mark lawrence

The Forbidden Tree short animated film

2010-05-12T22:12:00.002+10:00

Apologies to those loyal blog readers who noticed something amiss with this blog post – I had intended to share this short film earlier, but something stuffed up in some 'email to blog' features I'd relied on.

I recommend Forbidden Tree as an interesting, compelling short animation from a film maker whom I think is Persian, with some interesting social comments on what happens when love, or lust, feel the sting of public 'moral' outrage, gossip, and . Love-crime and punishment Iranian style?

I originally found this short film via National Film Board of Canada. I think it was a competition entry on YouTube chanell or network.

Available on YouTube via webindofirst.

[Updated 8 June 2010. Sorry for the delay in fixing this.]

Happy Birthday Jamie, who is four today!

2010-05-02T15:55:00.001+10:00

Happy Birthday Jamie, who is four today!, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

Jamie requested a tiger cake. Of course, Daddy, i.e me, had to deliver!

Did I remember to turn off the oven?

2010-04-16T12:20:00.001+10:00

Did I remember to turn off the oven?, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

At Ron Mueck at NGV International. It's brilliant!

Lawns and storms

2010-03-07T09:49:00.002+11:00

Instead of launching into a long explanation of my absence from blogging and what I'd been waiting for to start again, I've decided to just start blogging again. I wrote this yesterday late afternoon as the rain pelted Melbourne:

I watch a Persian Fairy-floss cloud stream over me and note how incongruous it is compared to the heavy dark storm clouds crowding in from the west. Then I realise that wispy, shredded cloud is only the vanguard of more heavy rain clouds chasing it east.

I'm lying on my back on our freshly mown back lawn, resting from a hot afternoon's work mowing the back and front lawns and the extra long nature strip bordering our corner block. The day's heat and humidity had left me dripping with sweat throughout this bit of domestic heavy-lifting, where I again had the opportunity to reflect on the features and expectations of Australian masculinities that our moving to a larger house with a garden has necessitated. The lawn mowers in our neighbourhood start up like clockwork on Saturdays and Sundays – certainly with greater regularity that mine – and I'm still getting used to this new requirement (after having lived in a unit for nearly five years!)

Instead of retreating into the house once I'd locked the mower away into its metal shed, I lay on the grass to enjoy my handiwork, took off my boots to let my feet feel the grass, and let myself sink into the soft cushion of grass. I can't remember the last time I did this.

Watching the sky darken as the storm clouds roll over me, the thunder comes louder and stronger from the west. I want the raindrops to just fall on me.

The wind starts to pick up and birds dart around seeking shelter. I can't tell if the birds are flying fast or the wind is propelling them through the air. This elevating avian aviatics turns out to be a good sign of the storm closing in, as pretty soon the wind brings pelting rain.

Pretty soon, I decide the novely of lying on the grass and letting the rain fall on me has worn off as the stinging pellets drive me indoors. Not before being well and truly cooled off after my Saturday afternoon chores.

By all accounts, the day's storms brought traffic havoc to the city and lots of rain in a short time. Enough to reassure me that the fruiting orange tree, the prize feature of our backyard, got a good drink. And surely enough rain to get the freshly cut grass shooting up again. An excercise in futility.

Set my time to the clanging clock in Perth's Hay St Mall

2010-02-18T10:47:00.001+11:00

Set my time to the clanging clock in Perth's Hay St Mall, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

The knight figurines chase each other in faux joust as the clock bell strikes the hour. I'm in Perth for work but my body's still on Melbourne time.

Newcastle

2009-11-06T10:51:00.001+11:00

Newcastle, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

This is my second day in Newcastle. I'm here for work. Haven't seen much of town, but like what I've seen so far. People are warm and friendly. Be glad to get home tonight, though.

Time for a stronger climate change response

2009-10-19T22:28:00.001+11:00

This evening, I wrote to Senator Penny Wong, Australia's Minister on Climate Change, urging her to resist the amendments being put forward by the Liberal opposition to water down the Rudd government's proposed greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme (ETS), and instead to strengthen Australia's greenhouse gas reduction strategy.

The email was prompted by Who on Earth Cares, the Australian Conservation Foundation's public climate change campaign. Personally, I find the Rudd government's ETS a whimpy, futile attempt at cutting greenhouse gas emissions and slowing global warming. The ALP government's targets for cutting emissions are pitiful – and certainly not based on what scientists say is needed to prevent dangerous climate change. However, the Turnbull Liberal opposition's attempts to weaken (let's not use mealy-mouthed 'water down', shall we?) the government's scheme and demand greater subsidies for carbon polluters to be worse!

The Who on Earth Cares/ACF online campaigning tool allowed me to send an email to Penny Wong (automatically generated), urging her to strengthen Australia's greenshouse gas reduction, not weaken it. It says:

Dear Minister Wong,

This week the Liberal Party has made it clear that it proposes to weaken the Government’s emissions trading scheme.

I ask you, as someone that is very concerned about climate change, not to cave in to their proposed amendments and weaken Australia’s response to climate change.

I ask you not to give more handouts to the big polluters. Doing so would take the scheme backwards, and impact greatly on Australian taxpayers.

Instead, I ask you to strengthen and pass the emissions trading scheme, and take real action on climate change ahead of the crucial climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December.

Australia has so much to lose from a climate change catastrophe, yet so much to gain in a clean, low carbon economy.

We have abundant renewable energy resources, and huge potential to grow jobs and investment by grabbing a fair share of the global boom in clean technologies.

You have the ability to strengthen the emissions trading scheme by:

• Improving the target for reducing greenhouse pollution. 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 is the minimum credible starting point for Australia; and scientists say we should be making a 40% reduction

• Decrease handouts of free permits to Australia’s biggest polluters – now that the economy is back on track we should be winding back corporate welfare, not increasing it

• Ramping up investment in clean energy jobs and industries that will ensure Australia remains prosperous in the 21st century

• Using funds raised by the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme to help bring developing countries and their people out of poverty through clean economic development, and to cope with climate impacts that are already hurting them.

Australia has a history of leading by example and punching above its weight. I ask you to help continue this tradition.

I added some text below that, in the bit meant for us to 'personalise' our emails and, I guess, prove we are real people rather than the digital version of the rent-a-mob governments so maligned a decade and more ago. I'm sharing it here as an open letter to Penny Wong, Minister for Climate Change. Feel free to use it, or let it inspire your own emails or letters to the Minister. (Write to senator.wong@aph.gov.au)

To Penny Wong, Minister for Climate Change

On a further note, Minister Wong, I would like to strongly urge you to strengthen Australia's greenhouse gas reduction strategy with an insight from Victoria.

I am seriously concerned that in Australia we do all that we can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent – not just slow down – dangerous climate change. If your government caves in to the demands of the Liberal Party and the carbon industry lobbyists, I strongly, strongly fear for the future of my children – my two boys, aged 9 and 3.

Last Saturday 17 October 2009, The Age reported that the huge aluminium smelters in Portland and Point Henry in south-western Victoria are costing Victorians more than $4.5 billion (by the time the contracts end in 2014 and 2016) in electricity subsidies for the smelters, and are likely to cost us more. Aluminium smelting is one of the most energy intensive – and greenhouse polluting – industries in the world, and it makes me angry that not only are we encouraging this industry, but we are actively subsidising it. Furthermore, these smelters are run on electricity generated from burning brown coal – one of the most carbon polluting forms of power generation there is!

If we instead subsidised and supported renewable energy such as solar power and wind turbines to anywhere the same amount, Australia would be in a much better position to tackle climate change!

Former Hamer and Kennett Liberal Victorian government minister Rob Maclellan, who was in the cabinet that decided to support and subsidise the smelters, was reported in that Age article as saying that decision was 'absolute madness' and a 'costly disaster' for our state. He clearly regrets those cabinet decisions! Please Minister, don't find yourself in a situation 10 years from now regretting any decisions you make to weaken Australia's greenhouse gas reduction strategy and throw greater subsidies at the carbon-polluting industries.

Victoria has already witnessed some of the most horrendous bushfires last summer, and I don't want my children living in a world where they have to fear every summer, rather than long for it and embrace the hope of its warmth and sunshine. This would be a horrendous future for us all. I want a carbon neutral future – and a brighter one – form my children. A future where my children will listen to Melbourne's weather report to figure out whether to take an umbrella or pack a jumper, or wear shorts and thongs – not whether to pack their belongings in a car and evacuate to a safe area to avoid a raging bushfire or a cyclonic storm.

Please – do the right thing. Strengthen Australia's greenhouse gas reduction strategy. Don't weaken it.

I welcome the opportunity to hear back from you about what you will do on this matter.

Regards,
Mark Lawrence

From a (little) more innocent summer some 4 years ago, Jacob (now turning 9) building a sandcastle at Squeaky Beach in Wilsons Promontory. I say a little more innocent, or idyllic, as we were still amidst a terrible draught then, and the heatwave that Australia Day weekend was awful! Photo by me.

Ride to work day

2009-10-14T17:41:00.001+11:00

Ride to work day, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

This morning I braved the rain (well, drizzle) to be part of Ride to work day. Surprisingly, it wasn't so bad riding in the wet. The breakfast was lovely, and a good crowd, put on by Yarra Council for participants in the municipality. I met my workmates there.

The audacity of Obama's peace prize

2009-10-10T15:12:00.006+11:00

I only just caught up on Saturday afternoon with the news that Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm amazed, and puzzled. I'm wondering: just what peace has Obama meant to have brought that is worth the Nobel? Iraq? Still tatters. Afghanistan? War. Well?

I haven't yet decided on Obama – on whether he is progressive enough and will be the catalyst for abiding positive change in the US and globally, or be another moderately liberal US President, like Clinton, hemmed in by powerful vested interests and neutralised by the desire to hang on to power. But based on his autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, which I really enjoyed listening to the audio of, I’m open to seeing what he can and will do, and I hope it will be many good and important things. As well as something big on climate change. Because we certainly need it.

It is the kind of hope that I never really had for Kevin Rudd (other than that he take Howard from power). Thus, while I feel less disaffected with Rudd (having expected less of him and the ALP and, perversely, received even less), I do feel we have more to lose if Obama falters.

But this Nobel Peace Prize is another matter. My partner reckons it will damn him. Everything he does now will be judged against the Prize. Will we always be asking of Obama, 'Is he living up to the Peace Prize?' She has a point. Will this mean that the small but crucial steps to peace that he may (need to) put in train will be seen to count for less? We will always expect the grand gestures for peace – even if such gestures are often empty?

In an email to supporters, international human rights online campaigning site Avaaz.org is more open to Obama’s Peace Prize, and sees in it the opportunity to push him to take stronger action on pressing issues of world peace, including climate change:

Obama himself says he's "surprised, humbled" and doesn't yet deserve it -- but he's accepted the Prize as a call to action, "to confront the common challenges of the 21st century" together. On too many pressing issues, the US President seems boxed-in by stubborn interests and has not yet taken courageous action. He deserves to hear our congratulations -- and our message to be bolder.
…
In his Cairo speech this June, Obama spoke of “the world we seek” -- one where “extremists no longer threaten our people, and American troops have come home; a world where Israelis and Palestinians are each secure in a state of their own” and nuclear energy does not trigger conflict -- a world where governments serve their citizens, and the rights of all are respected.

Obama’s words have offered a vision of profound change: all this can perhaps not be achieved overnight. But his push for Middle East peace has not yet been strong enough to overcome the resistance of hardliners in the region. Meanwhile, hawks and conservatives in the US are pressing him to commit 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, instead of changing course to focus more on peace, development and diplomacy.

There is a real risk today that the hope of change will be lost. Leaders are judged finally by their actions, not their words. Only by following through with courageous, transformative action for peace can Obama fulfil his promise -- and only then will history judge that this Nobel Peace Prize is truly deserved.

Avaaz.org see nuclear disarmament, climate change, and peace in the Middle East and Afghanistan as needing Obama's focus and action in the coming months. They are calling on people globally to support Obama and prompt him to stronger action through an online petition:

Only by following through with courageous, transformative action for peace can Obama fulfill his promise -- and history judge that this prize is deserved.

Let's define this moment as a challenge to be bold -- let’s send Obama a million messages of encouragement and urgency, pressing him to turn hope into real and lasting change!

What do you think? Is this Nobel prize audacious? Will our hopes be dashed?

[Image: cliff1066™'s photo of Shepard Fairey’s Portrait of Barack Obama, used
under creative commons license]

Black-faced racism

2009-10-10T14:45:00.000+11:00

When a group of Australian professional men – none of whom black – get together and paint up their faces black, wear large, black curly-haired wigs, dress in the style of '70s disco and R&B, and perform – very badly – a routine satirising 1970s African American family musical group the Jackson Five, you may think that they demonstrated more than just bad taste or a lack of good sense. You may, in fact, feel quite distressed at their racist portrayal of black people – not just African American people but all people of colour who have borne the brunt of white racism. This is quite likely if you are black, or a person of colour, yourself.

In such situations, you may express quiet disgust, you may walk out of the room during the performance, or you may, if you feel brave enough, have a word with one or two of the performers afterward and tell them why you think what they did was racist and wrong, and that they should rethink their attitudes towards African Americans, and black people generally. And it will likely be the subject of conversation amongst those who watched the performance for some time. Quite likely it will end there, or with a half-hearted apology from the performers and the excuse that they were just having a 'bit of fun'.

But when such an act is included in a variety program 'reunion' show broadcast on national television, with potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of viewers, as it was last Wednesday night, you would surely wonder what this said about a country that condoned, celebrated, defended, and advocated such racist depictions and ridicule of black people.

Personally, I'm not really surprised that there are people who would perform such a show, and only a little surprised that Channel Nine broadcast it. I am certainly not surprised that the national conversation in Australia has been divided between those who are aghast and disgusted at the national broadcast of such racist ridicule, on the one side, and those who think it is all just a bit of humour and totally blown out of proportion by those too 'PC' to have a sense of humour and who should just 'get over it', on the other.

I am not surprised, but I am still angry.

I'm not surprised because I do believe that Australia has more than an undercurrent of racism that it not only denies, but actively cultivates. It is the vein of racism that runs under the inaction that allows child malnutrition and food insecurity to continue in Aboriginal communities while the country's richest city, Sydney, throws away AUD$1 billion worth of food a year. A vein that stretched across the string of desert, and now island, concentration camps where asylum seekers were indefinitely detained without trial.

It is the same vein of racism that Pauline Hanson open-cut into a bleeding sore, and that John Howard carefully capped and tapped, to draw on in an continuing drip, drip, drip that helped keep him in power on a wave of fear and hatred of invading asylum seekers, PC-police multiculturalists and dole-bludging blacks.

It is the same vein of racism that sees Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children removed by child protection authorities from their parents at over 8 times the rate of non-Indigenous children – over 10 years after the Bringing Them Home Report and over a year after the Apology to the Stolen Generations.

It is the same vein of racism that saw the Cronulla riots by white Australians expressing extreme racist sentiments and racist violence against Australians of Arab descent, and today sees South Asian international students and migrants, often working in low-paying jobs, fair game for racist attacks, muggings, and robbery.

No, I’m not surprised. But I am angry.

I am angry because this skit, this poor excuse for racist ridicule, was not an unfortunate slip-up of bad judgement by television executives. Channel Nine producers did not just 'let it happen', but in my opinion likely sought out the original performers of the skit broadcast 20 years ago on Hey Hey it's Saturday – when the men were medical students. More than a couple of people must have thought it a good idea to exhume the same group for the come-back show, with a triumphant ‘see where we are now’ punch line: all now medical specialists, with a urologist, anesthetist, and psychiatrist amongst them.

Until Channel Nine got egg on their faces and a clearly angry Harry Connick Jr criticised them for it on air. (The footage of both the skit and Connick’s criticism of it is online.) When Connick said on air, “we have spent so much time trying to not make black people look like buffoons, that when we see something like that we take it really to heart,” he wasn’t kidding. The media and opinion storm in the US has been huge, and overwhelmingly critical of the TV show and of Australia for perpetuating such racism.

Unfortunately for Australia, the criticism seems to have gotten white Australia’s collective back up, and instead of inspiring widespread reflection on the extent of racism in Australia, it seems to be provoking defensiveness and closed ears – as well as the current debate over whether the skit was really racist or just harmless Aussie humour. The opportunity for collective soul searching and effective anti-racism campaigning seems likely to be swamped by this debate.

If such an incident doesn’t prompt privileged white Australia to reflect on the extent of racism in this country, I’m not sure what will. I guess I’m inclined to agree with one of the American reactions reported in The Age:

"As a college-educated, African-American professional who confronts racism daily from cradle to grave, for no other reason than the colour of my skin; it is clear to me now more than ever, that racism against black people will never disappear but continue to be tolerated under various guises."

[Image: 'Poster for minstrel show, 1899', published on flickr by bobster855; used under Creative Commons license]

Originally written for Meanjin Journal's blog, Spike.

Amazing big and little giants

2009-10-10T13:21:00.002+11:00

This has to be the most gorgeous thing I've seen in a long, long while. Truly uplifting public art. And from what I can gather, celebratory and cathartic.

It is the street theatre performance 'The Berlin Reunion' by French Theatre company Royal de Luxe in Berlin on 4 October to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany's reunification. And it gives 'street theatre' new meaning!

You get a better idea of the scale of these giant puppets from this photo.

The story is of a giant who battles sea monsters and such to bring down a wall dividing him from his little niece, and on his victory goes searching through the streets to be reunited with her. 1.5 million people filled Berlin's streets to watch the performance!

The full page photographs featured on The Big Picture are truly amazing, and really capture the details, textures and size of the amazing puppets – the detail, the theatre company's technical feats, and the enormity of the project. And capture the story really well. I wonder if we would ever get anything like it in Melbourne, or elsewhere in Australia. Perhaps to celebrate reconciliation and a treaty between black and white Australia? Someday.

There's also a video of the performance.

The photos I've shown here are creative commons-licensed photos from flickr. From the top, there are by azrael74, derSven ¶ and derSven ¶.

There's also a Royal de Luxe Central photo pool on flickr.

Another beauty on a lovely spring day

2009-10-04T15:56:00.002+11:00

Another beauty on a lovely spring day, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

I saw this gorgeous flower blooming this morning. There's a prize for whoever can correctly, or most accurately, tell me what the flower is. Comp details will be in the comments.

Update: More details on the competition, including the prizes, are in the comments. Keep your entries coming. Competition closes at 12pm on Thursday 8 October 2009. [Updated 12.00 pm Monday 5 October 2009]

Jaws on legs and feathered dinosaurs

2009-09-25T15:35:00.001+10:00

So not only did Tyrannosaurs have feathers, they had a Mini Me as well. Or rather they had midget ancestors.

I lost a bet to a workmate the other week. Well, only half lost a bet. The workplace banter had turned to the Tyrannosaurus rex for some reason, and my colleague made the assertion that Tyrannosaurs had feathers. I rejected that assertion wholeheartedly as I had always thought that T. rexes had some kind of leathery-scaly reptilian skin. After all, Steven Spielberg could not have gotten it wrong, could he?

So for the price of me making her a cup of tea without any comments about the two to three sugars she takes in her cups of black tea (if she was right), I set her the challenge of finding scientific evidence that the T. rex had feathers. Were she wrong, or couldn't find the evidence, I'd be able to occasionally, gently hassle her about the sugar content in her tea (you see, I care about friends facing risks of developing Type 2 diabetes, but I don't think I'm mean or too onerous about it).

The result was half-and-half. My workmate had very quickly dug up the National Geographic's pictures of the Chinese finding a new dinosaur some years ago – a tyrannosauroid that had feathers or some kind of early or hairlike primitive feathers. Or proto-feathers. As so:

I counted with the argument that this tyrannosauroid, Dilong paradoxus, was actually a different species from the Tyrannosaurus rex – in fact an early relative of T. rex, and it was the T. rex that we'd had the bet about.* Either way, the feathered tyrannasouroid created a fair bit of interest in the office.

To top this was the recent news of the Mini T. rex – a relatively tiny ancestor of the T. rex that was only approximately three meters long. The ABC reports that the Raptorex, also found in China, 'weighed only about 60 kilograms and was nearly 100 times smaller than T. rex'.

It may have been as small as an adult human, but it was still letha. As Dr Paul Sereno, paleontologist with the University of Chicago, put it, “It was jaws on legs.”

That ABC piece has some really interesting ideas about why the Raptorex poses some intriguing rethinking about the evolution of the T. rex. For one, the fossil find suggests that 'the skinny arms evolved not in order to help it offset a heavier overall bodyweight, but instead as a trade off for agility and speed.' But there was no suggestion of whether the 'Mini Me' T. rex had feathers too.

I reckon the might of the T. rex, for all its agility and speed, is overated. Those small, skinny arms make me doubt it.

*PS. The bet: while I insisted that my workmate's feathered tyrannosauroid was a seperate, earlier species, I made her a cup of tea with two sugars anyway.

And now a red tulip blooms

2009-09-12T12:44:00.002+10:00

And now a red tulip blooms, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

The fun of getting a mixed bag of tulip bulbs is not knowing what colours you'll get until they flower.

Celestial butterfly

2009-09-10T15:50:00.000+10:00

The refurbished Hubble telescope has caught some new amazing images of the celestial bodies, including this amazing image that has been dubbed a 'celestial butterfly'. Apt. According to the ABC:

The spectacular butterfly-like image is of a nebula, a cloud of stellar dust and gas, created by the last throes of a dying star that once was about five times the mass of the Sun.

I could just get lost in that image if I stared at it for too long. I keep wondering if it will suck me in to a vortex in the middle.

The new images were posted on NASA's Hubble website yesterday. This image is used under the terms of NASA's fair-use policy.

Judith

2009-09-09T10:27:00.003+10:00

I picked up Judith’s shopping list from the footpath the other week, and I certainly hope she lost it on her way home from – not to – her shopping. I have no idea who Judith is. I was walking to the tram stop from yoga and it had just started to shower, when I spotted and picked up the rather damp note from the wet footpath.

It is a small piece of paper that had been cut from a larger sheet. It wasn’t Judith who was the thrifty recycler, but her friend Val, who had originally left this note – quite obviously with the book she was returning to her friend:

Judith
P.S. I was concerned about the library book getting back to you.
What a delightful book & a change from all the serious ones I’ve read this year.
The characters are so believable weren’t they?
Val

Val’s handwriting is that old-school, well-tutored, slanty cursive handwriting that I have often envied but never mastered, in a rather scratchy, almost faint black ball-point pen. What book did Judith enjoy so much that she was prepared to recommend, and lend her library book to, Val? And that Val so enjoyed, and found its characters so believable?

That’s surely the kind of praise every author wants to hear. If only the author could know what Judith and Val thought of the book.

And the note I found was just the ‘PS’. I wonder what else she had to say to Judith. Perhaps she’d dropped in unannounced and had to leave the parcel on the doorstep because Judith was out. Did Val have to cut the notepaper from a larger sheet and rummage in her handbag or glovebox for a pen that worked? You know what that’s like. Three pens in your car/bag/next to the telephone but none work? And you wonder why you’re still hanging on to them? I hope Val got a new pen.

Being a recycler herself, Judith must have written a shopping list on the back of the note Val had slipped in with the returned book. Judith prefers a strong, dark blue felt-tip or gel-ink pen. Liking capitals, Judith’s handwriting is more rounded – untamed. And harder to read.

Judith’s shopping list

Mandarins
Sweet potatoe
Tomatoes
Lge handful Rocket
Ginger – little piece
Garlic
Little potatoes
Avocado
Homous
Goats cheeses
and just below the goats cheese, something indecipherable in a jar (is there a brand of goats cheese in a jar called Meredith?)

And under the heading ‘Coleslaw’ are these items:
Carrots Parsley
Celery Red Onion
Red pepper
Cabbage

Flatbread

I wonder how Judith’s coleslaw went. Judging from the fresh ingredients alone, it sounds like my kind of salad. Then again, I don’t know want went into her coleslaw’s dressing.

What goes into your coleslaw dressing? What fresh ingredients do you use? Have you ever tried adding fresh apple and walnuts to your coleslaw, or should they only be used in a Waldorf salad? I’ve had a potato salad with a little apple and walnut in it, and that seemed to work well.

And would you leave a friend a note if you’d found them not at home, or would you text them?

Say a little prayer for me

2009-09-08T14:45:00.002+10:00

Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul. Inspired by Mike Lynch's Top 100 women singers.

Someone's prayers are being answered. It's raining again in Melbourne. Lovely, wet, grey, soggy rain. The clothes on the line won't dry, but the trees and plants will be certainly greener. And hopefully the catchments a little fuller.

Each day, a little further for fathers

2009-09-06T22:15:00.000+10:00

The other day on the morning train to the city, I observed two men talking about their children. All right, I admit it – I was eavesdropping. But it wasn’t that difficult as they were not guarded in how they spoke with each other, and I sat close to where they stood by the train door.

They didn’t seem to be friends, but they struck me as having the casual familiarity of a couple of men who have met a few times, possibly at the train station where they got on together, and who easily find common ground for casual conversation to kill time while waiting on the platform and riding the train to work.

As they exchanged notes about their children, my attention was piqued as I’m always interested in how and where men find camaraderie over shared (or otherwise) experiences of fatherhood. They appeared to have two young children apiece, including a youngest around 3 years old each – the same as my youngest. When one asked the other if his children got along, the answer was, ‘Aah, yes and no.’ Not an unexpected situation with two young children. When asked in return, the original inquisitor had a different take on that old nutshell: his two young kids got along very well, and delighted in a ‘symbiotic misbehaviour’ – each working off or egging on the other as they got up to mischief together.

I covered a smile as I thought of my two boys – 8 and 3 years old – and their own ‘symbiotic misbehaviour’. That clever choice of words is what prompted me to get out my notebook and record the moment.

One father appeared to care for or spend a lot of time with his two kids for three days a week and talked of how he found that wearing sometimes, especially as one child could ‘talk and talk and talk.’ The other man could empathise with those sentiments, although his personal time with his kids seemed somewhat truncated by work and, besides weekends, his busy work-oriented life was punctuated by only a day or two of leave during the school holidays.

Despite the respective differences in the extent of their parenting, these men seemed to find a common bond in being fathers to young children, and their mutual experiences offered them something to not only pass the time with, but also a level of reflection and wonder at parenting and masculinity today. They enjoyed a fraternity of male parenting that I wondered whether was available to their fathers’ generation.

Women often laugh at men talking like this – surely three days with the kids, let alone weekends and occasional school holidays, are hardly ‘real’ cause enough to find parenting stressful! But for these men, and for many, many men in similar shoes (and I include myself in this shoe shop), the time spent with their children is both a time of joy and anxiety. Parenting is rewarding and stressful, enlightening and frustrating, heartbreaking and exhilarating, fun and downright annoying – for fathers as well as for mothers. And the more time men spend as active parents, the more we will encounter the frustrations and conflicts of child-rearing, as well as their joys and rewards. And the more we will learn from these experiences.

However limited or broad their parenting responsibilities, when men are able to whinge, swap notes, boast, let off steam, or get advice about or otherwise explore their experiences as fathers, their sense of being fathers is affirmed. And surely that is good for everyone – fathers, mothers and children.
________________

This year is the first that I've had to celebrate Father's Day without my dad. I don't think I'm used to it yet. No card or present to buy and send, no early morning phone call to him, no chance to tell him once again how much I love and appreciate him. But I still thought about him, and missed him.

It's spring again, and the tulips that my youngest and I planted in autumn are flowering. They are gorgeous. Flowering now so long after we planted the bulbs, they remind me of the fun I had with my son as we got our hands dirty mixing compost with potting mix and planting the bulbs. Spring bulbs are a lovely way to mark the passing of the seasons, and I'm really enjoying how the days are getting warmer and lighter, with the odd shower thrown in.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads reading this blog. I hope you had a great day.

Two stops early

2009-08-18T16:51:00.004+10:00

It's amazing what happens when you grab the chance and get off the tram two stops early.

I keep seeing these pieces of street-art from the tram when I'm near my work. Today I got off the tram two stops early so I could enjoy them up close and photograph them. Finally!

For reasons that appear apparent to me, the piece above reminds me of Kirty's recollection of a Joni Mitchell song.

My youngest loves ladybugs at the moment. He'll be wrapped with this photo.

And, of course, a tiger. This one's pretty good for a stencil art-piece. Nice lines.

At the Collingwood V Richmond game at the MCG

2009-08-15T15:56:00.001+10:00

At the Collingwood V Richmond game at the MCG, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

With my son Jacob and my old boss. Pies lead by 64. I don't even support either team! Jacob's the Pie's fan. The sacrifices we make for our kids.

From the mouth of babes

2009-08-14T09:13:00.004+10:00

From the mouth of babes, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

Did you ever think that one day you would raise fire-breathing monsters?

Something to brighten up a fog-grey day

2009-08-12T08:54:00.001+10:00

Something to brighten up a fog-grey day, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

I'm in the city for a third day in a row, which is very unusual for me. A heavy fog settles on the city like a dowager's peticoats. Give me spring. Or colour.

Home-made pizza night

2009-08-07T19:07:00.001+10:00

Home-made pizza night, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

We are making pizza tonight with Shelley's home-made dough. This is one of the smiley-face pizzas for the kids. Yum!

Three true things

2009-08-06T11:15:00.000+10:00

It's rare that I actually get to see the genesis of a meme. Kirsty's blog post of three true things she'd recently read in fiction really inspired me, and triggered a strong response from Genevieve of reeling and writhing and others too, and so this meme has emerged.

The idea is to post three true things you've read recently that are from fiction:

1.

"They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history, and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away."

– Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, p. 52.

2.

"Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter."

– Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, p. 53.

3.

Outside the playground, in the open park, with the hill rising up in front of him and the sky beyond it, he felt like walking forwards for a long time with his eyes closed, leaving everyone behind, in order, for a bit, to have no thoughts. For years, before his children were born, he seemed to have forfeited Sundays altogether. Now the poses, the attitude, the addictions and, worst of all, the sense of unlimited time, had been replaced by a kind of exhausting chaos and a struggle, in his mind, to work out what he should be doing, and who he had to be to satisfy others.

– Hanif Kureishi, from his short story 'Hullabaloo in the Tree'.

As you can tell, I've recently re-read The God of Small Things some 10 years after I first read it. And I have enjoyed more about it now. I downloaded Kureishi's story off his website some time back and found it as I sorted through my desk this morning, and remembered how struck I was by it. So it pipped the Rushdie excerpt I originally thought to include. I've raved about Kureishi's story before. I actually found it hard to limit this meme to three true things, so I'll probably revisit this theme sometime.

I'm tagging Matthew Smith from Smithology (because I'm curious what truths he may find in the sci-fi he blogs about) and Mike Lynch from Nannygoat Hill.

Riding the City Circle tram

2009-08-05T12:44:00.001+10:00

Riding the City Circle tram, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

This was my pefered way to get around the city for a presentation I gave today. I've been fond of these old trams since I first came to Melbourne.

Another first

2009-07-27T17:40:00.001+10:00

Following on from my first published piece of non-fiction is my first review! My remix story, published in the Remix My Lit project's anthology, Through the Clock's Workings, was mentioned in the review of the anthology in last Saturday's The Age A2 supplement (25 July 2009).

I was really surprised. I was reading the A2 in bed before going to sleep – trying to catch up on the paper I'd hardly had a chance to read all afternoon – when I came across the review of the anthology. I was pretty excited, I must admit. The review also examined the Remix My Lit initiative the anthology was published from, and remixing generally, so it wasn't much of a straight 'review', but I was amazed my story was actually mentioned.

I was hoping to just link to the review online and leave it at that, but of course A2 content is not online at all, is it? And while fearful that I'd appear frightfully boastful, I thought 'what the heck' and decided to publish the excerpt that mentions my story. Although, for sake of correction or accuracy, I would not dream of describing myself as a poet. I have to say, when I first saw the opening lines of the paragraph my name is mentioned in, my heart sank, but then I read on!

"…Some Remix My Lit efforts read like tame first year creative writing exercises. The best ones either develop the original in an intriguing new direction (as Amra Pajalic does with Cate Kennedy's Renovator's Heaven) or somehow intensify its emotional effect. For instance, Danielle Wood's story How to Domesticate a Pirate lyrically explores big themes such as marriage, domesticity and consumption. But in the hands of poet Mark Lawrence, words are radically stripped back and rearranged, producing an emotional subtlety I found far more moving than the original work."

Wow.

I don't necessarily buy into the reviewer's comparison of my remixed story and the original it is based on, but I appreciate the sentiments greatly. After all, it was the powerful emotion in Danielle's story that drew me to read it and remix it and play with it like on a riff at that live remixing event at Fed Square last year.

Still. Wow.

Dancehall station

2009-07-24T16:12:00.001+10:00

For the end of the week. Enjoy. I know I certainly did.

Via crazybrave on twitter, with thank. One of the best things I've seen on YouTube in a long time.

[Update: Had a go at fixing the embeded video so that it would fit within the width of the text column. 5.05pm 27 July 2009]

A delicate dance in space

2009-07-23T22:06:00.001+10:00

International Space Station in orbit

This story captured my imagination earlier this week, and I've been meaning to share my take on it sooner. Last Saturday afternoon (local Eastern Australian time), the space shuttle Endeavour docked with the International Space Station some 354 kilometers above the Gulf of Carpentaria.

On first hearing the news of the launch of the shuttle and it's subsequent docking, I didn't really grasp the significance of how delicate the docking manoeuvre is, and the enormity of that event. Not until I read that the two space vehicles were traveling at 28,000 kilometres per hour when they approached each other! According to NASA, this gave Commander Mark Polansky, the commander of the Endeavour, a margin of error of 4.5 centimetres to complete the procedure. That's shorter than the length of my index finger! Ouch. I hate to think of what would happen if he'd missed. Or they'd rammed each other.

For all the bad news surrounding the US's aging shuttle fleet, and some of the technical difficulties – and exorbitant expenses – with the growing international space station, it was good to hear of some success. It is quite heartening to think of the immensity of skill, training, good technology and probably a bit of dumb luck behind the deceptively simple notion of a successful space docking. I am, admitedly, awed to think of these two tin cans hurtling through space at each other, albeit in orbit, and being able to connect in a delicate balance of what I imagine to be lots tiny adjustments involving rocket thrusters, velocity, angles, calculations, and computer programming – and probably 'upside down', at that.

A far cry from the days of hurling grappling hooks on the end of ropes.

Of course, with the Americans' finely tuned sensibility for a good story and creating media buzz, they would have timed this space mission to capitalise on the 4oth anniversary of the moon landing of Appollo 11, and they have made much of the success of both this launch and the docking.

They must be very annoyed, then, when the news came out that the main toilet on the International Space Station broke. How does that happen on a multi-million (billion?) space station? I guess if Melbourne can't even get the air-conditioning to work properly on its trains, it's hard to expect perfection on a space station. Though it's not like you can just call out the plumber or have a new toilet flown in. And it's not great timing when you've now got a joint crew of 13 on board needing the toilet!

The BBC News online service has video of the Endeavour crew being welcomed aboard the space station, which is funny to watch, but I've decided to share this other famous clip instead – in honour of the astronauts (and cosmonauts) dancing that wonderfully delicate dance in space.

Homer and the Space Chips (via huluDotCom)

Let's hope that things stay well for the crews of the Endeavour and the space station as they pursue their missions.

Images from NASA, used under the terms of NASA's fair use policy]

What lies beneath Melbourne's lanes?

2009-07-14T12:34:00.004+10:00

What lies beneath Melbourne's lanes?, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

From 'Bone Bed', works on paper by Tom O'Hern, showing in Platform subway gallery under Flinders Street.

What lies beneath Melbourne's lanes Part 2, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

They explore the layers of detritus and bones burried under Degraves Street, ane evoke Melbourne's violent colonial history. Showing until 31 July.

[Edited 12.30pm 15 July 2009: merged two separate posts into this one]

Happy Birthday Shelley!

2009-07-12T16:51:00.001+10:00

Happy Birthday Shelley!, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

It's been a wonderful day - we've had a lovely celebration of my partner's birthday. With Nigela Lawson's chocolate cake.

Manna from heaven

2009-07-08T18:40:00.001+10:00

This afternoon I went along to a NAIDOC Week event hosted by a bunch of federal government departments. It wasn't the most community-oriented event I've been too – it appeared mainly targeted at those in community services or public service departments and agencies who work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Victoria. I went to this event for work reasons.

It was still good because there were a fair few Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people working in either federal public service delivery or Victorian community agencies there, and it was good to meet and greet and see some faces behind the organisation's names.

But the nicest thing about the event was the speech and Welcome to Country by Aunty Joy Murphy, a highly respected elder of the Wurrundjerri, the traditional owners of the land on which most of Melbourne is on, and certainly of Fitzory where the event was held.

Aunty Joy treated us to a potted history of the elders behind the movement for Aboriginal rights in Victoria and the beginnings of NAIDOC, and how Fitzroy has been an important location for Victoria's Aboriginal rights movement and community-controlled services since the early 1900s. But it was her welcome message that gave me the most food for thought.

After she welcomed us in language, Aunty Joy told us that part of the welcome was based the importance of the Manna Gum to her family and the Wurrundjerri people. Bearing a branch of green lush Manna gum leaves from her traditional country near Healsville, she explained that the welcome invited us to share in the community and its country – from the very tips of the gum leaves high in the sky, down to the roots deep in the earth.

Being someone who likes to visualise things figuratively, this appealed to me a lot. It is lovely to think of sharing in a thousands-year-old culture and its connection to the land in this way. To imagine our connection to the air and the leaves reaching out through it, as well as to the earth via the roots.

It also makes me wonder a fair bit about what we're doing to our ecology and to the climate in our carbon-intensive society.

Friday's NAIDOC March and Rally will be quite a different event – with lots more community, and certainly more issue and politically based – but I value this opportunity for reflection today. Thanks, Aunty Joy.

[Image: The photo is of eucalyptus blossoms I took at my suburban train station a little while ago. I have no idea what type of gum, though.]

Everyone should celebrate NAIDOC this week

2009-07-07T17:40:00.003+10:00

It's NAIDOC Week this week, a time for celebrating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and communities. The week is also a great opportunity to highlight the strength that culture and community offer Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

There's a lot that you can do to join with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in celebrating NAIDOC Week.

This year's NAIDOC theme, 'Honouring Our Elders, Nurturing Our Youth', highlights the importance the community places on its Elders and its young people. It is important to acknowledge Elders and the role they play in supporting, teaching and guiding young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, many of whom are struggling to find their feet and their way forward.

Brian McCoy's excellent reflection on this year's theme captures this point very well. McCoy, an anthropologist specialising in Indigenous health and well-being who has worked with desert Aboriginal communities for a long time, shows how important NAIDOC week is – not only to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples but to all Australians.

Considering last week's report on Indigenous disadvantage, the latest in a long line of official reports that highlight the growing gap in disadvantage between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia, this is an important demonstration of community strength and support. It's a way for many communities to show that they can make a difference, and are making a difference, for the better.

And it's an important way for non-Indigenous people to show their solidarity with Indigenous communities on this matter.

There are lots of NAIDOC Week events across the country. You'll find a calendar of events if you pick up a copy of the country's only Indigenous controlled national newspaper, the Koori Mail. You can also get information from local NAIDOC committees and Indigenous groups.

If you’re looking for a NAIDOC event in Melbourne, the NAIDOC March & Rally is on Friday 10 July. The march starts off at the Aboriginal Health Service on Nicholson St, Fitzroy at 10 am and makes its way to Federation Square. More details here.

How dumb can the Liberals get?

2009-06-18T23:37:00.004+10:00

Let me get this right – the federal Liberal Opposition's spokesperson for Women's Affairs, Sophie Mirabella, employs a male staff member who after three days on the job sexually harasses a number of women at a public event. (Allegedly, but what else do you call trying to or asking to fondle/touch their breasts?)

At last night's Mid Winter Ball hosted by the Parliamentary Press Gallery, no less?

What?

Tony Scrinis is his name. He was the shadow spokesperson's media adviser! I saw 'was' as he has 'resigned' today. You can't spin your way out of this one, mate. Talk about career suicide. Does this guy have any clue about this work, or was this just a job for one of the boys?

Importantly, does the Liberal's Sophie Mirabella have any clue about hiring the right people? I mean, this is Women's Affairs, for crying out loud!

How stupid can these people get?

King of the fruit - in Brisbane

2009-06-14T16:31:00.001+10:00

King of the fruit - in Brisbane, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

I'm in Brisbane this weekend. My mum's best friend bought us some durian. Some think it's disgusting, but I think its the king of fruit. I haven't had it in years. Yum.

The best news all week

2009-06-11T11:16:00.000+10:00

This Age report, Heat on to fix branch stacking, has to be the best news I've heard all week:

"The revelations [of serious branch stacking and questionable memberships in ALP branches] come as ALP state secretary Stephen Newnham fights to keep his job as factional forces and senior government figures push for change."

Barista has only a couple of the reasons why that makes me glad – mainly that the name of the ALP's state secretary crops up a fair bit around instances of dirty tricks and smear campaigns in various elections.

Though I doubt getting rid of him would really put an end to the old dirty tricks beloved by the ALP. Would make me happy, though.

Published

2009-06-04T10:20:00.003+10:00

I am published.

Well, I've always wanted to finally be able to say that, and in terms of how the publishing world works, now I can. My short, short story 'How to Domesticate a Pirate [Live Fed Square Remix] has been published in the Remix My Lit anthology.

The anthology Through the Clock's Workings was edited by Amy Barker and published by Sydney Uni Press. You can buy it online from SUP (link above). There's an ebook of it floating around as well, but I can't find the link to it.

The anthology is part of the Remix My Lit initiative to encourage the creative exchanges, remixing and mutations of Creative Commons licensed creative works. Here's how they describe the anthology:

A world first! The first remixed and remixable anthology of literature.

This anthology of short stories is not some textual tome, frozen in time and space. It is alive, evolving organically in a constant state of flux. Why? Because each story is available under a Creative Commons licence, giving you rights to share and reuse the book as you see fit.

The stories are great They are excellent examples of what collaboration and creative sharing and remixing can do to creative interesting writing and works of art. I urge you to buy the anthology.

My story is a remix of a 'Remix My Lit' story by Danielle Wood, which is also included in the anthology. The stories and the whole anthology are published on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australian license.

My remix was part of the live remixing event at Federation Square at last year's Melbourne Writer's Festival, which I blogged about. You can read the original version of my remix story as I'd published it on this blog then. I think the edited vesion in the anthology is better, though. It's short, but I had a lot of fun with it.

I'd heard much earlier this the year that my story had been selected, and it went through the editorial feedback process etc, but the publisher had asked contributors not to say anything publically until the launch. Well, I've just heard that:

Through the Clock’s Workings was launched at the Copyright Future: Copyright Freedom Conference at Old Parliament House (OPH) in Canberra on Wednesday 27th May by Dr Terry Cutler (Cutler and Co Melbourne).

Would have liked a bit more notice, but can't be too fussy, can I?

When I think of the idea that I am 'finally' a 'published' writer, I wonder what that means about the eight years and more that I have been writing, editing and publishing (and desktop publishing) in my previous and current jobs. Working in the community sector, I have written, co-written, ghost written, edited and published a lot of material for the organisations I work for, particularly currently. But I guess that doesn't seem to count as 'being published'. More than half the time, my name isn't put to much that I write. Not because I'm not proud of it, but because it's written and published under the organisation's name, or its leadership's. I'm okay with that. It's what I've signed up for. It's pretty much what 'communications' and much of project work is (and I'm finalising a really big one right now!). And I care about this work.

At times such as this, though, when a one-page story is published in an anthology and I'm publically credited as the author, and it is my first published piece of fiction, it makes me think of the reams of content I've written and edited that don't have my name to them. They are still my creative enterprise, and have a large part of me in them.

The image of the cover of Through the Clock's Workings is designed by Ali J and is creative commons licensed.

Street art

2009-06-03T09:42:00.001+10:00

Street art, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

A good thing about a big art exhibition being in town is seeing art in unexpected places - even if it's advertising on tram stops - in the suburbs.

Taking cleaning to new heights

2009-06-02T15:41:00.001+10:00

Taking cleaning to new heights, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

A window cleaner working on the exterior of a building on Degraves Street.

There be monsters

2009-06-02T13:36:00.001+10:00

There be monsters, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

In the city, monsters lurk around every corner waiting to pounce and gobble you up. Some also want to sell you charity.

Australian filmmaker wins Camera d'Or

2009-05-26T16:54:00.003+10:00

Congratulations are due to Warwick Thornton, whose first feature film Samson And Delilah has been awarded the Camera d'Or prize at Cannes. The award is for a first-film by a first-time film director.

El from elswhere has previously reviewed the film and its Extraordinary premiere in Alice Springs at Sars Lite, and I highly recommend it to those who missed her post.

I am somewhat disgruntled, though, that the media keeps referring to Thornton as an Aboriginal filmmaker. I know, and respect the fact, that Warwick Thornton is a proud Aboriginal man, who is strongly connected to his family and community in Alice. But why aren't Australians, and our media, ready to simply celebrate our writers and filmmakers and artists and musicians (and their achievements) as art makers first and foremost, and then, yes, Australian, and, yes, certainly Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander if they are of that background?
[Yes, there's more! Click on 'Read more' to read the rest of this post!]

Why are the media reports of his win constantly referring to 'Aboriginal filmmaker Warrick Thornton'? Why not 'Australian filmmaker'? Am I too sensitive in presuming an undercurrent of 'wow, he's managed to win it despite being Aboriginal'?

Is Thornton being Aboriginal the story, or is how good a film Samson and Delilah is the story?

Yet Samson and Delilah is constantly referred to as an Aboriginal film. Surely it is that but more, and everything else besides? Thornton himself considers it a love story first and foremost (and at least The Age picks that up in the headline 'Australian love story wins Cannes prize'), and yes its actors, characters, setting and plot drivers are Aboriginal, but surely this is not a only, or purely, an Aboriginal film?

If anything, the jury at Cannes seems to get it, describing it "as the best love film they had seen for many years."

I don't doubt that Thornton being Aboriginal is important to his approach to and success in the film – possibly securing him access to country, actors, community support, and certainly the context for the story – and it is unlikely that non-Indigenous filmmakers would have had the opportunities and entrepoints to make this project a success (though that is debatable, looking at David Vadiveloo's success with the online film/multimedia production UsMob). I have no doubt that being Aboriginal is important to Thornton, and has informed and coloured his practice as a filmmaker.

But perhaps, first and foremost, Thornton is a very fine filmmaker. And he was won a major prize at Cannes.

You can hear Thornton speaking to the ABC's Lisa Millar (links to audio mp3) about his reaction to his film winning the Camera d'Or and, endearingly, how he's ready to come home from the red carpet glitz of Cannes to reality and sit on his veranda in Alice Springs .

Cross-posted at Sarsaparilla Lite.

Gumtree blossoms on a cool wet morning

2009-05-26T08:59:00.001+10:00

Gumtree blossoms on a cool wet morning, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

From the train platform on my way to the city this morning. Been too sick to blog, or leave home, til today.

The one about the budget

2009-05-14T16:39:00.003+10:00

Instead of twittering away my thoughts and ideas and never get around to committing them to this blog, I'm taking a leaf out of the Blogging Amnesty inspired by Crazybrave and others and getting down my ideas, however short, about the federal Labor government's budget. And I'm going to pinch outrageously from others' thinking to do so. That's the original beauty of blogging, isn't it?

According to The Australia Institute's early budget analysis sent to subscribers of its email newsletter, the budget is 'all sizzle, no sausage'. They pretty much capture my thinking about it where they distill the the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the second Labor budget:

The good: Paid parental leave
The bad: More money for the fossil fuel industry than for the renewable industry
The ugly: Those who missed out—sole parents, the unemployed

I support the paid parental leave, but I want it rolled out sooner.

On the ugly side of the ledger, I'd add that there's no really significant spending to address Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander disadvantage. I'm increasingly concerned that 'Close the Gap' is going from being a powerful rallying point for social-justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to being a feature of the Rudd spin-cycle that masks Labor's lack of significant action in addressing Indigenous disadvantage.

In a subscriber only article for Crikey.com (so I can't link to it yet), Jon Altman of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research says:

“This Budget is about maintaining the status quo with the hope that economic recovery will see Indigenous re-engagement with the mainstream. This is a limited vision that might in itself not accord with the aspirations of Indigenous Australians. If the goal is to close the gaps, this approach just will not be enough.”

The other sorry-ass problem with the Rudd/Swan budget is that it fails to invest enough in renewable energy and climate change initiatives – but favours carbon industries and initiatives instead.

As The Australia Institute says:

The new solar flagship program is a scheme designed to establish as many as four solar energy projects generating electricity for the national grid with capacity up to 1,000 megawatts. The budget papers admit that that is merely the equivalent of one coal-fired power station. This project should not be sold as anything other than a modest initiative.

I think that Crikey.com's John Hepburn (the whole article is worth reading) says it a lot harder – and more accurately:

Of course, the decision to give another $2billion to support the coal industry is just a political sop to an industry that has the Government over the barrel.

Is this corporate welfare to the coal industry really worth the giant deficit the government is trying to convince us is needed to secure jobs? Surely we need more green jobs, rather than carbon jobs. What worries me is whether the government is going to have us over the barrel soon.

Backyard bounties

2009-05-07T17:31:00.002+10:00

Drooling at Crazybrave's photo of the delicious pomegranates she'd received from a friend has got me thinking of home-grown fruit again, and I am quite envious of people whose fruit trees thrive in their suburban gardens, considering my previous 'mixed' success.

You'd be surprised how much fruit is grown in Melbourne's backyards. Besides the ubiquitous lemon and plum trees, there are also commonly apples, cumquats and nectarines, or, if you're lucky, pears and peaches. Less commonly, you may find pomegranates in their thorny, small-leaved bushes, and, in older houses, that old favourite feijoa (or pineapple quava as some know it).

In neighbourhoods like mine, you'll find older Italian households with persimmon trees. From my kitchen window I can track the progress of my Sicilian neighbour's persimmons. In late autumn–early winter, when all the tree's leaves have fallen (or been assisted to the ground with a stick by my elderly neighbours), I'll be able to marvel at the large fruit hanging in the bare branches, their bright orange glow livening up the dull-grey days.

I marvel at some people's luck at growing trees that bear so much fruit that they have to give it away. Some end up sharing bags of fruit with family, friends, and colleagues, and I miss our family friends who regularly make plum, apricot and other jams and chutneys – because they now live in regional Victoria, we don't get to enjoy their preserves as much as we used to.

This year we missed out on the bags of plums that we previously scored from our neighbour's trees in previous summers. These are actually third-hand plums – branches from trees in the house next to our block of units overhang the back fence of the unit beside ours, and we usually get a bag of fruit when they harvest the overhangs – more if the Sicilian lady next door invites them over to help pick the harvest. Last summer's family crisis and extended stay in Brisbane after my father died meant that we didn't see this bounty, though from reports the weather limited the crop.

I wonder if climate change will continue to play havoc on our cropping trees. Besides the unseasonal frosts, hail, storms and such that have spoiled fruit or blossoms, there are concerns that warming will affect the setting of fruit in trees reliant on the cold to do so, such as apples, pears and stone fruit.

However, I'm trying not to dwell on such grim thoughts. Instead, I'm going in search of opportunities to share in the bounty of other people's fruit trees. I'm going to harvest the abundant sage, rosemary and thyme (sorry, no parsley) and go in search of urban orchards and swap meets – those wonderfully convivial gatherings where home-growers can swap their surpluses with something else they don't have much or any of. And there's one set up recently near where I work. Although it's getting late in the season, perhaps I'll find a bag or so of something I like.

What fruit are you growing in your back yard? Have you received some surplus bounty from a friend or relative lately?

[Image by Crazybrave, used with permission.]

Happy Third Birthday Jamie!

2009-05-06T17:01:00.000+10:00

It was Jamie's third birthday on Saturday. Jamie is my second child – our baby, but certainly not a baby any more.

It was a lovely day for all of us. We had an afternoon tea party for him (mainly grown-up family, with a couple other kids too) with some afternoon tea food, lots of presents, lollies and chocolate birthday cake. I believe he was quite happy with the day.

One of the presents we gave him is some playdough (or playdoh as the proprietary stuff is called) and all sorts of playdough extrusion and molding implements and he's having heaps of fun with it. He really enjoys playing with the home made stuff, and we thought this would be one of the last chances we could get him something like this where he would enjoy it before he grew out of it. In just only three days, nearly all the bright colours have been mashed together into that sludgy brown-grey, but that hasn't seemed to spoiled his enjoyment of the stuff.

My sister came down from Brisbane for the weekend and it was great to have her with us, especially for Jamie's birthday. And that's not only because she rescue me from getting stuck with the chocolate cake recipe my mum had given me over the phone. I think it helped that my sister had done that recipe before, whereas I hadn't! Honestly, it was a relief, and kind of nice to have my big sister there to boss me around again – for a bit.

Jamie had asked for a chocolate cake for his birthday, but it was hard to tell if he really enjoyed it. Perhaps he was too full from all the other party food. It's hard to find a nice, though simple, choc cake recipe that kids will also like. I may have another go at this one and see if it he takes to it at some other time. If you have any ideas for a good kid-friendly chocolate cake recipe, do let me know.

The photo above is from a couple of weekends back - not his birthday. I still haven't uploaded the birthday party photos to flickr, but when I do I'll be back here to update with the photos so stay tuned.

But from the photo you can get an idea of his cheeky, vibrant, fun-loving character. He is a really sweet-natured child, caring, loving, generous and sharing, and usually full of cuddles and hugs, though of late he has been developing his independence and learning to identify himself discretely from us, his parents. And his big brother! I think you can imagine what that can be like. Happy Birthday Jamie! We love you very much!

I have been remiss in keeping my blogging up to date, so I hope this little news will explain one of the reasons I've been so busy, despite there being so much news to share. I hope things get better on the blogging front soon. Bear with me.

These things come in threes

2009-04-28T16:58:00.004+10:00

I should have guessed that strange things would happen today when I saw a dog peeing against the corner of a building in Flinders Lane in the city this morning. I have never seen a dog do that in the CBD before. Mind you, I thought it was funny so I didn't expect to encounter anything horrible over the day.

I was on was on the number 5 tram to Malvern this late afternoon, making my way along Swanston Street from Carlton to Flinders Lane to use the City Library when I heard a public announcement asking for passengers (and tram staff) to look out for an elderly person aged about 93 wearing a tan coat and with two walking sticks - the police and tram authorities were looking for him as there were concerns for his health and safety, and I think he was a bit lost. I only really focussed my thoughts on the fact that the person making the announcement didn't clearly specify that it was a 93-year-old man they were looking for.

Now these things never happen to me, but just as I got off the tram outside the Town Hall on the corner of Collins and Swanston Streets I saw the man in question standing at the tram stop! I had a moment's doubt, but he fit the description. So I called the cops, as the announcement had requested. Meanwhile another person (from the same tram I was on) approached the man to check he was okay. While it took me ages to relay all the necessary information to 000, a Yarra Trams official had come across the road from the Collins St 'superstop' in response to some the Yarra Trams announcement as well. When I was sure the the woman from Yarra Trams was going to stay with the elderly gent, and the cops were on their way and didn't need me, and headed off to cross the road to come here to the City Library (where I'm posting this).

While waiting to cross Collins Street, I saw a terrible accident - a young woman seemed to be hit by a tram that was leaving the stop and making its way up the Collins Street hill. It all happened so fast, I can't say for sure what happened. I only know that there was a large knot of people standing in along the tram tracks waiting to cross the street, including some people carrying some large pieced of wood, and I heard a loud crack or whack, saw pieces of a broken signal light falling - presumably from the tram - and then I saw a young woman crumple sideways to the ground! She looked like she was in a great deal of pain and distress. The people crowded around her came to her help and supported her, and called 000 for an ambulance.

It was quiet distressing, but it seemed that there were enough people around to help her so I wasn't needed. I hope she is okay. And I hope that elderly gent made his way safely home with police help.

Help Save Reconciliation Victoria!

2009-04-16T10:25:00.003+10:00

I just want to quickly share the news of this very important campaign. I got this call to action via email from ANTaR Victoria, and because I believe that the work of organisations such as Reconciliation Victoria is so important, I want to urge you all to help by taking whatever action you can:

Reconciliation Victoria (Rec Vic) is currently facing the possibility of forced closure, having received no future funding commitment from the Victorian Government for the coming financial year.

ANTaR Victoria is supporting Rec Vic in its cause, calling on the Brumby government to provide ongoing and increased funding, as a key aspect of its closing the gap strategy. In addition to this, ANTaR and RecVic are asking for your help to put pressure on the government, as it is only through organisations such as RecVic that the hard work of changing community attitudes can happen to make Victoria a culturally safe place for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Learn more about how you can help save Reconciliation Victoria.

I'm taking a quick break from a terribly busy time at work, so apologies for a lack of details. When things settle down, I'll provide an update on the campaign and share why I think such organisations should be supported.

Boys' toys

2009-04-11T10:17:00.001+10:00

Boys' toys, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

It was my birthday on Thursday - guess what I'd got? I enjoy helping my son make is robots and other creatures, and often said I wanted one myself! This year, my birthday fell on a full moon - is there a rule that it had to be a total stress day? More later.

Hanging by a thread

2009-04-08T23:00:00.001+10:00

We began this week with the news that the Wilkins Ice Shelf was at astonishing risk of breaking off the Antarctic continent. The European Space Agency has been tracking the progress of the disintegration of the land bridge that connects the Wilkins Ice Shelf to the rest of the continent. Its splintering increases the possibility of the ice shelf shattering into a thousands icebergs, blocks and shards of ice in the southern ocean.

It is more evidence that humans are heating the planet at faster rates than scientists had predicted, with increased risk that ocean levels with also rise faster than projected. When – not if – the plug of the Wilkins Ice Shelf finally breaks away, the continental ice it was holding back with crash into the ocean much faster, and flood more fresh water into the ocean – water that has been locked into the ice for probably centuries.

Ironically, the other iceberg of human ingenuity – the global financial crisis – is drawing from us a response that is directly inverse to the one required to deal with the increasingly urgent threat of global warming. Instead of curtailing our unrestrained, debt-fueled consumption of stuff and the resources required to make, cart around, sell and operate this stuff – especially fossil fuels – the most compelling thing our governments are asking us to do is spend – spend our way out of the economic crisis that, it strikes me, greed and over-spending got us into in the first place.

We are expected to trust our governments as they urge us to spend, spend, spend at a time when we need to tighten our belts and learn to sew on buttons, patch holes, and reuse, reduce and recycle to conserve fossil fuels and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. After all, who needs another of what Laura Carroll last Saturday so insightfully called in her essay 'Inconspicuous Consumption' in The Age's A2 supplement a piece of "billion-year-old carbon frozen in the humiliating form of a large, green Incredible Hulk doll".

I'm currently reading a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's non-fiction writings, A Man Without a Country, which includes various recent addresses and speeches on the war in Iraq and climate change. In a piece on fossil fuels and climate change, Vonnegut tells us:

We are all addicts to fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.

And all for the sake of keeping the gunky wheels and cogs of the economy rolling and chugging along. I sincerely do appreciate that Rudd's stimulus packages are to inject more consumption cash into the market to keep businesses going and keep peoples' jobs.

But when the ice of Antarctica is about to go crashing into the ocean at unprecedented rates, I really wonder if we are being so short-sighted and have lost sight of what's truly at stake – and consequently are not thinking deeply and creatively enough about what we need to do. If anything, we don't need to slow down or speed up the nasty treadmill of the neo-liberal economy. We need to get rid of it and build something else. And preferably something that works.

[Image is from the European Space Agency (ESA) website]

Wild things to come

2009-04-02T17:38:00.000+11:00

Apple has the trailer for new film, Where the Wild Things Are, online. It's based on Maurice Sendak's children's picture book.
I learned about it via Barista, who says the trailer is "a corker". Which it is. They also made it at the giant move studio at Docklands. The one that isn't getting used much anymore.

I wonder which one of these children's books, especially the picture books, will be as enduring as Sendak's book, and get turned into a movie.

Personally, I'm a big fan of Shaun Tan's illustrations and stories, but one of the things I love about them is the intimacy of seeing them on the page and holding the book in my hands. Don't know if I'd want to see them larger than life on the silver screen. Though I'm happy to change my mind. After all, my kids and I have been enjoying the kids' animated TV series based on Graeme Base's Animalia.

And I will be going to see Where the Wild Things Are.

Stunning paper art

2009-03-31T09:26:00.001+11:00

Stunning paper art, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

Great paper sculptures in Platform underground gallery. Check it out.

Sickle moon at day's end

2009-03-29T23:15:00.000+11:00

This evening I walked to the bottle shop to buy a nice crisp white wine to go with the chicken casserole that I'd left cooking in the oven. There was a lovely, faint crescent moon hanging low in the evening sky, about a hand span above the orange glow over the horizon, last vestiges of the sunset.

It was a lovely evening, with only a hint of crispness at the tail end of a singlet and jeans kind of day to remind me that it was actually late autumn. It was a good way to finish a good day of writing. Not necessarily a day of good writing – there will be time enough to be critical of the writing later – but a good afternoon's worth of writing nonetheless. Considering I hadn't ventured out past the drive way all day, it was great to get out for a breather.

I returned with a nice (for the budget) sauvignon blanc to go with the chicken casserole I was cooking to help christen the new enamelled cast iron casserole we'd bought from Ikea last weekend. Not fancy expensive French cookware, but serviceable and at a price I could live with. (By the way, I'd portioned and skinned a whole free-range chicken myself. Don't get to do it often, but it turned out well.)

Shelley was putting the kids to bed as I pottered around the kitchen and washed the dishes, and Tripple R played some rather unusual music that I wouldn't normally get to listen to. We were waiting to have our dinner after the kids were asleep so that we could have some adult time together – something we've had precious little of this past week.

What a great day of my favourite things: the morning spent with the kids, writing (and time for it with the kids out of the house, thanks to Shelley), cooking a lovely meal, a nice evening walk, and a glass of wine with a delicious meal and conversation with the best company in the whole wide world – my partner. Bliss.

When I grow up

2009-03-27T11:53:00.002+11:00

What teenager didn't want to be a radio DJ?

So I can do it online instead. Song choice inspired by Ampersand Duck at Sarsaparilla Lite. Hats off to Nanny Goat Hill for introducing me to blip – via twitter. Aah, the joys of the internet.

Flinders near Flinders

2009-03-24T19:06:00.001+11:00

Flinders near Flinders, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

A stencil artwork of Flinders St Station - around the corner from Flinders St Station! At the entrance to subway at Degraves St.

If you were missing Sarsaparilla - fear not

2009-03-20T10:00:00.000+11:00

If you've been wondering what happened to Sarsaparilla over the last couple of months, and wondered if what seemed like a summer hiatus was turning into a winter of neglect, fear not as Sarsaparilla will be back - prettier and better.

Sarsaparilla is a group blog on literature, the arts, culture and public comment from an Australian perspective, and which I recently joined as a regularly contributor late last year.

The team at Sarsaparilla thought a spruce up and re-design was warranted, but a few things broke in the process, meaning things were taking a lot longer than we expected to get it up and running again.

However, we've recently launched a temporary site, Sarsaparilla Lite, to keep our audience's hunger pangs at bay, and to satisfy our creative juices.

And it already displaying the Sars team's excellent insights into dance and performance, television, film, public art and literary awards, and I'm sure there's plenty more to come. So do enjoy this coffee and hot buttered crumpets before you get stuck into the full cooked brekkie.

The devil you know

2009-03-17T14:00:00.003+11:00

Late last month, I came across a BBC online photo essay that immediately brought back memories of my undergraduate study of Anthropology. Considering that study was some 10 years and more ago, I think that was pretty remarkable.

The photos were of La Diabldada Festival in Oruro, Bolivia, and feature the gloriously detailed and colourful devil masks and costumes of the festival and its parade. The festival is a strong expression of the pre-Columbian Andean traditions, mythology and ritual that remain strong features of Bolivia's Andean people.

'oruro' by OVRL - devil costumed and masked performer in Bolivia

One of the first things I did was explore whether the massive flickr community also had photographs of La Diablada and the Bolivian Andean community who celebrate the festival. You wouldn't begin to guess the jackpot I hit. I also set it as a task of 'using my degree', something I periodically give cause to obsess about (considering I put a lot of energy, time and resources into completing it!

I was amazed how many photos were published on the Creative Commons license. All the photos here are Creative Commons-licensed photos found on Flickr.

'oruro' [2] by OVRL - devil-costumed performers at carnaval de oruro in Bolivia

When I saw the photos and remembered my second year Anthropology studies, I wondered how much things may have changed in the 17 years since I studied anthropology at university. I was particularly interested in how much the increased accessibility in travel, and the way the internet has allowed an explosion in the sharing of stories, photos, experiences and knowledge of things – including festivals, traditions and rituals – in places we may have once considered distant, unreachable and the domain of the brave few who ventured to explore them, or the isolated people who live these as daily realities, has affected how we 'know' the world around us.

'Cholitas dançam la Diablada' by Cltn - colourfully masked and costumed dancers on parade

'Máscara de Morenada' by Cltn - masked performer at what appears to be a festival by Bolivians in Sao Paulo, Brazil

The internet has brought together online the experiences and stories of people across the world, and their documentation and publication under creative commons licenses.

Not withstanding the concerns with the accuracy of much of this information, this development allows other writers, bloggers, media makers and other armchair sticky-beaks like me – and more importantly students and academics – to use them with the freedom that creative commons licenses offer. How much can the internet, social networking, blogging and creative commons licensed content creation and sharing improve teaching in universities? How much is this also unreflexive voyeurism? Perhaps that's the topic for another post.

What I do know is that I certainly did not get to enjoy the colour and vibrancy of these images to assist me in understanding what we were learning in anthropology. I wish I had access to these images then.

'Jallalla...!!' by mabel flores - Bolivian miner offering a salutation with beer

The Andean people in these parts of Bolivia have historically been the working backbone of Bolivia's now declining tin mining industry. The ethnogography, by Michael Taussig, we studied in second year anthropology examined how the devil featured in Latin American working class and peasant communities and expressed their experience of the brutality and exploitation of Latin American capitalism. According to wikipedia, in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America:

Taussig … argues that through the devil, peasants express their recognition that capitalism is based on the magic belief that capital is productive, when in fact capitalism breeds poverty, disease, and death."

photo by orianomada - a miner in an underground mine in Oruro, Bolivia

As developing countries, and mining communities in particular, suffer in the agonies and conflagrations of another global economic crisis, and communities are threatened by the flight or collapse of capital or falling commodity prices, I also wonder to what extent the internet can contribute to bearing witness to their struggles and document their traditions.

El tio de la mina, Oruro by germeister - shrine to the devil of the mine, El Tio. Such expressions were a central focus of enthonographies of the 1980s.

Galeria del museo etnologico de los mineros, Oruro by germeister - mining museum, Bolivia

Or whether the internet will just become another type of museum. Not that there's much wrong with museums (that are reflexive of their work and role in cultures). I guess the opportunities the internet offers us is more ways to engage with the content online, and with other people creating and sharing this content.

By the way, did I tell you how much I really enjoyed Barista's excellent, highly informed and exploration of the Chinese demon-catching god? (It is beautifully illustrated by illustrations now in the public domain.) Or Sophie Cunningham's amazing photographs of the Balinese festival to banish bad demons? How remiss of me.

Shaved and shorn

2009-03-13T14:47:00.001+11:00

Shaved and shorn, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

Shaved for World's Greatest Shave!

Counting down the hours

2009-03-12T14:50:00.001+11:00

In 24 hours, my boss will (hopefully, if things go well in his day!) shave off my hair for World's Greatest Shave.

This is the final stretch - it's been three weeks since I started this fundraising effort and so many people have been very generous in sponsoring me and donating to the Leukaemia Foundation. But I thought things would go pear-shaped when I discovered earlier this week that there was a technical glitch with my profile page at the World's Greatest Shave website – people couldn't find me to sponsor me!

Today, the very helpful people at World's Greatest Shave have fixed it up by setting me up a new sponsorship page, so you can find me online an sponsor me and raise money for the Leukaemia Foundation – if you haven't already. (I've also updated the links to my sponsorship page in this blog)

If you haven't yet, please do sponsor me and make a donation to the Leukaemia Foundation.

All sponsorship previously made to me will be transferred over, so rest assured your sponsorship of me won't get lost - thank you very much.

Thank you also to my friend Lynn, who has kindly knitted me a beanie to keep my head warm after the shave. And hopefully, tomorrow there will be photos and perhaps a video to share of the shave.

I have to admit to feeling a little nervous about how I will look with my head shaved – down to number 2 of the clippers, I think, or 2/8ths of an inch. But I'm sure it will be fine. After all, it is for a very, very good cause. And there are more important things to worry about in life, aren't there? Or rather, there are more important things in life to not worry about. And this is about those living with Leukaemia, isn't it?

Wish me luck.

Five days and counting

2009-03-09T12:05:00.004+11:00

In five days – Friday 13 March, to be exact – I will lose all my lovely hair, down to 2/8ths of an inch of stubble. But all for a good cause.

My boss is going to shave my head for a cure – that's right, I'm in my final week of Shave for a Cure, a fundraising initiative for the Leukaemia Foundation, and I'm hopefully well on my way to my extended target of raising $700 by Friday 13 March to assist the Foundation's efforts to find a cure for Leukaemia and other blood disorders, and to support those living with the disease.

I'm just under $150 shy of my target, so if you haven't already, please consider it and make a donation and 'sponsor' me.

I'm going to give my self a cold head, so that hopefully many, many others wouldn't need to.

Update: There's been a technical glitch in the site for my sponsorship page/profile this week, but the very helpful people at World's Greatest Shave have fixed it up by setting me up a new page. I've updated the link abve, so you can find me online an sponsor me and raise money for the Leukaemia Foundation. [updated 2.20pm Thursday 12 March 2009]

Friday Wrap again

2009-03-06T18:00:00.001+11:00

Friday wraps are usually when I have so many things going on but don't get time to blog properly about them, and end up with a wrap up at the end of the week.

This time, despite covering a few items already this week, I just wanted to quickly share some things that caught my eye, or that I'm obsessing about at the moment. And I realise that many things I twitter about don't get covered in this blog, unless I do so on occassions like this.

This looks like a really interesting film, and I'm annoyed I missed out on the free tix. I may just put this on the plate for when we next organise baby-sitting and go out. We haven't been to a movie in such a long time…

Meanwhile, doesn't this:

"…droll comedy of manners that plays on the snobberies of the English aristocracy and the mistrust of all things American."

sound pretty much like half of every British movie ever made? It's from the distributor's promo blurb about Easy Virtue, the new film by Stephan Elliot.

As part of my recent preoccupation with walking long distances, I ordered Unforgettable Walks to Take Before You Die online, but am really disappointed they can't fill the order. Do I have to go all the way to Port Melbourne to get it? Perhaps I could walk…

I'm getting very, very tired Kevin Rudd's rhetoric. I find it done to death and increasingly hollow. Time to close the gap on your rhetoric, Kevin.

The portrait of Aboriginal (Yolngu) singer Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu by Guy Maestri has won the Archibald Prize today. It's amazing, and I'm looking forward to when the exhibition comes to Melbourne.

I'd getting my cholesterol tested – for the second time – tomorrow. It will be good to see what nearly a year of a drastically changed diet and (slightly) increased exercise (and no drugs) has done to dint the high cholesterol that bothered my GP. Fingers crossed.

It's Labor Day on Monday – a long weekend for the kids and I. I'm sorely tempted to take them to the Moomba Parade on Monday morning, but a couple of friends pooh-poohed it because of the crowds. Last year, I went alone to take heaps of photos, though only a few are online (I shot on film). Perhaps this year…

My bike has a flat – again. Frustratingly, it's the same tyre as the one I fixed the last time, so I've got to get it to the shop this weekend to get it fixed. It's been a while, and I've been missing riding a lot.

I'm procrastinating – again – from a heavy workload of writing and editing, with an impending deadline.

Isn't that enough for wrap? It's liberating how much one can cover by saying less about something. Have a good weekend.

Autumn in my pocket

2009-03-06T09:54:00.007+11:00

I've returned to writing in my writing notebook on the tram to work again, and this post begins from what I wrote there.

In my pocket is a light blue cotton handkerchief, the kind that is thick enough and large enough to wipe your face with without it scrunching into a ball, or blow your nose in without being sodden within three gusts – a handy feature for the impending cold-virus season. That's possibly because it is relatively new, and still has the fresh stiffness of new cotton. It has crisscrossing stripes of navy contrast along the edges that mark it as a man's handkerchief, and an upper-case 'P' embroidered in navy blue in one corner. It was my father's.

My father always had a handkerchief with him – every day, he'd put one in his left trouser pocket. (I've long long followed his habit.) Dad had quite a stock of them. My sister and I insisted that he have one just so for the funeral.

Each time I've been up to Brisbane lately, I return – on my mother's urging – with a small load of my father's clothes. This time, the load included a handful of these good handkerchiefs and a couple of pairs of new socks dad had not gotten around to wearing. They were still attached to their label.

Today, I'm wearing a light, grey cashmere jumper of dad's. Now I understand the love for cashmere – light, soft, almost luscious – and appreciate the premium put on them. I'd probably never afford cashmere myself. There was a time, some ten years ago, when my father could afford to buy them and appreciated their warmth and comfort in Melbourne's winter, however briefly he lived here. I found this jumper, along with another maroon cashmere and his chunky blue wool cardigan that I loved to see him in, stored in the bottom drawer of a dresser he hardly used. I wonder if he got to enjoy them much, considering how brief and relatively mild Brisbane's winters are. Though he'd been complaining of feeling the cold bitterly, especially in his hands and feet, in the last couple of years.

This morning in Melbourne, it is cool, grey and raining. It's probably closer to 14˚C than 21˚C in the range forecast for today. Autumn has announced itself dramaticaly, and I'm glad to be warm and snug in a fold of cashmere.

This morning, the online sponsorships and cash donations for my Shave for a Cure drive had past my $500 target! (As evident in the image of the fundraising meter.) Weighing up the pledges that have been made and the possibilities of another week of fundraising, I've decided to extend my goal by $200 – I'm now aiming to raise $700 for the Leukaemia Foundation by Friday 13 March.

I'd appreciate any help you can offer me to reach that goal, including spreading the word. And thank you to all of you who helped out, made donations, and spread the word.

In a week, I will have my hair shaved for Shave for a Cure. It will be a chilly affair, and I'm glad for my friend Lynn's offer to knit me a beanie to keep my head and ears warm! Thanks, Lynn! Meanwhile, keep warm. Or cool as your case may be.

Shortlist for Commonwealth Writers' Prize

2009-03-04T14:16:00.002+11:00

The Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009 Shortlist has been announced, with a selection of writers across the Commonwealth nominated in the Best Book and Best First Book categories.

From Australia, they've stacked up Aravind Adiga of White Tiger-Man Booker fame against Helen Garner, Joan London, Christos Tsiolkas and Tim Winton for the Best Book prize. Wow. I don't want to be taking bets on this one.

They've also stacked up Nam Le (for The Boat) and a bunch of other firsties against Aravind Adiga again, this time for The White Tiger, for Best First Book. You'd think though, since Adiga won the Man Booker for The White Tiger that they'll lay of him for a while and let some other writers have a chance? Not that I'd put money on it, but I do hope that Nam Le wins it – I think The Boat is a brilliant collection of stories.

I don't get why Aravind Adiga is listed amongst those from Southeast Asia & Pacific. Wikipedia states he has dual Indian and Australian citizenship, but he lives in Mumbai now, so … what gives?

The shortlistees from Southeast Asia & Pacific for Best Book are:

Aravind Adiga (Australia) Between The Assassinations - Atlantic Books
Helen Garner (Australia) The Spare Room - The Text Publishing Company
Joan London (Australia) The Good Parents - Random House Australia (Vintage Imprint)
Paula Morris (New Zealand) Forbidden Cities - Penguin New Zealand
Christos Tsiolkas (Australia) The Slap - Allen and Unwin
Tim Winton, (Australia) Breath - Picador

I'm interested to see that a Malaysian author, Preeta Samarasan, has been shortlisted for a First Book Award too, for Evening is the Whole Day. I'm a little perterbed that it sounds like it's in the Arrundathi Roy-Amitav Ghosh-and dare I say it, Aravind Adiga mould, but I shouldn't be surprised considering current literary tastes.

I wonder when we will get past writers of Asian and African decent getting gongs for more stories of jungles, plantations, wild animals and bizarre families and cross-generational/cultural conflict, while white authors continue to be lauded for angst-ridden kitchen table dramas. I'm getting tired of how the empire is still enamored with the heyday of its plantations and coolies. Hm, is that too harsh?

The Commonwealth Writers' Prize website seems to be crashing, probably due to the heavy demand to see the shortlist, so check out Readings online's news of the 2009 Shortlist, including links to their reviews of the books where available.

I'm waiting to borrow White Tiger from a colleague. What will you read next? Anything from the shortlist?

We're in Brisbane this weekend

2009-02-28T15:13:00.001+11:00

Just a short post to mention we're here to commit my father's ashes into the columnbarium at my parents' church.

Chickens and eggs

2009-02-26T10:52:00.001+11:00

I wonder whether Orwell, for all his preoccupation with how many eggs his chickens were laying, had anything like John Cleese's gentle affection for his hens (watch the video clip)?

Of course, as I've heard from various backyard chook-keepers, how many eggs your chooks are laying per day is a big thing. It probably means the difference between a poached egg on toast and a quiche. And the difference between happy, contented hens and stressed or ill ones.

The tip-off for the video came via Cleese's Twitter feed (Camilla the hen is a bit of a star in Cleese's online efforts) and, of course, Orwell's diary has long progressed since I first blogged about it. The image, 'Sunrise Haiga 2000', is a creative Commons licensed Haiku digital art-work by monkeysox.

See me shave my head–support World's Greatest Shave

2009-02-23T12:39:00.003+11:00

I'm taking part in the Leukaemia Foundation World's Greatest Shave this year.

Do you want to see me shave my head? On Friday 13 March, I'm shaving my hair off.

My target is to raise $500 in 3 weeks – for the Leukaemia Foundation.

If I can get 50 people to donate $10 each, I can make my target! Please get your friends to donate too, and that will help me reach my target! But any amount – however small – can help me reach my target and support the Leukemia Foundation.

You can see my Profile Page on the World's Greatest Shave and donate online by making a secure online donation using your credit card. [note: the link to my profile/sponsorship page has been updated - see the update note below]

I'm doing this to honour my Dad's memory – before he died suddenly last December, Dad used to do the Leukemia Foundation door-knock appeal to help raise money. It was part of his way of dealing with his continuing grief at losing my older brother, Jeremy, to leukemia over 20 years ago (and his way to help out). Jeremy died after battling leukemia for nearly 18 months, aged 16. I was 11.

I've been meaning to do 'the Shave' for years now, but never got around to it. Now, my dad's example is spurring me on. This is also to honour Jeremy's memory.

See this all taken off!

On 13 February, my boss is going to shave my hair at work – I'm going to post a video of it online, so you can watch it here!

According to the Leukemia Foundation:

Every hour of every day, at least one person in Australia is diagnosed with leukaemia, lymphoma or myeloma.
Every two hours, someone loses their life to blood cancer.

Please help me raise as much as I can for the Leukaemia Foundation. Their vital work provides patients with practical support during their long and tough treatment, as well as funding important research.

Come on, we can help! We can help find a cure, support those living with this disease, and support their families.

I will be providing updates on this blog, via Twitter, and on my Profile Page. You're also welcome to drop me a comment here on a message on my Profile Page at World's Greatest Shave to show your support. Thanks for your support!

PS: Would anyone like to knit/crochet me a beanie for the cold weather?

UPDATE: There's been a technical glitch in the site for my sponsorship page/profile this week, but the very helpful people at World's Greatest Shave have fixed it up by setting me up a new page. I've updated the link abve, so you can find me online an sponsor me and raise money for the Leukaemia Foundation. [updated 2.20pm Thursday 12 March 2009]

UPDATE 2: A big thank you to Lynn who has knitted me a gorgeous beanie/hat to keep me warm after I shave my hair on Friday 13 March 2009! [updated 2.25pm Thursday 12 March 2009]

Something to enjoy

2009-02-19T16:06:00.004+11:00

I found this via the New Internationalist Blog and twitter update. In case you miss them, those are kites flapping above the roofs of homes in India, in celebration of the Makar Sankranti festival, which celebrates the return of the sun to the northern hemisphere and the awakening of the gods from their six-month slumber.

Which reminds me that Australia, in the southern hemisphere, is now heading into the reverse – the fallow period of our cycle of sun and the seasons. A good time for reflection, licking ones wounds, I guess, and recharging.

The photo, by photographer Adeel Halim, based in Mumbai, India, is published on the NI blog's creative commons license, and hence republished here. Enjoy.

After the air ignited

2009-02-11T10:46:00.003+11:00

I have to say that I struggled for a long time with this post, as I found the horror of the past week's Victorian bushfires and deaths very troubling and emotionally painful, and wondered long and hard whether, and how, to put into words what I had learned of these events. I've decided to go ahead and post anyway. I hope it is read in the spirit of caring, concern and bearing witness with which I wrote it. The image is from flickr.

UPDATE : A happy ending after all
I have recently learned that C's house survived the fire in Kinglake after all! Please note he changes below. [Updated 4.10pm Tuesday 17 February 2009]

When I spoke to my friend C late on Sunday morning, he still didn't know if the house he'd been building for his family was still standing after the firestorm that swept through Kinglake last weekend.

He thought there was a "99% chance" it was gone, considering all the houses across the road from his – bar one – had burned down. However, he held on to a glimmer of hope that it survived. His neighbour and neighbour's son stayed to protect their house and saved it.

With the roadblocks and other restrictions on movement to the area, it was a while later when he found out that the house was gone. Thanfully, C, his partner and their three-year-old daughter were safe at home in Melbourne's north-western suburbs when the fires hit. He hadn't gone up to Kinglake to check on the nearly completed house as he'd not expected the fire danger to be so severe or immediate. In this case, it must be a blessing.

[Update: C has recently told me that he'd received incorrected information from a neighbour that the house was destroyed, and that he learned late last week that his house survived! He's been up to Kinglake to check it out and it's still standing.]

Unfortunately for the many, many dozens of Kinglake residents who lost their homes, and the 35 who lost their lives, the horrifyingly extreme nature of this bushfire was not anticipated – not the immensity of it, not the suddenness with which it changed direction toward Kinglake, not the speed nor ferocity with which it hit.

My heart was in my mouth when I woke on Sunday to read and hear the news of the fires hitting Kinglake (and the rest of Victoria), as I knew C was building there, and over the years I'd known people who had lived in that area. I was relieved to hear Chris and his family safe and well.

But I was also worried for another friend and her partner who live in St Andrews, another township near Kinglake and famous for its alternative weekend market. While I was quite unsettled and concerned that I couldn't get them on the phone either Sunday or Monday as the line was disconnected, by Tuesday when I'd heard about the high number of deaths in St Andrews – 22 at last count – I was panicking.

I called around a number of 3rd parties who knew these friends and finally heard from someone that they were safe. I finally spoke to my friend L on Tuesday afternoon (their telephone had been disconnected due to a stuff-up by the phone company, rather than the fires!) and learned that while they were safe and well, they had survived a close call. The stories of what she saw were unbelievably shocking – and she found it quite shocking, like nothing she'd seen before, and she'd previously experienced 3 other bushfires!

She told me how on Saturday they vigilantly watched the fires in the distance advancing on them, and were putting out burning embers on the roof and in the gutters that had rained from the sky all afternoon. She had watched the fire advance on a white weatherboard farmhouse on the top of a hill but leave it unscathed as it burned down the hill, and inexplicably leave it intact yet again when the wind change drove the fire back up the hill, and how that house now stands starkly white on a blackened hill.

She told me of how they watched as the very air ignited from the extreme heat and ferocity of the fire. How where as the top of one hill was ablaze, the air at the top of the neighbouring hill suddenly exploded in a ball of flames and set that hill ablaze. The fire was still some 3 kms away or so, sure to destroy their home, and they were prepared to leave when it go too close when the late change came through and started blowing the fire in another direction and their home was saved.

She learned the next day, as the rest of us did, what destruction and death that weather change wraught as it drome the firestorm front to the neighbouring townships and communities.

*********

Today we are being told that while the official death toll from the bushfires across Victoria stands at 181, already the worst natural disaster in Australia's history, we should expect the death tol to climb past 200 and nearer 300.

But Kinglake and St Andrews, while having amongst the highest death tolls in the state, are not the only communities affected. The township of Marysville has been scorched off the face of this earth, and the community is trying to come to terms with the devastation and loss of life there, while there have been terrible deaths and destruction in townships from Healesville in the Yarra Ranges to Churchill in Gippsland.

As you can see from MrTomTom's images of a family member's home destroyed by the fire in Yarra Glen, the devastation is frequently extreme and total.

I think this disaster and tragedy is going to stay with us for a long time, as we come to turns with the deaths, the environmental destruction, the loss of homes, jobs and businesses, the trauma experienced by the survivors and emergency workers, and the terrible injury to our collective psyche as we absorb this through the non-stop media coverage.

It is going to take a great effort and a lot of time to to make sense of this all. Though I have to say that David Tiley has made admirably insightful and eloquent efforts to do so. And Penni Russon's tale (her family and home in St Andrews are unscathed, thank goodness) gives great insight into the nerve-wracking business of waiting to see if the fires move toward them again. Penni and her partner have decided, quite understandably, they will leave their home again at the first signs of renewed danger.

I wish them, and all others on a danger footing, and dealing with the grief and trauma of this tragedy, my very best wishes. And to all my other readers too. Stay safe and well.

[Image sunrise.seven on flickr, under creative commons license. I think it's a screenshot from Channel 7's TV program Sunrise]

Would you try this yourself?

2009-02-06T10:07:00.001+11:00

I think the third rule of blogging is that if you haven't had time or headspace to scrounge up a blog post for a week, then post a video. So here it is.

While clearing out my old archived emails, I found this great film clip that a colleague had sent me at work. The file was titled ‘What old people do for fun'. I have a chuckle each time I watch it. Besides the Simon and Garfunkle soundtrack, I especially love the cackling at the end…

Enjoy.

You can also find the .mpg file on my divshare site.

Cooling off

2009-01-30T19:54:00.001+11:00

Cooling off, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

At Williamstown Beach. After today's 44 degrees, it's a relief!

Not...

2009-01-30T16:16:00.001+11:00

Not..., originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

It's just too hot!

Down tools, go home

2009-01-29T16:37:00.003+11:00

It's just past 4.30pm and we've been all urged to go home by the boss because the office air-conditioning has been struggling to pump out even a skerrick of cool breath on this miserably sweltering 43º C day. Hurrah!

It has been really uncomfortable, sweaty and, yes, unfortunately, smelly in the office. Yesterday, I twittered: "You know how your sweaty legs stick to vinyl car seats on really hot days? My brain feels like that." Today has been little different.

It does mean that I have to go out into the blistering heat and get on a stinking hot tram... Booh! But that's if the trams are running and the tracks haven't buckled. From what I've read, though, it's the trains that have been affected that way – so far 198 trains canceled today!

Well, the boss has turned out the lights to get us out of the office and go home. Can't say I can argue with that!

John Updike dies at 76

2009-01-28T23:16:00.001+11:00

US novelist John Updike died on Tuesday, aged 76. He lost his battle with lung cancer.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author was highly prolific, and wrote novels, short stories, non-fiction and verse. Updike was famous for his keenly observed, sharply rendered and insightful narratives of middle America’s domesticity and family life.

As he put it once, “When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.”

Updike also pursued a realism that placed sex and sexuality squarely in the middle of his characters’ lives and thoughts, just as they are in the centre of all our lives. Some thought he took the sex too far, though for different reasons. The prudish British dubbed Updike the ‘laureate of lewd’, while other critics nominated him – repeatedly – for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

However, it’s worth remembering that in the 50s and 60s, Updike was pushing the boundaries of moral prudery and taboo over sexuality in a country and time where many saw Rock ‘n Roll as the work of the devil.

He made no apologies for putting sexuality in the middle of his stories:

“I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”

I think that some of Updike’s finest work is in his short stories where he explores small town life and burgeoning adolescent sexuality and angst with more restraint and nuance, yet great honesty.

His two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction were for his famous Rabbit series of novels (beginning with Rabbit, Run in 1961) featuring the middle-aged, middle class, middle America suburban antics of high school football hero turned car salesman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Some of his other famous works were The Centaur (1963), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), and The Widows of Eastwick (2008).

“Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does— and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader*.”

— John Updike, Writers on Themselves (1986); Wikiquote

* Whoever that is...

Obituaries elsewhere
‘A Relentless Updike Mapped America's Mysteries’, The New York Times, 27 January 2009

'Rabbit is gone: Updike's wit, frankness remembered', ABC News Opinion, 28 January 2009

[The image is a Magnum one... shhh...]

Shoulder to the plough

2009-01-27T17:21:00.000+11:00

Now that I'm back from Brisbane and back at work, I'm more in the frame of mind to post this quick update and catch up on what's happening.

About the only things positive I can say about yesterday's Australia Day is that I'm glad – proud even – that Mick Dodson is Australian of the Year, and that we went to a lovely, small barbecue at our friends' place in Melbourne's west and met their new (well, not so new after six months...) baby, Alex, who is gorgeous!

Monday also saw the start of the Chinese New year of the Ox, hence the lovely photo of oxen pulling a plough in the mist in India that I found on flickr. Happy Chinese New Year to all my readers! I hope this new year brings good things for you, especially peace, safety, health, good cheer and love. Just as importantly, I also wish the coming year brings you the forbearance and fortitude of the Ox to withstand the vicissitudes of the economic crisis and the emerging social hardships accompanying it.

For all the talk of the economic crisis in the media, I have been somewhat cushioned from the full extent and possible horror of it, seeing that I work in the community sector (but not in welfare/service delivery) and thus am sheltered from the financial shock of profit meltdowns and job-losses in the commercial sector. And I don't take taxis much, so don't hear the stories of taxi drivers going bust as the rest of us tighten our belts.

However, it realy does hit home – as it did me this afternoon – when the retail worker serving you asks where you're working and comments that your job must be safe, and mentions that her boyfriend has just that afternoon lost his job in the car finance sector. Ouch. At least, she comments, he hated his job and hoped he could get another that he liked, and that his real passion was music but you can't make a living as a muso...

I wondered what would happen to her job if the rest of us keep tightening our belts and stopped buying things – or at least cut down – however well made and useful they are.

What I hate so much about how the media, corporations and government are approaching the economic downturn' is that it involves throwing more money at a system that I'm sure is broken in the first place – to encourage us to spend, spend, spend our way out of recession when I think it was our over-consumption-fueled debt crisis that contributed in no small way to the current economic troubles, and certainly does contribute to our current environmental predicament of consumption-propelled fossil-fuel burning global warming.

We are being offered a poisoned choice – to consume our way out of recession to save each others' livelihoods, and to forget how we are consuming our planet's resources at a rate of knots and warming the globe in the process.

I feel like we are people drowning at sea being thrown life-rafts with holes in them. Or worse, with fires lit in them.

[Image: 'Oxen in the mist' by Roshnii under CC license]

Brisbane morning bouquet

2009-01-22T12:14:00.001+11:00

Brisbane morning bouquet, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

I went for an hour's walk around my mum's neighbourhood this morning. I love the flowers, trees and abird life around here.

Up to Brisbane again

2009-01-19T17:24:00.001+11:00

Not quite on the road, but I'm flying up to Brisbane again tomorrow afternoon to see my mother. My dad would have turned 70 on Wednesday, and instead of having a celebration, we'll be having a Catholic mass at Mum and Dad's home in his memory.

I'll be there the rest of this week, so without internet access at Mum's place I seriously doubt there will be much blog action here until Australia/Survival Day or after. Unless something especially strikes me and I try to post from my mobile phone. We'll see, you never know.

Until then, I particularly recommend Ampersand Duck's post on reading and traveling – in this case bushwalking – at Sarsaparilla. I'm printing it off as it will make some great reading while I'm flying. I really want to do more long walks and walking travels this next year and more, and &D's post in another inspiration for that.

In a similar vein, I'm also truly enjoying Tony Kevin's Walking the Camino: a modern pilgrimage to Santiago, which I gave my father for Father's Day last year in honour of his (then) upcoming September holiday in Portugal and Spain with Mum. When they returned, he told me he really enjoyed it, and we speculated on walking the Camino together in a few years when I'd saved the money. Mum recently told me he took me seriously, and that he'd read the book twice. I can see why.

What was a flippant comment in conversation with my father has now taken a new meaning. I'm aiming to do that walking pilgrimage when I'm 45, if not earlier. It's like my dad's holding me to it. And I'm holding myself to it.

The best laid plans

2009-01-15T14:32:00.000+11:00

After this time and distance, it's been hard to come back to this blog – for many reasons. I've been away from Melbourne and the internet for nearly a month, I haven't really felt like writing much for an audience, and I would have to explain – to put into words – why I've been away for so long. But I will anyway, because to do otherwise is to pretend nothing has happened.

A couple of days ago, I emailed some friends to explain what happened, so I'd found the words to explain the events, but not quite the words to express how I feel or what it means to me. I think that will come later. So I've decided to post here an edited version of what I wrote my friends.

A lot happened in the last weeks of 2008 - particularly something very shocking and sad. My Dad passed away from a sudden heart attack on Saturday the 13th of December, and I rushed up to Brisbane that evening.

My partner Shelley, our boys and I were meant to go for a holiday at the Sunshine Coast on the 16th for three nights, and then we were going to spend Christmas and New Year with Mum and Dad, and celebrate their 70th birthdays together. Mum's birthday is on 27 December, and Dad's nearly a month later. I was suggesting a joint party while we were up there.

Of course, all the best made plans are tossed in the air by cruel chance.

Shelley and the boys joined me in Brisbane that week, but Shelley had worked wonders to change our travel and accommodation arrangements so we could delay our coastal break to the end of our stay up north.

My sister and her family were in Europe on the tail end of their extended holiday and they rushed back from Rome as quickly as they could when they got the news. They were wrecked.

***

Peter J. Lawrence
1939–2008

My Dad was so well, so we thought, and showed no sign at all of having anything at all wrong with his heart or health besides the usual things associated with ageing and high cholesterol. What we didn't know is that he had serious heart disease - his coronary arteries were severely blocked, and had been for many, many years, leading ultimately to the sudden heart attack.

I was pretty much in a state of shock for a while when I got the initial pathologist's findings from the Queensland Coroner's office a few days after the death. It was a very, very heavy sense of dismay, incredulity and pain that this had been building up so long with no sign at all that we could interpret to indicate heart disease.

Cruel, cruel chance. I think you could imagine the anger, frustration and deep sadness I feel at not being able to see my dad again. I don't know about these different stages' of grief – I seem to be feeling them all at once, and at various times. In the previous two weeks, I was more numb than anything.

We held the funeral on Friday 19 December, the day my Dad was intending to drive up to Noosa to pick up my family and I to bring us back to Brisbane. This would have been the first time I'd seen him since he and Mum came down to Melbourne in November 2007. I gave one of the three eulogies (and a poem reciting) at the funeral, a blistering hot day in the sweltering Catholic parish church my parents had been very active in since they retired to Brisbane some 12 years ago. Three Catholic priests officiated at the Mass. That doesn't happen very often. My parents' co-parishioners were wonderful, sharing our grief and truly supportive of my mother. They really love my both my parents, and miss my father terribly. But not as much as we do.

***

Shelley, the kids and I spent 3 nights in Noosa after the New Year, and the break and rest has done me much good. We go back to Melbourne last Friday, and I've been back at work since Monday. Thankfully, it's pretty quiet and still a bit cruisey, so I can get lost in the background and mope for a little longer.

I'm still worried about my Mum, of course, as this is very, very hard for her. She has a large and close group of friends up in Brissie, through her parish, and many close relatives there, and my sister and her family are there, but it is not the same when you've lost the person you've loved for nearly 50 years, and been married to for 45!

But I'll see Mum again soon - next week, in time for Dad's birthday on the 21st. And I'll be going up again on 28 February when we hold the commitment of Dad's ashes into the Columnbarium at the parish church he and mum went to.

I haven't yet decided whether I will publish my eulogy for Dad online, although I'm inspired by other examples to do so. It's a bit long for this blog, so if I decide to upload it somewhere, I'll post the link here. What I can say for now is that my Dad was a great man, and a good man, and we loved him very, very much.

Meanwhile, I just want to say a big thank you to all my good friends and family who have been a big help and support to me and my family at this time. You're wonderful and I love you.

I certainly intend to make the most of each moment we share together.

Wordlessly or otherwise

2008-12-05T11:37:00.000+11:00

I wish it were Wednesday, so that this post and photograph could be part of Wordless Wednesday, which I'm hoping to return to. But it's not, and I've just written some words. So there.

I'm quite taken with this photograph I took over the winter of the pigeons that congregate at this house's backyard every evening at around 4.30–5.00 pm. I assume they're being fed then, and they make quite a flurry of activity as they take off en masse, circle the house and surrounding area, and return to pick over whatever is left from their initial feeding frenzy. Sounds a bit like journalists, if you ask me.

Wind in the Willows is 100

2008-12-03T14:35:00.003+11:00

I have a number of abiding memories from reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows as a child and young teenager. Some strong themes stand out for me, in particular the spirits of discovery, adventure, fun and camaraderie that imbue the book, its critique of the excesses of wealth, and its celebration of idyllic country-river life.

Of course, as a teenager I also had a strong desire to one day be able to ‘muck about in boats’. It was only much later as an adult did I realise the extent that food was also a strong theme running both through the book and my experience of it. With this year being the centenary of the publication of Kenneth Grahame’s most famous and enduring work, I thought it worth while to revisit this theme in Grahame’s book.

In a writing class some years ago, we were all asked to bring some food with a literary theme to share, and to select and read in class a scene involving food from a pice of literature, to celebrate the final class of the year. One of my classmates (Hi, Heather!) read from a scene in the opening chapter of the book where Rat takes Mole on a picnic on the river bank in what is Mole’s first ever – and defining – experience of the River. She also brought every single food item listed by Rat to be in the picnic hamper to share at the party.

I just want to set the scene for you. The Mole has just seen the River for the first time, has just been befriended by the Rat, has just gotten into a boat for the first time, and is about to embark on his first ever River excursion with the Rat. During a quick stop-off at Ratty’s home on the river bank, Rat reappears “staggering under a fat, wicker luncheon-basket.”

‘Shove that under your feet,’ he observed to the Mole, as he passed it down into the boat. Then he untied the painter and took the sculls again.
‘What’s inside it?’ asked the Mole, wriggling with curiosity.
‘There’s cold chicken inside it,’ replied the Rat briefly;
coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrolls
cresssandwidgespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater––’
‘O stop, stop,’ cried Mole in ecstasies: ‘This is too much!’
‘Do you really think so?’ inquired the Rat seriously ‘It’s only what I always take on these little excursions; and the other animals are always telling me that I’m a mean beast and cut in very fine!’

In case you had difficulty deciphering from Grahame’s writing what the Rat had packed, here it is again:
cold chicken, cold tongue, cold ham, cold beef, pickled gherkins, salad, french rolls, cress sandwidges (sic), potted meat, ginger beer, lemonade and soda water.

The only thing my classmate couldn’t manage to bring was the potted meat – if only because she wasn’t sure what it was – and she compromised with some paté. As you can imagine, we had a great end-of-year celebration that year.

My classmate’s passionate recreation of Ratty’s and Moles’ river-side picnic lunch rekindled my interest in The Wind in the Willows, and reminded me of other scenes involving food in the book. When Mole gets lost in the Wild Wood and Rat goes to rescue him, they take refuge from the snow, nightfall and dangers of the Wild Wood with Badger, whose hospitality includes an ample supper and a lovely breakfast the next day.

In my favourite chapter, 'Dolce Domum', food is also the social lubricant that makes Mole’s rediscovery one winter evening of his own home the warm and joyful experience it is. First we have Rat displaying his optimism and can-do attitude to rustle up a tin of sardines, a box of captain’s biscuits, a German sausage and some beer from Mole's stores for his and Mole's supper. When the local young field mice out caroling turn up to sing at Mole’s front door, Rat soon packs off two of them with a shopping basket and strict instructions for more provisions to cater for the impromptu event. The joy with which Mole sits down with his guests to a table laden with food later that evening is a significant marker of the importance of food in hospitality and 'house-re-warming' – not only in Grahame's experience of country England of that period, but for all cultures everywhere, I'm sure.

I don't want to delve to far into what experiences influenced Grahame's book, or his idealisation of country life, animals or rivers in England. And I don't particularly want to get into the theory that suggests that food and food scenes in children's literature take the position of sex and sexuality found in adult literature – other than to mention in passing (heh!).

This is more an opportunity, instead, for me to pay homage to a book that had a big impact on my early life, and remains a favourite for various reasons – food being one of them. It is also a book that has survived a hundred years quite well, considering the popularity of the plays based on it performed at Melbourne's Royal Botanical Gardens each summer, the television shows based on it, and how children are still taken with the adventures of Mole, Rat, Badger, Otter and, yes, even Toad.

The guardian.co.uk and Telegraph.co.uk have great articles on Kenneth Grahame and the book to mark the centenary, and offer some fascinating insight into Grahame and what inspired and motivated him in writing the work.The Guardian piece has the bonus of publishing my all-time favourite EH Shepard illustration for the book, which I've not shown here only because it is still under copyright. It's the one that pretty much summed up the book for me as a child. EH Shepard's illustrations are generally considered the favourites and most identifiable with Grahame's book. The illustration above (not by Shepard) was published with the Telegraph piece.

As the weather warms up and our thoughts turn to the wonderful possibilities of picnics and barbecues and their associated foods, or just enjoying the gardens, rivers and creeks near us, I hope the Wind in the Willows offers you some inspiration. I know it will me. Perhaps I'll even make it out to the Fairfield Boathouse on the Yarra River to muck around in boats.

Cross-posted at Sarsaparilla.

[Note: sorry, I've just noticed the image was not displaying - I've fixed that up. Updated 9.42am Friday 16 January 2009]

Tearing open the heart

2008-11-26T17:35:00.003+11:00

I'm having trouble coming to terms with the enormity of the tragedy of the drowning death of the father and his two sons in Tathra, New South Wales. They were burried today in Bega, NSW.

Each time I hear or read the news of the event, I feel terribly troubled – almost in pain – to the extent that I don't allow myself to dwell too long on it, and the excruciating pain that must stem from such a tragedy. Today I'm facing it, otherwise it may haunt me.

I'm a very visual person, and I tend to visualise situations and events, particularly imagining how they may have unfolded. It's what I do, and it somehow meshes with the 'worse-case scenario' type of thinking I'm prone to.

From the reports, I understand that the father drowned after he jumped off the wharf to rescue his two young sons (four and 18 months) who had fallen in the water. The two boys also drowned. From an early report, police were investigating whether the older boy was playing with the pram his baby brother was in the minutes prior to their falling in. The three had gone for a walk on the wharf at Tathra, a popular holiday spot in New South Wales.

Part of my tendency to visualise and imagine the worst is that I also can't help but wonder how this could happen to my two boys and I. It could so easily have happened to any one of us. Kids fool around, big brothers (and sisters) often want a turn pushing their younger sibling in the pram. You take your eyes off them for a second to ask the fisherman on the wharf if the fish are biting. You hear shout or a splash, you panic, the terror rises up. You jump in. I would have, even though I cannot swim very well.

No, I don't feel any better having written this. I've imagined it yet again, and it hurts. But I've also been reminded that constant vigilance is a price for the joys of raising children and being parents. And this is in no way a suggestion that the dad at Tathra had not been vigilant. Not at all. I know exactly how quickly, and terribly easily, it could all come crashing down. That imagination feeds my paranoia when the kids are mucking about in places or situations I don't feel safe in or about.

I know that my feeling troubled at these events pales in comparison to the trauma and deep grief the family, especially the mother of the boys, and the wider community in Bega and Tathra are feeling. And will feel for a long time. The grief of losing a child, let alone two, and your lover, can tear open your heart. Especially when your memory of your partner is coloured by what happened to your children.

I know many, many people live with grief each and every day, and I've had my share of grief from death in the family, so I know that time will heal.

Honestly, though, if I had not been able to find them in the water, I don't know if I could have come back up to surface to face the enormity of the pain of it.

Vale, Shane, Riley and Travis. May you rest in peace.

[Image of the wharf at Tathra, NSW, by sophiec]

Consumer confidence plummets

2008-11-26T11:45:00.002+11:00

No, this is not a post about the see-sawing global financial crisis and how it is hitting consumer confidence. This is about something else that is quite serious: plummeting consumer confidence in eggs.

Australia's consumer rights organisation, Choice, has named the Australian Egg Corporation amongst its ten 2008 Shonky Awards for misleading consumers about free range eggs.

It seems that the Australian Egg Corporation's definition of 'free range eggs' gives a rubber stamp to the treatment of laying chickens that doesn't meet what we would expect as 'free range' or even humane. According to the Corporation's standard for free range, there can be 14 hens per square meter, whereas battery hens get 18 to the square meter. That is hardly much difference!

I feel duped – all this time, I've thought that the free range eggs that I'm buying from supermarkets and greengrocers are really from hens allowed to range free and treated humanely. Sure, I've heard the many arguments between free range breeders about accreditation, and whether free range egg farmers are any more humane if they de-beak their chooks, or lock them in barns at night (which actually protects them from the cold and predators, really) etc etc.

I certainly didn't expect the chooks to be crammed in at over a dozen to the square meter. If you think of a large egg farm, that is a lot of chooks crammed in the paddock.

Sure, I had my suspiscions about the veracity of the 'free range' claim when I've heard breeders insist there is no way the number of credible free range farmers could produce the masses of eggs being touted as free range on the market (and there are many claims and issues in this matter).

Because of this, I've tried to be more deliberate in my choice of free range eggs, and instead of relying on the picture of happy hens pecking in greed paddocks on the cartoon, to look for signs of more stringent (compared to the Egg Corporation's) assurance of free range: organic certification for one (but prohibitively expensive), and accreditation by Free Range Egg and Poultry Australia. Alternatively, you can buy your eggs direct from free range farmers, such as at CERES organic market (where you can see the conditions the chooks live in) and at farmers' markets.

But it is often not possible – especially when we're rushed or making last minute purchases, and the store we're at doesn't stock accredited free range eggs, so we end up grabbing the carton with the picture of happy chooks labelled free range and hope their claims are true.

I guess this story illustrates that there is no real excuse for sloppy shopping. Just as there is no excuse for slopping marketing.

[Image by zoomar - under creative commons license]

Sunday morning funnies

2008-11-23T11:55:00.003+11:00

John Cleese and Michael Palin in the 'Parrot Sketch' – a sure-fire antidote to any grey-cloud-blues on a dreary Melbourne Sunday morning.

There's laundry in the washing machine waiting for me to hang out, but cracking-up over this with the family around the kitchen table is a lot more fun.

Originally found via Still Life with Cat.

Double-Oh-Trouble

2008-11-21T17:27:00.001+11:00

I am quite positive that more than a few of us are James Bond fans. We probably just don't want to admit to it publicly. Perhaps its because many of us don't wish to admit to enjoying action movies, or spy thrillers at that. Perhaps its because so many of the James Bond films were schmaltzy, kitsch, glitzy or just plain dumb.

The current commercially-induced James Bond fever, sparked not insignificantly by the recent release of the latest in the Bond film franchise (which will remain unnamed in my vain attempt to thwart Google's page ranking search mechanisms), offers a great excuse for closet Bond fans to come out in the open and share what they love about the 00 agent from M16.

Sure, I'll admit it. I enjoy James Bond movies. With some of the best gimmicks and devices that have been the stock-in-trade of spy films, fancy cars, hammed-up bad guys, amazing futuristic sets for the bad guys' lairs (especially in those films made in the 60s and 70s), some pretty out-there stunts, and a chance to see the Bahamas, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Alps, Africa, or even glimpses behind the Iron Curtain (that were not) on the silver screen, plus a dozen episodes of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous rolled into one movie, I was more than happy to wallow in whichever film in the franchise was on television or at the cinema at the time.

Absolutely, I share many of the criticisms and apprehensions of this big-budget, money-spinning, action movie film franchise that has over the years demonstrated a great deal of misogyny, Cold War hyperbole, and extreme violence and bad sex on the big screen.

But I just can't help but reflect on the extent to which the last quarter century of James Bond movies has permeated popular culture and imbued itself in my childhood. They became part of my childhood play, imagination, and cultural patois.

The Bond films have become entrenched in popular culture, to the extent that the various cultural references to the films have become so clichéd that others refer to them in self-referentially clichéd ways – sometimes to good effect (the Austin Powers franchise). And for all their pop-schmaltziness, the makers of the Bond movies would usually try to fit in some political comment on issues of the time, however tokenistic or shallow the effort was.

So here goes. To assist those closet Bond fans come out, I'm framing the rest of this post in terms of some Trivia questions. Please feel free to join in.

Favourite Bond song
I'm tossing up between 'Goldfinger' by Shirley Bassey (from Goldfinger) and 'Live and Let Die' by Paul McCartney (Live and Let Die)

Favourite Bond bad-guy
Hmmm. Probably Dr No. But I haven't made up my mind, really.

Favourite Bond bad-guy's henchman
Originally, I couldn't decide between Jaws from Moonraker and the butler who decapitated people with his bowler hat (name and movie forgotten), but now I'm leaning toward Robby Coltrane as the ex-KGB spy turned Russian gangster who started appearing in GoldenEye.

Favourite Bond gadget
The gondola that turns into a hovercraft. Can't remember which film though, but that scene is set in Venice, of course.

Favourite Bond female lead
Natalya Simonova, played by Izabella Scorupco, the Russian computer programmer who helps defeat the geeky bad guy in GoldenEye.

Favourite Bond M16 hack
I really can't decide between John Clease as Q and Dame Judi Dench as M. I'm leaning for Judi Dench.

Least favourite Bond film
I'd have to think very hard about this, because while there are many scenes, plot-lines and characters I dislike in many of the films, I'm not enough of a fan to know them thoroughly to work out which one I hate the most.

Favourite actor playing James Bond
Without a doubt, Sean Connery.

What about you? And what Bond trivia questions would you add?

Cross-posted at Sarsaparilla.

Creativity, colour and noise put global warming on Melbourne's agenda

2008-11-17T17:00:00.002+11:00

I've had a chance to upload my photos from Saturday's Walk Against Warming to flickr, so I can tell the story of that successful rally through pictures. There are more photos at that link to my flickr site.

The anti-nuclear power message was strong at Walk Against Warming in Melbourne.

But bicycle power was a very strong favourite instead.

As was turtle power.

People's creativity was shining through in the many banners, placcars and protest props people brought to make their message clear. As was the cooperation and community involvement evident in some of the larger and more elaborate ones.

The Walk Against Warming in Melbourne finished up at the steps of Victoria's Parliament on Spring St, to pressure the Brumby government to take strong action on climate change. At issue was its foot-dragging over 'Feed In' tariffs to pay those who feed solar-powered electricity into the grid.

This placard caught my attention at the steps of Parliament where the Walk Against Warming ended.

See also the reverse of that placard.

The samba percussion band and dancer were a huge hit at Melbourne's Walk Against Warming. Their loud, cheery dance rhythms and the colourful dancer really lifted the mood of the march, and got people cheering, clapping and dancing up the street.

Wasn't it Rosa Luxembourg who said 'If I can't dance in the your revolution, then I don't want any part of it?'*

I do believe that the big crowd, the creativity and the spirit of those marching on Saturday are strong signs that people believe that climate change is still a major issue that requires strong, urgent and concerted action from government – all governments: local, state and national, and international – and from the community.

To an extent, I do think that the upcoming local government elections will be a test of the extent to which the community will hold their government representatives accountable for the pace of action and policy work on this issue.

And it has the potential for being a litmus test for how Victorians perceive the Brumby government is acting on this and other enviromental issues – including logging old growth forests and the threat that extending clearways holds for local neighbourhood strip shopping and communities.

Let's keep an eye on this one, eh?

I have to say, though, this is still one of my favourite placards at the march, and it was a favourite of many others too.

*Yes, yes, it is probably one of those myths of the activist left that this saying is attributed to her, but hey, I love the sentiments…

It's huge: Walk Against Warming in Melbourne

2008-11-15T13:49:00.001+11:00

It's huge: Walk Against Warming in Melbourne, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

In Federation Square with a massive crowd for Walk Against Warming. The big message is strong emissions cuts and the potential for renewable energy. We need a strong community movement on climate change. Get active!

Walk against warming tomorrow – Saturday

2008-11-14T16:41:00.003+11:00

Better late than never, I guess. In case you didn't already know, there will be another Walk Against Warming tomorrow, Saturday 15 November.

In Melbourne, the meeting place is Federation Square, at 1pm.

The Walk Against Warming website lists the details for other Australian cities.

If you think the struggle for strong action on climate change has passed, or it's time to relax, because Obama has been elected in the US and Rudd is promising an Australian emission reduction scheme, then think again! Now is the time to keep up the pressure on the Rudd government for clean energy, strong climate targets, and a safe future.

Amidst juggling the kids, Milo cricket and the usual Saturday requirements, I really hope to drag the kids out to Walk Against Warming this year. Hopefully, there will be so many people I won't have a chance to see you there! All the same, it promises to be a good family day.

A lucky but well deserving chook

2008-11-12T12:09:00.002+11:00

Nam Le has won the Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers for his story collection, The Boat. Congratulations, Nam!

According to the folks at the Dylan Thomas Prize, the prize is to "recognize the best young writer in the English-speaking world and ensures that the inspirational nature of Dylan's writing will live on." They mean writers under 30. That's very nice, but the £60,000 would come in very, very handy too. That's AUD$140,000! From what I gather from this morning's Radio National Breakfast show, it is one of the richest and most prestigious literary prizes for young writers globally. You can hear Nam Le talking about this prize in his usual self-deprecating style to Radio National's Fran Kelly this morning – if you hurry and before RN take the audio off-line.

Nam Le has certainly made a splash in Australia and around the world for his first book, The Boat, a collection of short stories – some of which are short in name only. He drew a very big crowd at this year's Melbourne Writers Festival, and his packed-out conversation with Sophie Cunningham was transmitted live by satellite to the Edinburgh Festival of Books, and I believe The Boat was one of the highest selling books at the Festival. It is certainly one of the highest selling books of short stories in recent years.

And he's been winning a slew of awards, honours and prizes. Yet, however much prizes such as the Dylan Thomas claim to celebrate the best, they are pretty much just competitions, and there are many, many young writers out there slogging it and coming within Cooee of the Dylan Thomas. Even Nam Le is pretty low-key about the significance of this recent prize. As he told Fran Kelley on RN this morning, literary prizes are a chook lottery, and he happened to be the lucky chook this time.

Nonetheless, he is a good writer, and he deserves it. But for all the talk of Nam Le's talent, which I sincerely admire, his emergence from the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, his rise to fame with The Boat, and his success as fiction editor of the Harvard Review, I think it is important to take some perspective in remembering where he came from.

No, I don't mean so much Australia, where he grew up, or Vietnam, where he was born and from which his family fled by boat when he was a three-month-old baby (although the Dylan Thomas Prize strangely describes him as a "critically acclaimed Vietnamese writer" rather than an Australian writer...). Though I do think that for a Vietnamese refugee boat person to be a good writer and make it good on the Australian and world literary stages is a great achievement to be celebrated.

What I mean is where Nam Le's stories were first published, and where we – Australian readers particularly – first encountered him.

I first heard of Nam Le when I was blown away by his story 'Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice' in The Best Australian Stories 2007, edited by Robert Drewe. Before that, its first Australian publication was in the magazine Overland, and before that it was published in the US Zoetrope: All-Story.

And I don't mean it lightly when I saw blown-away by that story when I read it last Christmas. So I am truly grateful for Drewe picking the story for the collection, though he would have been foolish not to. And I'm very grateful that Overland published the story first in Australia. In fact, of all the previously published stories collected in The Boat, only 'Love and Honour…' had been previously published in Australia.

And here is the crux of my rant. If it weren't for Overland publishing that story in Australia – and going on publishing more and more Australian stories each edition – and Robert Drewe picking it up in time to be packaged by Black Inc for a whole lot of Australians' Christmas/Summer reading last year, I wonder if I would have heard of and been impressed by Nam Le as I was. And I wonder if his writing would have made such an impact on me as it did.

And I wonder if I would have liked The Boat as much as I do.

Seems to me we need more magazines and places for short stories to be published – and read – here in Australia. Otherwise, we may miss the next Nam Le. Or worse, miss their stories.

Cross-posted at Sarsaparilla.

[Image: Nam Le at the Mossman Library, Queensland. Photo by Mossman Library, used under Creative Commons license]

Last day in Cairns

2008-11-07T06:50:00.001+11:00

I'm leaving the conference early this morning so that I can catch a direct early afternoon flight home. Considering the only later direct flight to Melbourne lands just before midnight, I'm very happy to trade the last sessions of the conference for getting home and seeing my family earlier. Sook.

Despite the hard work I've had to do here (seriously, no, seriously) and the utter boredom inspired by some of the conference presentations, Cairns has been fun, though certainly no holiday.

Unlike some of those I met at the conference, I didn't arrange to stay an extra couple of nights and make a trip to the reef or nearby islands, fly my partner or whole family up to join me for the weekend, or take day-trips in the middle of the conference. Unfortunately, it didn't even occur to me to fit in a tour to the Great Barrier Reef – for which I'm kicking myself.

While I've only hung around in the CBD, I've enjoyed what I've seen and experienced: the heavy grey clouds that descend from the hills ringing Cairns and stifle us with the humidity without a single drop of rain, the blasting sun and humidity of 32 degrees C days, and how with the refreshing cool that sunset brings, the lorikeets roosting in trees in the centre of town deafen passers-by, while the flying foxes ghost silently above us on their way to their breakfast.

And I've very much enjoyed how culturally mixed Cairns is: with the strong presence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, tourists and backpackers, and the particularly the Japanase holiday who choose to make Cairns home for few months and work in the hotels, shops, Japanese restaraunts etc, giving me a contemporary impression of what Thursday Island and Broome would have been like at the height of the Japanese involvement of the pearling industry.

On all this, hopefully much more once I get settled when I'm home again.

Cool shade

2008-11-04T07:50:00.003+11:00

Cool shade, originally uploaded by Mark Lawrence.

This is one of the largest ficcus trees I've seen in a long time. In Cairns city mall.

North of Capricorn

2008-11-03T15:52:00.001+11:00

I am in Cairns all this week for a work conference. There wont be much time to play, but I do hope to post that I see here when I can.

Happy Eighth Birthday, Jacob!

2008-10-27T23:30:00.003+11:00

It was my older son's birthday on Saturday. Jacob turned eight.

We had a party on Saturday for him and four of his school friends and his two Melbourne cousins (and other relatives) involving a round of mini-golf and then a birthday picnic at the park. We then had a late BBQ lunch for the family after. It was a pretty busy day, as you can imagine. And exhausting.

Mini golf is a strange game. It's stranger to watch five eight-year-olds (we'd split the party into manageable groups for the golf) struggling to hit little white balls into not much larger holes with unwieldy clubs over deviously frustrating tracts of poorly maintained artificial grass. I think the kids had fun.

The cake and treats certainly made up for any frustration though.

In all, I believe Jacob enjoyed himself. He even said so.

Jacob's been really enjoying his birthday presents, in particular the electric train set we gave him (in conjunction with his Nana). He's been a train buff for a long time, but this is his first electric model train set, and he was really excited about it. But it turned out to be larger that we expected, so it took nearly all of Sunday for his mum and I to build a special platform train set so that it could be kept safely out of reach of feet, accidents or his little brother's hands.

With sheets of plywood and lengths of timber, glue, screws, sandpaper, a borrowed electric drill and a great deal of elbow grease, sweat, occasional swearing and good planning, we managed to get it finished last night just after dinner. It still needs quite a few finishing touches, including a paint job, but it gives Jacob the chance to set up the tracks and run his train, which he's enjoying a lot.

Happy birthday, son! It is amazing to think that it has been eight years since I witnessed your birth and you came into our lives. Smitten as only new father can be, I marvelled at how amazing you were. And you continue to amaze me. Your mother and I really didn't have much of a real idea what we were in for when you were born, but it has sure been an amazing adventure.

I love you, and I hope your life continues to be an amazing adventure!

Overheard on the tram

2008-10-27T17:16:00.001+11:00

Teenage boy 1: Sonic Youth are just weird. Teenage boy 2: Dad only likes crap music. Aah, the generations gap. Mobile post.

Toilet training success

2008-10-23T13:29:00.001+11:00

Cafe post: Out in Fitzroy with my youngest and he waited til we got to a cafe - and used their loo without fuss! Woot!

6 minutes isn't even enough time to help my youngest go to the toilet

2008-10-22T23:56:00.003+11:00

'One Minute Aussie Dads', the headlines screamed when I spotted it on the tram going home from my night class on Monday. Well, it was something like that, because I didn't pay very much attention. If it hadn't been on the front of the free, waste of old-growth forest glorified shopping catalogue distributed free on Melbourne's public transport that I saw from across the aisle, I may have paid a bit more attention to it – beyond wondering what beat-up about dead-beat dads it was beating up.

I'd been in work training in the city all that day, so no internet, no email and no blogs, and hadn't heard the news. But there it was again the next day when I did get on the net at work.

There was a whole bunch of news items reporting the research findings of social researcher Lyn Craig from the University of New South Wales that Australian fathers on average spend as little as one minute a day alone with their children – on weekdays. Or, on average, six minutes alone with their kids from Monday to Friday.

I'm not sure who these fathers are, or how these averages are calculated, but it doesn't sound anything like any of the fathers I know well enough. It certainly doesn't reflect my experience.

6 minutes didn't even cover the time it took me to help my second go to the toilet to do a poo this evening. Or to wash his hands.

(He's two and a half, and he started toilet training a week and a half ago, and he has been going wonderfully well this last week, with accidents getting fewer and further between. He has even moved on to doing a poo on the toilet this last couple of days, which is a great accomplishment, and which required my sitting in the hallway outside the loo keeping him company this evening before dinner, and more… Hmm, I bet that was probably a bit more information than you really wanted, isn't it?)

Then there's the bit of time before the loo thing that I spent with my two boys in the front yard playing cricket. And I didn't come home from work and yoga yesterday to immediately blog on these reports because I was putting the boys to sleep. And I bet you know (or can guess) how long it can take to get two boys to go to sleep.

I'm not trying to talk myself up, or request a round of applause. I guess I am saying that the research findings came as a bit of a surprise to me. Perhaps that is the shortcoming of assuming that many - if not most - other people are like yourself or the people you know.

But even where I consider the many the differences in socio-economic, cultural, and educational backgrounds and attitudes amongst the people around me, I find many who apparently share some traits with me – fathers who care about spending time with their kids and being directly and intimately involved in their care, and mothers who expect, encourage and enable this participation.

A lot of the reporting on the research was that fathers spend time with their children alongside the mothers of the children, and spend more time alone with their children on weekends. Another finding was that many fathers believed that the care for children was the responsibility of mothers, while for fathers it was a hobby.

It is probably true that many, many in Australia still hold such attitudes, and many for whom time with the kids is time as a family, rather than one-on-one or without mum around. And there are a lot of men who are struggling to balance work demands with their desires to spend more time with their families at all, let alone time alone with their kids.

But there are also lots of fathers who spend a great deal of time alone with their children, and relish it. And it's not just time spent playing sport and other 'blokey' things. This can be shuttling kids to and from school, or helping them with their homework, reading to them, drawing with them, putting them to bed, or just hanging out. And enjoying it.

By all means, do still take them to the footy. At least you've got that.

If we don't talk about the fact we are doing this, and why, then the kinds of attitudes identified in the research, and the dearth of time fathers spend with their children without the mediation of mothers, will continue.

I have succumbed

2008-10-17T12:46:00.003+11:00

And hence, I have succumbed to the lol-cats blog post.

It has been one of those weeks.

(Oh, and I've been very, very busy. Promise.)

Why do you care about climate change?

2008-10-09T10:50:00.000+11:00

Another step I took as part of my recent eddy of activity on climate change was to sign up with the 'Who on Earth Cares' website. An initiative of the Australian Conservation Foundation, the site allows people across Australia to express their concerns about climate change and pledge to take certain steps to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, and record and share their initiatives on a map. It also allows you to see how people in your neighbourhood are taking similar steps. It's quite encouraging.

The site asks you three basic questions, thus providing a frame for what you share online, and asks you to nominate various steps you pledge to take to cut your personal and household greenhouse emissions. I've decided to share what I wrote for Who on Earth Cares here – also because it captures my latest thoughts on action on climate change:

Why do you care about climate change?
I believe that global warming is one of the most pressing crises facing our planet, and our human society, and we need to take the most effective action possible as soon as possible to avert the most dangerous aspects of climate change. I want to be able to say to my children and grandchildren that I did what I could to help slow, stop and even reverse dangerous climate change.

How concerned are you about climate change?
I'm very concerned about climate change, and I'm very concerned that despite its promises, the efforts by the Rudd government will be too little, too late. The Rudd Government must commit to strong targets in any climate change plan – namely a reduction of greenhouse emissions by a minimum 40% by 2020 and no less.

Although I believe that the most effective action on cutting greenhouse gas emissions must come from government and industry, I think that families and households can reinvigorate our action to cut household emissions to show the government and industry that we are serious, and that we can 'do' as we 'say', just as we expect them to act. This is why I am renewing my and my family's commitment to continue reducing our climate impact and to cut our household emissions further.

What do you want Australia to be like in the future?
I want Australia to be carbon neutral – to be weened off the fossil fuel industries and generating our energy needs from sustainable, renewable energy. I want Australia to be nuclear free, and tapping into the vast resources of solar, wind, and geothermal energies. I want to see whole communities working together to make our food, transport, housing, health, well-being, culture, industry, education, government etc ecologically and socially sustainable – to be human and humane.

To reduce my greenhouse pollution, I have personally committed to:
* Switch my household power supply to accredited GreenPower
* Set my washing machine to wash my clothes in cold water
* Turn off computers and screens overnight at work and home
* Eat one less serve of meat a week
* Avoid one domestic air flight this year and purchase carbon offsets
* Drive 20 kilometres less each week
* Reduce my household electricity and gas usage by 20%
______

A lot of the steps I've pledged above are things I already do, like cycling and taking the tram to work instead of driving, but I'm renewing my comitment to do them.

Some steps are new – we're switching to 100% wind powered GreenPower. This has been a useful exercise because I discovered the GreenPower plan we're on at home only includes 20% wind energy, leaving the ballance to come from coal and hydro (which the government no longer accredits as GreenPower, I gather).

The other great thing about the site is that it encourages you to write to your local federal member of parliament to share your concerns and urge them to support stronger action from Australia on climate change. It automatically generates the letter's text based on what you've written for the first two questions above and additional material they provide on greenhouse gas emissions targets. Brilliant! I also used this feature to amend and prepare a second letter to federal Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong. More action that is usefully directed at lobbying your MP and Minister.

I encourage you to sign up with Who on Earth Cares (if you haven't already, of course) and perhaps share what you've written there on your own blog if you have one (drop me a comment here to let me know if you've done this). One reason for this is that most bloggers I know aren't too keen on outing their locations so publically on a google map, which is what Who on Earth Cares does. After all, we are fond of our privacy and security, aren't we? Though perhaps not as much as we are fond of a decent and secure future for our kids.

So do remember to send your letter to your local member.

[Image is a screenshot from Who on Earth Cares]

Taking climate change action to the workplace

2008-10-08T23:48:00.001+11:00

Of late I have tried to reinvigorate my efforts and take further action on climate change – especially beyond this blog. The recent concern with Garnaut's proposed targets for cutting Australia's greenhouse gas emissions helped spark this.

I also think that after the first flush of concern and action around climate change that started two or three years ago, there is the danger of complacency setting in, or concern with the accelerating rate of warming turning into 'caught in the headlights' fear.

For these reasons, it is useful to remember what we're concerned about, renew a sense of responsibility, recommit to whatever steps previously made to cut our greenhouse emissions, and take further action. This includes taking action at work beyond chats in the tea room.

This morning at work, I organised a viewing of a DVD on the impact of climate change on poor communities in developing countries, including Australia's Pacific neighbours. The 15 minute DVD was from Make Poverty History, who are distributing it as part of their climate change campaign to highlight the disproportional impact of global warming on the poor of developing countries. They had also kindly provided pamphletes, posters, postcards, petitions and a host of other campaign material.

I was pleased with the positive reception – not just in the number of my colleagues who came (a big majority) but also in the short discussion we had after. A lot of my colleagues are already well versed in the issues around climate change and take their own personal action, but efforts to be more sustainable at work have been slower and a little more painful.

That is why I'm really heartened by some people saying they were inspired to act further, and a renewed interest amongst us in the organisation switching to GreenPower and exploring offsetting the carbon emissions for our various activies, including flights – including from my boss. We are a small organisation with a small budget, and there is only so much we can do. I could not have hoped for a better response.

I've volunteered to get information on carbon offsetting and switching to GreenPower, and having an energy efficiency audit done at work. More work to do, but good work.

Thank you, Leslie Canold

2008-10-07T13:43:00.000+11:00

For saying what you said – publicly. I really, really appreciate it, and I think it is spot on.

Lemmings or wildebeest?

2008-10-01T14:22:00.000+10:00

In case you need further proof that stock market traders and other capitalist flunkies are a bunch of lemmings collectively hurling themselves off the cliff – taking our superannuation savings with them – in a fit of irrational fear, then heed the words of these scientists.

Paul Zak of the Centre for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California says, "There is this sort of herd mentality over-reaction".

"I am not a financial genius. I do know that when you see millions of people in the market essentially freaking out, that spills over into your brain and you get this impulse to do what everyone else is doing," he said.

I just wonder if these traders and investors are wildebeest stampeding to escape predators or base-jumping lemmings. If they are just wildebeest, they'll stampeded until they tire themselves out and look around sheepishly when the dust settles. The irony is they are terrified of the results of their own handiwork.

Queenscliff and Point Lonsdale

2008-09-30T17:40:00.001+10:00

We had a great time during our weekend away to Queenscliff. In actual fact, our holiday was in the Bellarine Peninusula, as we stayed in a self-contained cottage in Wallington, about 15 minutes inland from Queenscliff, and, besides enjoying Queenscliff's township, we also made forrays to Point Lonsdale for its beach and to see the lighthouse.

I have a thing about lighthouses, and you wouldn't believe how happy I was to see and photograph the one at Point Lonsdale. The current structure has been standing since 1902, when it replaced the wooden lighthouse that had been operating since 1863. I wonder if the wooden one burned down. The plaque didn't say.

I hope to photograph the lighthouses at Airey's Inlet and Cape Otway some day, and have a complete set of the lighthouses of the Bellarine Peninsula and Great Ocean Road.

The kids are train fanatics and Queenscliff is famous for its tourist steam railway, so there was no way we could avoid a steam train trip. To be able to take our younger son on a ride, we chose the shorter 40–45 minute round trip from from Queenscliff to Lakers Siding. Short and sweet, but much going for it, including passing by some lovely views of Swan Bay and the Marine Discovery Centre (more on that later).

Queenscliff station is a simple, old country railway station with volunteers running the steam trains as a 'living museum', much like Puffing Billy in Belgrave and the museum at Daylesford. Lakers Siding was just a stop with just a little old post and telegraph office. But there we got to watch the train shunt around the carriages and join up to the opposite end to take us back to Queenscliff.

We also visited the Queenscliff Marine Discovery Centre, which is a marine research and education centre run by Victoria's Department of Primary Industries. They don't have an extensive public exhibit, but we got there just in time for the floor talk and feeding time (the creatures are fed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays). It was a really good way to see some of the marine life of Port Phillip Bay, including sea horses, sea cucumbers, scallops and such, and for the kids and adults to learn of the impact of litter, plastics and other acts of human inconsideration on marine ecology and sea life. We also got to touch the seastars, hermit crabs and other hardy creatures in the touch tank.

We stayed at a self-contained holiday cottage on the grounds of a B&B in Wallington, set in a mix of bushland and farmland. It was quite easy to get to from the Bellarine Highway, which was amazing because dotted around the property were these amazing, massive and ancient grass trees.

You could tell they were old because they are very slow growing and many had tall trunks and even taller central floral spikes. The one above didn't have half as tall a flower spike, but it was stunning and in blossom. This was pretty much the view from the kitchen window whenever I was at the sink:

Not bad for washing dishes, wouldn't you say?

You can find more of my Queenscliff holiday photos on flickr.

Holiday interruptions…

2008-09-26T22:24:00.005+10:00

… are, of course, the best kind. But it does mean I have had little time or energy for regular blogging this week.

We are going down to Queenscliff for the weekend, and that means I won't be able to blog very much. I may manage the odd brief email blog post, but being on holiday I won't feel very obligated to do so.

It's school holidays, so... you can imagine what things are like at home. But that doesn't mean I haven't been having fun. Yesterday, I took the boys to ACMI for a free claymation workshop they are holding for kids, and we had a great time. I wanted to blog about it after, but was too exhausted.

Work has been pretty busy as well, so I've had little energy to blog these last few evenings. And I hope to do just that sometime next week. And, things going well, some photos of the holiday.

Along with some observations on the emerging trends in the new Opposition new leader, Malcolm Turnbull, portraying himself as charismatic and all-Australian (despite him being the richest man in parliament) against an 'out-of-touch', boring, technocratic, jet-setting PM, Kevin Rudd. Hmm, we live in interesting times when the richest man in parliament – a conservative – can pose as the hero of pensioners and paint the Labor PM as mean and an elitist intellectual.

Meanwhile, you can keep track of what I've been – and will be – up to via Twitter.

The bowerbird near the heart of the city

2008-09-23T18:10:00.000+10:00

It is quite amazing that a 40-minute tram ride and 5-minute walk away from my home, a Satin Bowerbird is building a new bower. But what is more amazing is that this isn’t a ride out of the city, but in to the very edge of the CBD.

There is a magical Australian Indigenous rainforest garden of gum trees, tree-ferns, palms, creepers, sedges, grasses and bushes flourishing in Melbourne, and it is not at the Botanical gardens. Nor is it in the walled garden of the Melbourne Club or any other exclusive garden of the city’s elite.

Enclosed by concrete walls, glass, steel mesh and a metal framework, this rainforest garden is at the Melbourne Museum and is the permanent Forest Gallery, demonstrating the natural and human forces that shape southeast Australia's forest ecology. This flourishing garden is habitat for tiny birds, frogs, blue-tongued lizards, insects, and a host of other creatures I have not yet encountered. It is also home to a pair of Satin Bowerbirds – male and female.

The Satin Bowerbird, Ptilonorhynchus violaceus, is common to the forests of eastern Australia from southern Queensland to Victoria. The male, whose stunning, shiny jet plumage provides the name, builds a bower of twigs and grasses on the ground and decorates it with bright objects, including flowers, berries and even plastic oddments, to woo a female to mate.

On a previous visit to the Museum's Forest Gallery, I noticed a stunning arrangement of blue plastic objects around the large bower near the path. Blue plastic spoons, straws, biro barrels, and milk bottle lids and broken bits of blue balloons were artfully arranged around the bower’s entrance and the ground around it. I didn't have my camera with me, so I don't have any photographs to show this brilliant display, but this Wikipedia image does the job.

On my visit there with my younger son last Sunday, however, this brilliant cerulean concourse was missing. I thought it had been washed out, raided by vandals, or tidied up by over-zealous clean-freaks who missed the point. The bower still stood, but seemed somewhat diminished.

Later, while quietly waiting for the tiny wrens to show themselves in the open part on higher ground, (my son and I love sit quietly to see how close the wrens will reach us before they dart off again), I noticed the Satin Bowerbird male was assembling a new bower.

I guessed that it was new because he was very busy with it – scuttling in and out, making adjustments to the arrangements of twigs and grass that are so minute to be barely perceptible, at least not to anyone else besides the Bowerbird and the female he is trying to woo with his bower.

And there didn't appear to be any blue bits and pieces around that bower, as though it weren't ready for the finishing touches that will attract the female to mate with him.

The irony is that after all that construction work, if the female is attracted by the male’s bower to mate with him, she will the fly off to build a separate nest in which to lay their eggs.

I wonder if she raids his love-shack for material to build the nest.

The photo is one I took of the Forest Gallery from a visit there early last year. You can see a photo of the Satin Bowerbird in its bower on the Museum’s website.