the pockets of career carpet-baggers whose mandate is little more than;

– Convince this person they’re mentally unwell so they don’t feel like they can organise collectively against the conditions they find themselves in

– Potentially help them adjust emotionally to being homeless and completely without hope of an improvement in their circumstances.

This new government initiative is meant to be rolled out to address ‘poor mental health’ in regional Australia. It’s insulting. Imagine you lose your job and your home in the pandemic shutdowns.

Is the nice lady with the dangley earrings going to buy you a new house? Or even help you find and pay for a rental? Nope.

But she can try to make you feel happier about being at the pointy end of nature’s climate change catastrophe, and if you’re lucky you’ll get a couple of Wagon Wheels.

 

 

Reading

A funny graph for your Friday morning….

I know that I’m supposed to be talking about my readily impugned dignity and/or vagina, but actually at the moment I spent most of my days reading about the relationship between wages, price signals, inflation rates and the RBA and housing. Specifically, Australia has been experiencing wage decline for quite some time. This has implications.

I’m realising there’s a lot of wobbly data out there, but I found one frequently repeated stat;

– Australians owning at least one investment property;

22% of GenY (age 18-34)

20% of GenX (age 35-49)

19% of Baby Boomers (age 50- ~ 170)

Thought that was interesting.

Investment property comprises about 16% of the residential property market.

More to come I suspect……

History in a stream of consciousness

Shit this is FUN. (1907 Tairawhiti Museum, Gisborne)

In 1967 at the age of almost 100, my Dad’s great Aunt published a book. It details her move from Gympie, Queensland to Gisborne, New Zealand, at the turn of the century. Clara was from a white, colonial family*.

The thing I’ve realised, from reading historical accounts of everyday life, is that there is a point at which historical life becomes somewhat unknowable, a bit like a fairytale. Aunt Clara remarked on this herself as she marvelled at the good fun of rowing little canoes through town along Taruheru creek in Gisborne. She expected it was almost impossible for today’s teenagers, with their cars, television and music, to understand that life before the advent of these things could be hilariously, wickedly entertaining.

I’ve realised that historical accounts of life (dealing with the the last couple of generations) are often reduced to one dimension, a time when people were bad, or mad or good, or completely constrained and dictated by tradition or good manners. These historical characters weren’t ironic, didn’t play with fashion or meanings or boundaries. They didn’t transgress, argue, fret or consider themselves as part of the broader trajectory of life, with a sense of nostalgia or promise.

Their horrors are also unfathomable, for instance, Clara lost her brother in world war one. She writes of him constantly throughout the book, he was her closest friend in many ways. Yet his death is noted in one or two sentences. He was, like many other New Zealand and Australians, killed on the Somme. She doesn’t ruminate on the dimensions of this sadness, perhaps this is what makes older writing seem remote? We’re so used to endless exploitations of emotional whims in literature, when we’re presented with a taciturn description of a loved one’s departure it adds to the cast of unknowability.

Her intention in writing the book was to provide an account of early Gisborne, as she thought this might be of interest. Yet, what interested me the most were her accounts of life in Queensland. She spent most of her young life either in Gympie or Mt Morgan. Clara was from a large family of white people, many of whom are still there.

Mt Morgan was a mining town, although Clara’s father wasn’t a miner, he was a builder. He built some of the mine’s infrastructure but worked in Mt Morgan more generally. Life was obviously hard, but she describes it as a happy time. Like many families, the children came in two batches – a younger and older group. Clara’s parents, Emeline and James, took the youngest batch with them to Gisborne. Both Emeline and James were from Brisbane, so it must have been hard for them to leave Australia and their respective families.

In 1898 there was a devastating drought in Queensland, and many white families left. Her description of the drought and its effects was particularly compelling.

At the risk of becoming a genealogy bore I’ll stop there. Just ruminating I suppose….

 

*The other thing I’ve noticed as I’ve read a little ‘around’ Clara’s story, is the ubiquity of white accounts as ‘Australian’, with enormous interest in the movements of white people throughout Queensland. I tried to read about the Aboriginal history of Mt Morgan in particular, and found it really difficult to obtain information. I wanted to know how people lived in the area, as there was (and is) obviously huge diversity amongst Aboriginal people. I wanted to know what food was cultivated, what their houses were like, what patterns of movement they observed, how they nominated themselves.

It seems likely that the people who lived in the same area as my relative were Gayiri or Garingbal, (and there’s mention of them in the book) but more than that I really struggled to find. Given that I could easily establish the movements of almost every white family in the area at the time (if I’d wanted to, which I don’t), I find it kind of staggering the lack of interest and accounts of local people in the region. As far as I can tell from visiting there, Rockhampton and surrounding areas are incredibly rich – this is land that would have supported large numbers of people. I guess I’m not saying anything we don’t know already, it’s just hard for me, when looking into family history, to escape the feeling that I’m just reading the minutes of a colonial tennis club.