thegoodwills.com

My laptop is doing odd things – taking forever to load things I think I need and occasionally sending messages that the hard drive is full – blue-screen critical. The same goes for my two terabyte external hard drive – chockers, as are most of the USB memory sticks lying around.

I downloaded a programme which analyses your computer and graphically shows you what type of files are taking up most room. Yes, I know, the programme just added to the mess, but it was a salutary lesson. Part of the problem is that modern PCs come with back-up systems that take up an enormous amount of space on a hard-drive and if you don’t set it up right, it just keeps on adding back-ups, willy-nilly. Then there are very large music and video files and photos. OMG, the photos. I don’t know where to start – do you? Let’s not even think about the cupboard full of prints and negatives from the 1970s through to our first digital cameras.

Those of us with a penchant for hoarding (you know, collecting bent nails in case times get really tight), add to the physical clutter by becoming a digital hoarder. For example, I’m pretty sure my Outlook folder (27GB) contains every email I ever sent and most emails I ever received. The smart thing to do would be to delete everything. I recall a business acquaintance once telling me he came back from three weeks holiday and did just that with the hundreds of emails that accumulated while he was away – control alt delete.

“If it was that important, they’ll get back to me.”

We are now being told that we can store electronic files in “the cloud” and, what’s more, it doesn’t cost anything. Do I feel secure about my scanned family archives being stored off-site by some faceless internet company? Not bloody likely.

I have gradually been whittling away at the edges of my hoarding habit. The trouble is when you’ve been writing for 40 years, that’s a lot of paper. Boxes full of journals, two four-drawer filing cabinets full of what are probably first drafts, second drafts and multiple copies of the same documents.

Then there are the shoeboxes full of letters from one’s parents, siblings and lovers. Last year I did a “cull” of the correspondence files which to be honest, amounted to throwing out Christmas and birthday cards from the 1970s and 1980s. But when it came to Father’s letters, and the letters I wrote to him (retrieved after he died and my sister and I cleaned out his flat), I confess I sorted them more or less chronologically, put rubber bands around the bundles and carefully put them back into a new shoe box.

“Someday my son will find this interesting,” I tell myself, thinking about the historical relevance (Dad complaining about Mr Muldoon and Rogernomics (unpopular 1980s economic policy in New Zealand). He probably won’t, but you never know, do you?

Our children, generally speaking, don’t appear to have a clutter problem at all, apart from their bedrooms.

For Gen X and Y it’s all about NOW and who will be first to post a party photo on Facebook. They live with phone in hand and (having conducted a straw poll) I can tell you that few of their cohort ever back up data.

Hoarding ranges from very specific collecting (stamps, butterflies, fridge magnets and so on) to a major psychological problem.  TV current affairs programmes love a good hoarder, especially if they can get footage of the reporter squeezing his or her way past 10 years’ worth of newspapers stacked in the hall. Keeping “stuff” because of its historic relevance is something else again. I have a couple of archives boxes full of newspaper cuttings, stories I wrote for the long-defunct Daily Sun. You might remember The Daily Sun – for a while there it was a genuine competitor to The Courier-Mail and we took our work seriously, often beating the CM to stories when they had five journalists for every one of us.

The Daily Sun library had paper files, thousands of them, kept up to date by librarians who would help you find the background stories you needed to write a new one. As far as I know this historic news archive (1982 to 1991) was taken to the tip. The National Library will have The Sun on microfilm, but those hand-pasted clips, an alternative view of Brisbane’s written contemporary history, are gone forever.

Burning Father’s Letters

Last year I wrote a song around this subject, Burning Father’s Letters, which includes a spoken word narrative about Charles Dickens and the Gad’s Hill Bonfire. In 1860 Dickens took more than 22,000 letters and private papers out to the back of his estate in County Kent and torched them. They included letters from famous writers of the day including William Thackeray and Lord Alfred Tennyson. Other writers of the Victorian era also burned their personal correspondence to thwart publishers who craved collections of letters which they’d publish after the writers’ death. http://www.thegoodwills.com/mp3-player/

Someone who has our new album wrote to say how the song resonated with him as he had been through this very situation after his Mother’s death. I want to close this week’s column with an extract from his letter to me.

“On my recent trip to the UK for my Mum’s funeral, I took with me a large packet of letters written to me over the years by both my father and my mother. They went back decades. The elder of my two sisters told me a while ago that the best thing to do was to burn them, but somehow I couldn’t do that. The finality of it all, the end of recorded, written memory just seemed too much. I guess in the end that’s what happens to most correspondence from those who die. I thought, “Will my kids ever want to read these?”‘ And the answer was No, they won’t. They will never know what it was like in my home when my parents got a telephone connected; the first black and white television; the crises and sometimes disasters that befell them. A chronicle of a working class family’s life from the 1970s in short – them in urban England; me, discovering the world.

“I took the bundle of letters back home and gave them to my other sister who has been reading them and who says they are beautiful and she is glad I didn’t destroy them. There are others – boxes of them from people who played an important part in my life. Can I bear to burn them one day? Will I have to?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You won’t read too much in the mainstream media about the online news magazine, The Conversation. In case you didn’t know about The Conversation (research-based articles by academics), the Federal Labor Government gave the not-for-profit news organisation seed money of $1.5 million in 2011 and an extra $2 million over two years in the 2013 budget. But Education Minister Christopher Pyne has cut the funding, so The Conversation has to replace 25% of its operational budget.
An article in Pro Bono Australia quoted editor Andrew Jaspan (pictured) as saying the aim was to be fully self-sufficient by 2017 through contributions from its global network.
“We must now take stock,” he said.

In the 10 days since the Federal Budget revealed the cuts, this stock-taking has resulted in more than 1,000 readers donating $190,000 via a direct plea for donations on the home page of the website. Meanwhile, The Conversation continues daily with the support of a majority of Australian universities and the CSIRO.
I feel a little bad about this as I get The Conversation in my mailbox every day and to my shame do not always read it extensively. This could well be the syndrome my son’s generation refers to as TMTR (too much to read). But the gems I have mined from this rich body of intellectual discourse have been nuggets of precious information I would not have found elsewhere. For example, on Wednesday, there was an insightful article about people with bipolar disorder and why they struggle to interact with others.
One of my readers donated $200 on hearing news of The Conversation’s fiscal plight. He says it is the only daily news he reads, the why of that probably best explained by Andrew Jaspan.
“We believe healthy democracies need access to high quality, non-partisan, evidence-based information,” Jaspan told Pro Bono Australia. “That has struck a chord with our two and a half million readers.”
Jaspan said yesterday the donations would buy some time while other initiatives are investigated. The funding target is $300,000 and on the response so far, that seems achievable. Crowd-funding platforms like Indiegogo or Kickstarter, both of which work with not-for-profits, extract a commission for their work. At least $60,000 of a successful $1 million campaign would go in commissions and processing fees.
So we can see why The Conversation decided to make a direct plea to its readers. One hopes they discover a wealthy benefactor out there.

If you delve into the detail of any government’s budget you will find funding cuts that one could hypothesise were made on partisan grounds, to shut down criticism of the government. It is easier to single out when, like The Conversation’s financial support, the sum involved is pocket change on the scale of a Federal Budget.
Art for art’s sake?
Meanwhile, this year the Abbott government got a bit tricky with arts funding too. Instead of cutting funds to the Arts, a new entity was created to distribute the funds. The National Programme for Excellence in the Arts takes $105 million from the Australia Council and puts it in Arts Minister Senator George Brandis’s top drawer for re-distribution to arts organisations. There has been much discourse on this move, with the easy conclusion that the top end of town arts initiatives (opera, ballet, light classical), will be generously endowed, while there will be less money available for writers, experimental art and theatre. Of course, the same sort of criticism could be levelled at the Australia Council, which has developed a reputation for favouring the arts in Sydney and Melbourne. So at best, Senator Brandis could just be trying to revitalise regional arts. Radio National’s Michael Cathcart asked him what kinds of excellence was the Australia Council not supporting.
Senator Brandis, after dancing around the question for a few minutes, said it was about “contestability” – that it was not an ideal situation that all arts funding be administered by the Australia Council. He said he wants to give artists and performers who miss out on funding “a second go”. In many ways, this could be a response to what is a widespread perception that the Australia Council is a “closed shop”.
But as Cathcart pointed out, the Australia Council, which has a remaining budget of $185 million, is also being directed to trim $7.2 million from its own budget over four years through “efficiencies”. The Budget papers says these savings would be met by cuts to artists in residence and the ArtStart programme, which means small companies and start-ups would be disadvantaged. Cathcart’s telling question was when he asked Senator Brandis whether some sections of the arts community were anxious that this would amount to “State-sanctioned art”.
“That’s a nonsense criticism. The money comes from the government and ultimately the taxpayer. If you take that argument to its logical conclusion you wouldn’t have any support for culture or the arts for fear that it is, to use your words, State-sanctioned.”
Nevertheless, purveyors of fringe arts see their funding, peripatetic at best, wafting away on the autumn zephyr. There will be no “Abbott the Musical” in the foreseeable future.

Crowded market?

As we have discussed in this forum before today, online crowd-funding platforms are fast taking the place of government and council-operated grant systems. But can crowd-funding be “scaled-up” to raise serious amounts of cash? Business magazine BRW listed the top ones last year, mostly computer games, toys, IT gadgets and other inventions. The stars of Bondi Rescue, Jesse Polock and Maxi Maxwell, raised $105,380 through Pozible to complete a Jet Ski ride from Sydney to Cairns, to raise awareness of mental health charity headspace and make a documentary. So anything is possible.
The financial securities industry has hopped on to crowd-funding in the US, where 534 companies successfully hit their online equity target in year one (2,824 did not), raising on average $407,685 per company. Forbes Magazine says the next step will be to allow ordinary investors to participate in crowd funding equity start-ups. In Canberra, Treasury issued a discussion paper on this subject in December. Our corporate regulator ASIC has already had its say about risk management; it would limit the maximum amount raised and cap annual investments by individuals. (ASIC doesn’t regulate crowd-funding activities unless they involve investment schemes).
So The Conversation continues apace, its future a little hazier without that guaranteed money from the Feds. But it has an established track record and an international growth trajectory, so there’s no good reason why a direct-action crowd-funding campaign wouldn’t work.
It just takes people to move beyond pressing “Like” on their Facebook page. I gave The Conversation $50 and if they’re still around in May 2016, I’ll do it again.
Hopefully some of you will too.
https://theconversation.com/au
…and in closing, we have joined Soundcloud, a music streaming website where you can go and listen to a song from each of our four albums. Be sure to “like” us, if indeed you do!

She Who Pays The Bills has been keeping a household budget since long before we took up the business of joint accounts and sharing one car (more on that later). When I was perusing The Courier-Mail’s comic-book summary of the Federal budget (a free read in a coffee shop, OK), it came to mind what a jolly old mess households would be in if, like our dim-witted leaders in Canberra, they had doubled their debt from one year to the next.
Some households may already have a deficit: maxed-out credit cards, cars on lease-plans, already-spent-the-redundancy, horrific mobile phone bills and investment houses so highly geared that a tardy tenant or a late-night flitter could tip them into foreclosure.
Those of you who do not have a household budget (a month by month accounting of what is coming in and what is due to go out), well, good luck with that. Those tempted to start need a blank Excel spreadsheet and name it Budget 101. Or, if you want to have the heavy lifting done for you, try this link: https://www.moneysmart.gov.au/tools-and-resources/calculators-and-apps/budget-planner.
The Federal Budget 2015 interactive spreadsheet (above) was set (by me) to show the tax distribution of someone earning $200k a year. Find out where your tax dollar goes at http://www.budget.gov.au/

How to find out how broke you are

Hindsight is a wonderful thing – we over-60s have lots of it and it usually comes dressed up as sage advice with a pinch of arrogance tossed in.
Household budgeting ought to form the core of a Practical Living exam children have to pass before they are allowed to leave school. Moreover (just using that term to show I went to Uni), mutually agreed household budgets ought to be the anchor of prenuptial agreements. Parents should actively involve their children in the process, (Junior Senators get the final say in passing the Family Budget). That is no less odd a situation than the Federal Government finds itself in.
So let’s start with Housing, which includes rent or mortgage repayments, house and contents insurance, Council rates and utilities (electricity, gas, water, heating/cooling). Conventional wisdom is that this should consume about a third of your income. If it is more, you just can’t afford to live where you’re living.
Utilities can cover a range of expenditures that were not around in our parents’ days – mobile phones, internet and pay TV. You probably know of households where Mum, Dad and all three kids each have a mobile phone. There will also be at least one Ipad and two TVs. The technology has become all-pervasive and there are more gadgets to come. The cost to a family can be considerable, especially with teenagers whose lives are governed by peer groups.
The Health portfolio causes families a lot of angst. Should we support the public health system and take the risk with long waiting lists for elective surgery, or do we fork out up to $5,000 a year for private insurance? How much should we set aside for prescriptions, over-the-counter medications, supplements and the like?
Moneysmart devotes a section to insurance and financial budgeting. What you pay depends on your stage of life. A 39-year-old Dad with family commitments should and probably does have a life insurance policy, but he’s about to get a rude shock. When he turns 40 his premiums will rise sharply with the increasing actuarial risk of his dropping dead without warning.

Buy a pushbike, maybe?

Transport gobbles up a large chunk of household money. I mentioned at the outset that we have been sharing one car for as long as we’ve been together. Last time we bought a property, I worked out that the house and half-acre of land cost roughly what we would have spent on a second vehicle over 20 years. We weren’t being especially clever. We just couldn’t afford a second car at the time and never got round to buying one.
The RACQ estimates that car owners spend from about $8,964 a year (to own and operate a small car) up to $21,448 a year for a top of the line SUV. This is based on buying new and running the car for five years. The cheapest of the small cars cost $42,298.71 to own and maintain over five years and the large SUV cost $107,441.14. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
It does not necessarily follow that the family which does not own a vehicle and uses public transport and taxis will save that much over five years. Some city families have two cars but end up using public transport as well, to avoid tolls, parking costs and the stress and delays of commuting by road. Moneysmart’s budget planner advises people to set aside money for fines, air travel, rego and driver’s licences. To which I might add, factor in about 3% a year for inflation in the household budget so that when you renew your licence in five years’ time it won’t be such a shock.
The big imponderable in Moneysmart’s planner is listed as Entertainment/Eat-Out. Seriously? Does anyone budget for the nights when everyone gets home late, tired and grumpy and the easiest way out is dial-a-pizza? Oh and let’s rent a video while we’re at it. People whose work life involves frequent business meetings in city coffee shops will easily go through $100 a week, more if they’re in the habit of meeting friends for lunch.
Children ought to budgeted for, starting with a First Baby Package (cot, pram, stroller, rocker, baby clothes, change table, self-help books, pre-natal classes – shall I go on?) Later on there are toys, books, computer games and videos, not to mention
babysitting, childcare, sports and activities, school fees, excursions, school uniforms and books. Oh yes, and child support (where applicable).

Cohabitation and compromise

The problem with these catch-all budget calculators is you can feel hemmed in. Moneysmart’s “personal and medical” section is where most of the household savings can be made. But it will require that good old mainstay of domestic harmony – compromise ¬– to decide which items among cosmetics and toiletries, health and beauty, computers and gadgets, jewellery and accessories, sports and gym and “hobbies” are expendable. Those of you thinking of co-habiting with someone might want to talk this section over with your prospective partner.
Mind you, it is good for One’s self-esteem and One’s sense of independence to have One’s own money and do with it what One wants (even if Two thinks you’re mad to spend $600 on Fleetwood Mac tickets).
If you have never done the household budget exercise or let it slide, it could be an illuminating start to the weekend. Clearly the people who took part in a recent Choice survey think about household budgets. Their main cost of living concern (Feb 2015) was electricity, then food and groceries, fuel, and health/medical. A third of those surveyed said they were finding it difficult to get by on their present income and 21% said they lived off a credit card to cover the gap until payday.
I can’t see too much in the Federal Budget to ease those concerns.

I had a ‘jump the shark’ moment this week. What, you don’t know about jumping the shark?
It is a buzz phrase coined to describe the point in a TV series when far-fetched events are included merely for the sake of novelty, indicative of a decline in quality.
The term originates from an episode of Happy Days where The Fonz goes water-skiing and literally jumps a shark. There are loads of examples of bad choice formula departures in contemporary TV drama. ER had a couple and long-running medical soap Grey’s Anatomy has had several shark jumping moments – for example, the episode in which all of the surgeons started singing while operating. An operate-etta if you like. Last week, Dr Dreamy witnessed a car accident and saved three people using his outstanding medical skills and some glad wrap. Then he jumped back in his car and drove out onto the road and while reaching down to get his phone collided with a big truck. Next thing we know he’s on the operating table, trying to tell the Emergency Doctors that he has a bleed in his brain, but he can’t talk. That’s jumping the shark.

This usually comes about when the series writers feel hemmed in by the constraints of a fixed number of sets or locations. The splendid Danish political drama Borgen, for example, takes place mostly in the female Prime Minister’s home or the Castle (houses of parliament). So it’s not really surprising that the writers have the PM visiting Danish troops in Afghanistan or making a peace-keeping mission to some transparently fictitious African nation. These outdoor sorties typically happen in hospital soaps too, because there’s just so much you can do in an operating theatre where every actor is wearing a mask (or at least holding it in front of their mouth). Pastemagazine.com lists the ten worst offenders, but since they are mostly shows I didn’t watch (Will & Grace, Buffy, Roseanne, The Cosby Show), I’m none the wiser.

So here we are, about to mark the first year of Friday on My Mind, but fortunately I haven’t reached the stage where I feel it necessary to leap over sea creatures. It’s just that seeing the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy prompted me to talk about our secret obsession with medical soaps and obscure sub-titled drama series.
And an anniversary like this is kind of important; it prompted me to finish printing out the weekly column and filing it in a ring binder appropriately enough called Friday on My Mind. I print another copy for my sister in New Zealand who does not have a computer. That’s right; some people don’t have computers, or mobile phones or even answering machines.
So I’m thumbing through these 62,400-odd words, and odd some of them are indeed, to see how I went.
There’s a few that didn’t work because I tried interviewing people and quoting them and then you have to edit 2,800 words to 1,200 words which is never a great idea. She Who Sorts My Syntax wrote a couple, so I’m not officially up to episode 52 yet.

There was a fair bit about our CD – you know what they say, write about what you know. A regular reader and house concert attendee ambled over to the “merch” table at our CD launch and playfully said: “I suppose I’d better buy one of these CDs you’ve been banging on about for ages.” He bought multiple copies, so I figure he was just making a point, and a good point it was.

If you only just found us
For those of you who recently joined, I’ve been emailing this column to an ever-growing list of people and then I post it to a WordPress website. If you subscribe or “follow” on the website, the column comes to you as an email in any event. It’s just dressed a little differently. I have a handful of online subscribers who evidently prefer to receive Friday on My Mind in this way. Then I post it to Facebook, where I hang out quite a bit, and Twitter, where I don’t go at all. You can post comments online or email me directly and statistics show the majority of readers prefer the latter.
As some of you might know, I wrote a column for the Toowoomba Chronicle in the mid-80s, being blessed with an editor who was happy to let me write what I liked and take the flak. My English Lit lecturer at the time, one Bruce Dawe AO, encouraged me; he liked the ye olde English I sometimes employed and what he called the “common touch”, something you’ll find plenty of in Bruce’s poetry. Try as I might, I could never break through to writing such a column in the city media; we wrote plenty of gossip columns and I contributed to The Good Mail, a famous column on the back page of the Sunday Mail. The late Don Busmer was the editor of that page or to be more accurate he compiled it while doing 101 other things to get the weekly miracle out the door. Don came in one Tuesday morning (we had Mondays off) and after an hour or two pronounced Sunday’s page a “three-piano column”. Apparently, he’d written a snippet about an old person’s home that was very keen to get its hands on a (free) piano. By Tuesday morning The Good Mail had found not one but three pianos. It was a bit like Macca on a Sunday morning but written down.

Why broadsheets were better
Journalists don’t have that kind of space to play with today and if they do, it will be social pages, fashion, cooking or showbiz celebrities (and their many marriages and children with odd names), or strange fads like twerking and jumping the shark.
The Sunday Mail in Brisbane went tabloid in March 1992 and while The Good Mail continued for some years, you could tell that sports had their eye on the back page. When broadsheet newspapers convert to tabloid format, the main thing that happens is you get roughly half as much news and what news there is has to be more actively edited.
Nevertheless, tabloid sells. Last November, Queensland tabloid The Courier-Mail (which was a broadsheet until 2006), announced it had increased its officially audited circulation by 0.13%, the only Australian newspaper to record a sales increase over the six month period to September 30.
But there’s no space for a 1200-word column in a tabloid. I’d like you to think of Friday on My Mind as an old-style broadsheet newspaper column you can read without having to buy the newspaper.
There should be more of it.

watch video

Even though I have lived in the southern hemisphere since I was six years old, Kath Tait’s song about prejudice and xenophobia resonates with me. My folks immigrated to New Zealand, taking up residence in a two-horse North Island town in the 1950s. Kids at our school had strident voices and peculiar accents. I was a novelty – a six-year-old boy with a broad east coast Scottish accent. Women would come into the bakery after school and accost my Mum.
“Make him talk,” they’d say.Not so long after, I lost the accent and started saying fush and chups  like all the other fullas. Some 20 years later I went travelling, eventually settling in Australia because it was big and warm, it seemed less insular and there were so many opportunities to live and work in what seemed like different countries within the same continent. So I stayed, got married, had a family and have a piece of paper that says I am Australian, although deep down I’m a citizen of the world and I think we owe it to people fleeing persecution and hardship to offer refuge.

The lure of the land of milk and honey

Mum and Dad were economic refugees in the 1950s. I can remember Mum working out how to make her rations stretch out over a week of feeding two adults and three children – an ounce of butter and one egg per person per week, for example. I remember Uncle giving me the top off a boiled egg like some kind of caviar-like treat. I also remember Dad picking me up from school in a blizzard, pushing his bike through the ever-deepening snow and the gathering gloom.
So what could be so scary about leaving your country of birth and travelling 12,000 miles by sea to the promised land of milk and honey? It was probably the first and only time my Dad had a six-week holiday where his every need was taken care of, from the quiet knock on our shared cabin door at 7am (cup of tea Mr Wilson?), to the leisurely three-course dinners in the tourist-class dining room. Of course the Promised Land was not quite what they envisaged and the sponsoring employer didn’t do the right thing, but they persevered, making a good impression, going to the Kirk on the Sabbath and spending the afternoon listening to Jimmy Shand records.

Whatever happened to the open door?

New Zealanders and Australians have a bit of a hide taking the piss out of strangers and foreigners when one in four of us were born somewhere else. And now we have a government which is skating as close to a White Australia policy as you could possibly get. True, Labor governments have ballsed up our refugee/asylum seeker policy too. But it’s not that hard, as Kath Tait says in “Strangers and Foreigners.”

Lots of people think, when they own their own homes,
That they can keep the immigrants out of their living zones.
Strangers and foreigners are everywhere
But they don’t bother me, no I don’t care.
If you look at yourself you just might find
A stranger or a foreigner in your own mind.
So be kind to yourself and have some care
For strangers and foreigners everywhere.

Kath’s song goes on to discuss gays and lesbians, fools and dickheads and generally preaches tolerance in her uniquely under-stated way. We could do with more Tait-isms in this country. Our policy of diverting refugees and asylum seekers to offshore detention centres is not in any way defensible. It seems such a reversal of our acceptance of British and European migrants in the 1950s and 1960s and the Vietnamese in the 1970s. My folks looked forward most, I’m told, to an egalitarian land where anyone could “have a go.”

Second class wait here

My elder sister tells a story about the day we boarded the Rangitiki at Tilbury near London in 1955. She was 14 at the time so remembers clearly a voice over the ship’s loudspeakers: “Mr Robert Wilson, telegrams for Mr Wilson can be collected at the Purser’s office.” So my sister was sent to collect the telegrams. But she got lost and ended up in the first-class dining room where a waiter who was setting out the silverware for dinner kindly gave her directions.
“Have a good look around,” he apparently said. “Because once we sail you won’t be allowed up here.”
We sailed to New Zealand, via Curacao, The Galapagos, the Panama Canal and Pitcairn Island. I was at first confined to the nursery with younger children and babies until I complained loudly and often until I was released into my father’s custody.
So the five of us, from somewhere else, settled in New Zealand and Australia and now there are 30 whanau or extended family.
I’ve written a couple of songs about this. Impressions of New Zealand is just that, based on letters my Mum wrote about our first year in the colonies. The companion piece, Rangitiki, is more about emigration, economic refugees and why it was OK then but it is not OK now.
Now there’s a YouTube video, out there for anyone who wants to watch and listen and catch the subtlety of the message. I’m indebted to the photographers who allowed me to use their images, particularly Lukas Schrank, who has produced a 15-minute animated documentary about Manus Island, in which two detainees tell their stories over the telephone. We supported this venture when Lukas raised money through Pozible for post-production. Some of the stills from this movie appear in our video.

Seven million and counting

Not everyone will agree with my take on emigration and refugees and that’s OK – it’s a free country. I consider myself to have ‘small l’ liberal ideas in the true sense, that all persons should be treated equally. I have a big problem with the Australian Government spending our tax dollars to keep people in onshore and offshore detention centres without those people being charged or convicted of an offence. Seven million people have come to these fair shores since World War II and made a life for themselves and their families. It is fundamentally unfair not to extend the hand of friendship to those who arrive here by unorthodox means, driven by persecution, fear and desperation.
As former PM Julia Gillard told the Migration Council conference in 2013.
“We are a nation of migrants. I know – because I’m one myself. My family made that journey of hope and courage to a new land.
Together we have built a nation that strives to be classless, confident and compassionate. But above all, a country which is decent. A country that has been enriched by the hand of welcome each generation holds out to those who come after us.”

Roll up, roll up, see the tattooed lady

We were mingling with herds of people last week at Suncorp Stadium (the Broncos won). On the train getting there, I espied an attractive woman in her late 20s, wearing a backless, strapless dress held up by natural means alone. While I was admiring the healthy tone of her skin, the fine down at the nape of the neck etc, she half turned to reveal what in rugby league terms is known as a “sleeve”.
The league boys go in big time for the sleeve – an assortment of tattoos which usually run from the cap of the shoulder to the wrist and rarely if ever leave any skin unadorned in between.
My observational skills and memory let me down now as I can’t recall what she had tattooed on her arm, but it was a new tattoo, very ornate and colourful. As she and the assumed boyfriend exited the train, he gently placed a helpful hand in the small of her back to ensure she alighted safely. This is not the first time I’ve seen beautiful young women, their arms, legs, or exposed areas of their backs thusly adorned so I wasn’t too shocked. Part of the shock factor is that living where we live, women in their late 20s wearing strapless backless gowns walking down the main street are a bit under-represented.
Getting new tattoos is nothing new.
Young people today probably think getting a new tattoo is something new and daring. The earliest known tattoos were worn somewhere between 7,000 and 5,000 BC, as a symbol of group membership or a rite of passage, according to resonancefrequency.net. To the Maori and other Polynesian groups, Ta Moko (facial tattoos), were like a history of your achievements, representing status in the tribe. The Australian Museum says it was a huge honour for men and women to have Ta Moko. Tattoos were applied to the face and buttocks of men, and to the chin, lips and shoulders of women. In the 19th century and earlier, Ta Moko was chiselled in using an albatross bone, with gum and dye from vegetation rendered to soot and mixed with oil.
Newly-inked young people might not know there was a time during the 1930s when men and women, desperate to feed their families, offered up their bodies to the tattooist and then went on the road with a travelling circus or carnival. Folks used to pay good money for a freak show.
If it wasn’t a bearded lady, a man with boobs, or a woman with a beard, it would be a sword-swallowing midget or the aforementioned tattooed lady. The latter called for all-over tatts so women (or men) could pose virtually naked, while punters could spend as long as they’d paid for to study the artwork up close.
I know these things, not only because of Dr Google, but because I’m old enough to remember the half-man/half-woman freak shows that existed at travelling carnivals.
Groucho Marx sang about “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” in the 1939 Marx Brothers film “At the Circus”, which is just about as tawdry as one might imagine. The original version has made its way on to YouTube, because of the notoriety when it was used as a ringtone for a character’s cell phone in the finale of Breaking Bad.
In the first part of the 20th century, people sometimes used tattoos to launch a new career. The Committee for Skeptical Enquiry (CSI) gives the example of Horace Ridler, a British ex-army officer who was down on his luck and in the late 1920s opted to become a circus star. He had himself tattooed all over with zebra-like stripes (the process took a year). The circus story was that he was forcibly tattooed by New Guinea savages.
Tattoos were a class taboo at the turn of the 20th century. Some middle to upper class ladies indulged in small butterflies or flowers but never showed them outside the house. In that era, women with visible tatts were considered to be “loose”, although why the same distinction did not apply to men is something Germane Greer could talk about for hours.
No regrets?
In 2015, it is hip and cool (and expensive) to get inked. Many musicians, sound guys and roadies I know have tattoos of one kind or another. They tend to be more than vague about why they did it and hell would freeze over before the word “regret” ever passed their lips. No such mystery why rugby league players go in for tatts – it’s a team thing – a bloke thing.
Our son has a couple of discreet tatts. When his mother first heard of this she asked: “Where did you get the tattoo?”
“Thailand,” he replied.
“No, I mean where on your body!”
My late uncle was in the merchant navy as a young man and had expansive tattoos on his chest and back. I can’t accurately recall, but I think one was of a sailing ship and the other a women or a garland of roses. (Sorry if I got this wrong – it was 60+ years ago and my cousin doesn’t do email.)What I do remember is Uncle telling my Dad that every day as he stood at the bathroom mirror shaving, he regretted having it done.
The permanency of tattoos is something the younger generation seem to treat in a cavalier fashion. Oh you can always get them burned off with lasers, they’ll say. Maybe. Typically it can take five to 10 sessions costing around $100 a time to remove just one tattoo.
We know of Holocaust survivors who still wore their ID numbers (tattooed on their arms by the Nazis), as a demonstration of resilience. This is all the more powerful an act when you realise that Judaism forbids tattoos, as per Leviticus 19:28 “You shall not etch a tattoo on yourselves.”
One place you’ll see plenty of ink is if you serve any time at all or go visiting in one of Australia’s jails. Getting inked is something a lot of inmates do, to stave off boredom, to become one of the boys, to identify themselves as part of an inner group. Typically, jail tattoos are home-made, using the ink from a biro and a safety pin or needle. Sources tell me infections are common, so too is Hep C, which you sometimes get from sharing needles.
In my police and court reporting days I knew a very tall, very gruff Senior Sergeant. One time he gave me a “Have you seen this man?” bulletin which described tattoos on the suspect’s hands, or to be more precise, between each finger. Sarge confessed he’d made a point of studying felons’ tattoos, under the guise of admiring them, but in reality tucking them away in the part of his long-term memory reserved for “grubs”.
These days he’d just whip out his smart phone and take a happy snap. “L.O.V.E and H.A.T.E?” Gotcha!

We were at home on a sunny Sunday morning, getting ready for a house concert. Our two musician guests had just got out of bed when two well-dressed men wearing suits and hats came to the front door. They were clutching literature and, from the weighty look of their satchels, they had much to show and tell.
She Who Reserves The Right to Edit This Stuff When It Affects Me (Ed.) said: “No thank-you. None of us are the slightest bit interested,” which of course had no impact. By this time the dog had come to the front door, tail wagging, ears pricked, very interested in proceedings.
“I said none of us here are the slightest bit interested,” SWR etc repeated, “So you can leave now.”
After they left, I protested that perhaps SWR was speaking peremptorily on behalf of other people who may (or may not) have been interested. Moreover, the Staffie, with the rather misleading name of Nibbler, seemed vitally interested and had started that curious throaty Marge Simpson whining thing that Staffies do when people leave.
“What if Nibbler had been interested?” I asked. “They say dogs have a spiritual life.”
When was the last time someone knocked on your door and wanted to sell you something? It does not happen much anymore. There was a fair bit of door to door sales going on when the electricity industry first got privatised. But many companies ended up in the Federal Court charged with making false and misleading representations and engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct, so we doubt it is the preferred sales tactic today. I could be wrong.
We live on the edge of a country town and to get to our place you have to walk 100m down a bitumen driveway where you might encounter one or even two dogs. So no, we don’t usually get people going door to door selling electricity supply contracts, solar panels or mobile phones. And, apart from the occasional proselytizer, we don’t recall ever seeing anyone going door to door selling bibles.

There’s a classic low-budget documentary made in 1968 about bible salesmen, falling on hard times but resolved to carry out the mission no matter what.  The documentary ‘Salesman’ tells the story of four determined door-to-door salesmen crossing America selling expensive bibles to low-income Catholic families. ‘Salesman’ is reality TV before there was ever any such thing. It graphically portrays how these men deal with rejection, homesickness and boredom. Former bible salesmen Albert and David Maysles directed the movie but reportedly did little more than hold microphones and cameras while they followed the bible salesmen around, chronicling their daily struggles.
The film received good reviews but was shunned by Hollywood as being too depressing for mainstream audiences, but it seems to have endured. If you have an interest, it can be found here.
York Times reviewer Vincent Canby ranked Salesman as a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life; a film that pulled no punches. He watched it three times.
“The movie’s lower-middle-class, Roman Catholic-oriented landscape is not particularly pretty, nor are the hard-sell tactics employed by the salesmen as they pitch their $49.95 ($330 in today’s dollars), Bibles to lonely widows, Cuban refugees, boozy housewives, and to one young couple that can’t even pay its rent.
“Be sure to have it blessed,” a salesman reminds a customer to whom he’s just made a sale, “or you won’t get the full benefit from it.”

Working as a door to door bible salesman was quite the thing to do in the penurious 1920s and 1930s. It was considered to be a step above selling pots and pans and bric-a-brac, even though some organisations were already giving bibles away (the Gideons starting leaving bibles in hotel rooms in 1907). Today, with more than 50 billion copies distributed and websites where you can download an e-version for free, there’s not much call in 2015 for bible salepersons.
There’s a scene in the Coen Brothers movie O Brother Where Art Thou when Big Dan Teague (John Goodman) a one-eyed con man masquerading as a bible salesman, befriends convicts on the run (George Clooney et al). After a leisurely lunch in a field beside a big tree, Big Dan breaks a branch off the tree, beats up Clooney and friend and steals their money.
If you’ve ever watched the dark, expletive-laden Glengarry Glen Ross, about a posse of desperate real estate salesmen, hounded by their dark master (Al Pacino), you’d come to realise that for a salesman, sometimes you’d be better off committing larceny than being forced to sell to someone who clearly doesn’t want to buy.
Glengarry Glen Ross is a play by David Mamet. It was not made into a movie until 1992, where it attracted an A list of actors (Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, Alex Baldwin, Kevin Spacey and Jack Lemmon).
The drama portrays a group of salesmen; most are just getting by, but one is really struggling, probably because he’s in the wrong business, and the axe is hovering.

I was telling a friend who understands my reticent nature that somewhere in my working life (I left school at 15); I’d had a crack at door-to-door sales. When he stopped laughing and lightly mocking me: “Oh please buy this, oh, so sorry to trouble you, I’ll leave now,” I recalled it was encyclopaedias I was trying to sell, on a time-plan. I also forced myself to recall that I was plain bad at it. A timid little knock and if no-one answered I’d leave (trying not to notice the lace curtain twitching). ‘Dangerous dog’ sign – I was out of there.

Decades later, having found my niche working in the news side of the newspaper business (which exists, let there be no doubt, to sell advertising space), I had cause to remember the day I succumbed to a door-to-door salesman.
He came to my door referred by his nephew, Bazza, a journalist colleague at the time. Bazza knew I was in the market for a new vacuum cleaner so he told his uncle to drop by. Uncle came in with the top of the line Electrolux and proceeded to show me just why the $50 second-hand one wasn’t doing the job.
He had me there. I could have bought a 20-year-old Corolla for what that machine cost, though it was on what the old folk called the “never-never.” But hey, more than 30 years later, it still works!
The dog has chewed the end off the rubber nozzle, the hose is held together with gaffer tape, we make filters out of scraps of foam (I didn’t know that – Ed.) and buy bags by the dozen lest they become obsolete. But I repeat – it still works.

It sometimes makes me sad to think that this old vacuum cleaner outlived Bazza and probably outlived his Uncle too.
I hope he spent his commission wisely.

I was standing in the ensuite talking to my ol’ fella the other night.
No, wait; it’s not what you think. I had got up for a pee in the middle of the night and, not unusually, nothing much was happening.
“Jeez, mate,” I grumbled, sotto voce in the ensuite. “Bloody get on with it, will you?”
Once it starts, depending how long I’ve been holding on, it can take forever. The worst possible thing I can do is sit in a car for hours and not pull over for a pee when I first feel the need. Leave it too long and you could watch a whole episode of Better Homes and Gardens while I’m still in the loo.
So yeah, things can be a little slow in the waterworks department. Life is generally better if I go at the first hint that I need a pee. Now when you are on the road a lot, as we have been, this is not as easy as it sounds. True, blokes can just pull off the road, get out of the car and fertilise a tree. But we don’t like to be a burden.
“What, again? Didn’t you just do that?”
The other thing about travelling is you are sitting on your bum for two to three hours at a time. In the sitting position, you are putting pressure on all of the bits that adversely affect the prostate, which for those who did not know or don’t even want to think about it, is in an inaccessible place between a man’s testicles and his bottom.

Ah, I sense all of my male readers over 60 wincing and empathising about the myriad bladder problems that affect men of that age or older. The usual problem is an enlarged prostate gland, which restricts the flow of urine to one degree or another. It is a complex problem and one cannot immediately assume the prostate is the culprit. Sometimes the bladder or other organs are at fault. The key issue with prostate problems is that urine can be retained in the bladder and that, my friends, is when you go to see an urologist.
There is only one way a GP can assess whether or not your prostate is enlarged and that involves a rather invasive procedure where the doctor takes the only available route to digitally examine the prostate. The problem most doctors have is convincing men to have a routine examination – once a year is not a big ask, but you ought to do it from the age of 45, especially if there is a family history of cancer.

The women who read this column will know that what I’m going to say is truer than their men would care to admit. While the women of the house have their annual mammograms and pap smears diarised from one year to the next, their husbands could go on covertly carrying a bladder problems for years before it might occur to them that it’s a problem.
Having a digital examination to diagnose an enlarged prostate is not what most blokes would volunteer for, especially when forewarned. It does not hurt, as such; but it’s darned uncomfortable.
Not all enlarged prostates become cancerous, but it is fairly prevalent. According to the Cancer Council, and they should know, one in 5 men will get prostate cancer before they turn 85. Generally speaking, it is one of the slower growing cancers and as doctors are fond of telling their 76 year old patients, “You’ll die of something else before this gets you”. This is not always the case, so anyone diagnosed with the disease ought to keep close tabs on its progress.

Prostate cancer can be detected by a simple blood test (prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening). This blood test alone has increased prostate cancer awareness since it was first used as a screening tool almost 28 years ago.
Advances in Urology 2012 carried a scholarly article that discussed the problem of over-diagnosis and over-treatment. Here’s a link so you can print it out and read while having a sit-down pee. http://www.hindawi.com/journals/au/2012/862639/
The authors of this article say that due to the largely indolent course of the disease and the unspecific nature of the PSA test, increased incidence has largely been associated with cancers that would not go on to cause death. This leads to over-diagnosis and over-treatment, which is exacerbated by the high risk of side effects that put patients’ quality of life at risk, with little or no survival benefit.
“PSA testing, while it helps to discover mortal cancers, can also often lead to the discovery of non-mortal cancers, or those which would never have been noticed without screening. Given that 20–50% of asymptomatic men are found to harbor prostate cancer upon autopsy, it follows that the PSA test leads to a much greater detection of cancers, both mortal and non-mortal.”
The National Cancer Institute says the rising incidence of prostate cancer is in contrast to the relatively unchanged mortality rate from 1975 to 2007. The number of newly-discovered prostate cancers is over seven times greater than the number of prostate cancer related deaths.

The low mortality thing is some comfort, but no-one can guarantee that the cancer won’t misbehave in between check-ups. In 2010, 19,821 new cases of prostate cancer were diagnosed in Australia. This represents 30% of all cancers diagnosed in Australian men. Being an occasional betting man, it seems to me that the odds are in favour of getting things checked out. The first GP I consulted about this issue examined me and after some discussion counselled against chemical solutions. In other words, you can take pills to improve the flow of urine, but, ahem, sometimes it improves too much.
According to the World Health Organisation, 200 million people have some degree of bladder control problem. About a quarter of the world’s older people develop incontinence, but it is both preventable and treatable. You just have to front up and talk to a medico about it first.

Medical clinics today often have annual health checks where a nurse takes a medical history before you see the GP. Nurse will take your blood pressure, look in your ears, listen to your lungs and then ask all kinds of questions about your life like, “Are you still active?” Yeh, I mow the lawns and trim the hedge. “No, I mean in the bedroom, mate.”
So, it’s that time of year again – a full blood screen, a lung function test, a flu shot and then playing 20 questions with the nurse. Just so you know – Medicare pays!
Some of the questions Nurse asked last year were about this very subject, like how many times I have to go and pee, do I ever feel like I’m not finished, and, do I “leak”. I could tell you, but a man is entitled to some dignity, don’t you think?

So there you go; another weekly episode of what my songwriter friend Fred Smith calls “stuff you didn’t know that you need to know”. Thanks for giving the column a plug at the house concert, mate – I’d love to keep chatting, but more importantly, I gotta go pee.

I’m taking a week off to promote our album, The Last Waterhole, which is getting noticed after a national radio interview and a 4-star review in the Courier-Mail. Enjoy this piece by my trusty offsider,  Laurel Wilson, who learned a thing or two about carpentry and plumbing at her Daddy’s knee.

 

When Fred called the other day, Bob told me that when he picked up the phone he said “You’re lucky we answered. Laurel’s out fixing a leak in the caravan and I’m doing the vacuuming.” Reportedly, there were no sounds of derision or disapproval from the caller – not surprising, given he is a man of taste and sensitivity. But this apparently somewhat unusual division of labour around our place does cause consternation at times.
It’s an old van and things go bung occasionally, usually when we’re a long way from our usual sources of reliable fixer uppers. On one occasion, we were having trouble with the 12 volt lights. Now, 12 volt systems are not to be trifled with and they can give you a bit of a belt if you put the screwdriver in the wrong place at the wrong time. But unlike 240v, which is best left to the experts, fixing 12v idiosyncrasies is usually considered to be within the capabilities of the dedicated caravanner. I’ve had the lighting system explained to me, I know where the battery and the fuse box are and have my head around the concept of the Anderson plug, unlike “He Who Usually Writes This Column But Is Having a Nap” (HWUWTCBIHAN or HWU for short).

Battery? What battery?

So, when we rolled into Mt Isa with a broken light bulb melted into the socket, I began explaining the problem to the (older) auto electrician. I don’t consider myself softly spoken, but for some reason this particular chap seemed incapable of hearing what I was saying. Surely it couldn’t be that he was ignoring me, in favour of discussing the matter with HWU? At any rate, having failed to elicit the information from the latter, OAE summoned his apprentice, who was quite happy to discuss the problem with me. He took out his mobile and used the ‘torch app’ to get a good look at the offending light (a very useful app, that one: Ed.) The result? One fixed light and evidence of a young man in a country town who has obviously adapted to the changing world of technology and the notion that women can actually have a clue about how to fix things.
Division of labour by gender probably had its beginnings in the Palaeolithic era, when men, generally being the stronger and faster of the two sexes, were the ones who went out slaying Mastodons, while the females stayed in the cave and nursed the young. But was this the case, or is it merely the supposition of (usually) male anthropologists? For all we know, there may well have been big, strong, fast women who loved hunting, as well as men who preferred to stay in the cave and look after the kids (and do rock-art:Ed)
But the conventional division of labour persists. For many, it still seems odd when women are the main bread-winners and their partners stay home to raise the children. Bob even wrote a song about it some time ago, called ‘Househusbands’ (which he was for a while). And as it happened, Fred (remember Fred?), was home looking after a sick child, utilising his employer’s parental leave scheme, which apparently does not discriminate.

The visionary head mistress

I was fortunate to attend a High School where the Head Mistress (as they were called in those days) was an advocate of higher education for girls. The expectation was that ‘her girls’ would continue their studies after Grade 12, attending university or teachers’ college if possible. This was not generally the case in the 1960s and earlier.
The percentage of females to males participating in tertiary studies increased from 23% in 1960 to 33% in 1972 and currently tops 55%. However this does not translate into equality at work. According to the Australian Government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency, women comprise 35% of all full-time employees, but earn, on average, 17.5% less than male full-time workers. And female graduates’ salaries average only 90% of men’s.
Just over 5% of women aged under 64 have post-graduate qualifications, compared to just under 5% of men, and women make up 45% of the ‘professional’ ranks, so, at least on the grounds of qualifications, there should be no reason for women to be under-represented in executive positions. But according to the 2012 Census of Women in Leadership, only 3% of chair positions and 3.5% of CEO positions in ASX 200 companies are held by women. As of 2014, just 17% of directors in these companies were women. Over 20% of ASX 200 companies have no women on their boards.

Peter who?

The Guardian’s take on this situation demonstrated a less conventional approach to statistics – on the 6th of this month, the newspaper claimed that there are fewer women at the head of top Aussie companies than there are men named Peter. Perhaps there’s an idea in there for women aspiring to higher positions – change your name to Peter.
The stats are better for Government board appointments – 38% of board members were women, as of 30th June 2102.
Australia’s population consists of 50% male and 50% female, (Yes, I know there are other options, but that’s how the statisticians write it.) So to have equal representation in government, one could expect the same ratio. However, as of 1 January 2012, fewer than 30% of all Federal Parliamentarians across Australia were women. The current Federal Cabinet has one woman. The Senate does somewhat better, with 38% of Senators being women. In 2012, the proportion of female State and Territory parliamentarians was 30% – slightly higher than the proportion of Federal Parliamentarians, but still less than a third.

The atavistic feminist

It’s 2015. There are still enormous differences between what one could expect for women, based on their educational and employment status, compared to what is actually the case at present.
Hm, that sounds like feminism – something with which Julie Bishop apparently disagrees. I find this somewhat surprising, as feminism could be said to be based on at least the small ‘l’ liberal view that a just society results from the free choices of educated and aware people; that social problems arise primarily from ignorance and social constraints on freedom of choice. Gender inequality, then, results primarily from socialisation that forces people to grow up with distorted and harmful ideas about males and females and from cultural ideas that restrict people’s freedom to freely choose how to live their lives.

Yup, on that definition, I’m a feminist, even if in some deeply hidden atavistic part of my brain, I secretly believe that HWU should know how to fix that leaky caravan pump.