Author Archives: gerard oosterman

Because (Nr2)

09 Monday May 2011

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Country Australia back then had many of us struggling with education. Coming to school was often much less educational than staying out, especially when one would also avoid getting the cane. That’s at least how it panned out for me in Muswellbrook. I could take schools’ caning on the flat of the stretched-out upturned hand but not on the knuckles of both hands. It did not help my writing letters of the alphabet. The sadism of ‘snotty nose’ rapping knuckles was not part of any kind of educational encouragement to improve my spelling nor was headmaster’s penchant for making me stand really close while inspecting the bruising on my hands. What have you done this time, Frankie, he said while stroking my hands?  There was a strange breathing going on, which at first I used to connect with his tobacco spittled chin with labouring lungs. I understood more when all of a sudden he vanished, never to shadow school’s doorstep again. Rumours were rife. That fondling of bruised hands with one hand in pocket was a bit of a joke amongst the older boys. Fricking cheeky cheeky, they would snigger knowingly while imitating the movement of a hand inside their pockets…Hey Frankie, did he have his hand in pocket, they would ask?

Apart from our family being a bit hard on fibbing, we were all loved and cared for and we took to a bit of God fearing every Sunday when mum made us go to Sunday School. Mum’s sister’s name was Bellum who would also always be there for us and tried to kind of help me with some spelling. She was not as dark as grand-dad. Grand-dad had worked on big cattle properties way up north and used to smoke nonstop, tell us his stories from outback and sandy hills. He called those ridges the Channel country. It was way up north, he always told us. While rubbing his Capstan tobacco between his palms, he could look in a kind of sideway manner as if his tales of up north were visible for him again.

Aunt Bellum was rumoured to be a carrier of some kind of wasting disease that only boys could get and that’s why she never wanted to get married. My mum and dad married and had me and my brother and two sisters. My brother was eight when I finally gave up on school and started hanging out with other boys sitting on the wooden bridge. I had taken to earning some money having a paper run both in the morning and afternoon. Mum looked after my small earnings but gave me pocket money for the odd bottle of drink and a small packet of Graven A ciggies.

Looking back, while being at Long Bay serving two years with a minimum of 18 months for an attempt at robbing a truck full of electric fans but, unknown to me, included Ernie having a pistol. Armed hold-up, the Court called it. Having a pistol was serious even though there were no bullets. I sometimes thought I should have been listening to mum and Aunty, learned a trade. One has a lot of time while serving time. Indeed, jail makes you a servant of time just creeping by; each second takes a second to pass.

 There were no more spitting rings in water from the wooden Muswellbrook Bridge.

(to be continued)

Because (Happy 2nd Birthday Pigs Arms)

06 Friday May 2011

Posted by in Gerard Oosterman

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Because.

Just because I went to school it did not mean I learnt much. The spelling of words eluded me, but not the art of reading. At 56 I am eloquent in the use of words but never caught up with spelling. This is why I don’t write much but talk a lot and do some reading only to find the words that I can copy in order to write.  I copy them, letter by letter. It is a slow process.

Just after my school days which did not come soon enough I met up with mates that were on par with my sense of adventure, mischief, and a desperate need to taste a life unshackled by boring school assemblies, studying or needless spelling. We would rather use ‘speaking words’ by sitting on the fence at Muswellbrook’s Bridge spitting rings in the water and jingling coins in our pockets, the bravado outpacing our deeds, but only just. We were rearing to do something, something worthwhile or dangerous. It would prove to be a difficult journey to combine both. Our use of the spoken words outstripped the written ones by odds of hundred to one. The books that I grew up with were two. The book of psalms and a well worn bible.  My mum swore by the bible. Telling fibs we never dared when forced by mum to swear by the bible. It was part of our family group and included mum’s sister. She was dark skinned, not married and no kids.

Of course, even at my school when letters and spelling reared its head first I somehow lost interest when the outside world with the creeks, tree climbing and catching goannas adventures  became threatened by having to listen to the monotonous ranting of Miss teacher and her dripping snotty nose insisting on the importance of letter ‘c’ or ‘z’. I would so much rather cut a piece of wood into a sharp pointy stick than sit inside a class room listening to the drone of an alphabet recital. My mum wrote many notes of absence and sickies, there were many colds.  She was often cranky when finding out I had not gone to school. The days not at school equalling numbers spent sharpening sticks, throwing flat stones across the river and counting the skips. I did learn to count.

How my education became so entangled in learning how to read and yet unable to learn the art on how to spell is something that has plagued me from then on. I can read the word ‘because’, but ask me how to spell it and I can’t. I can only write the word ‘because’, if I am lucky to find it while reading something containing that word and then copy it. Fortunately, the bible and the book of psalms had many words I could copy, including ‘because’.

(to be continued)

Australia moving forward (kicking and screaming)

04 Wednesday May 2011

Posted by in Gerard Oosterman

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Having experienced the last few decades living in Australia and overseas one can form an opinion of what some of the differences were.. One difference that sticks out is our love of staying put, resist change. Australia is many things but it will never get accused of being at forefront of progress, rearing to try out new things, seek change, make things work better. It is true that we do advance in certain areas but often behind many others having done and proven it first. We are somewhat scared of testing the water.

It doesn’t matter what is proposed, our immediate reaction are howls of protests and rejection no matter what the merit, no matter what the proposal. It is part of who we are; fear of change is deeply embedded in our national psyche, none more so than with the latest outcry and the political tsunamis over the proposal to charge for CO2 emissions. 

It started with Federation, a bit before my time, when Australia would only consider a form of unity away from Britain, if independence was promised to each state. Australia today is a federation of States whereby each state still has many of its own laws and regulation differentiating from each other. Commit a crime and you still have to be extradited from the state where one has escaped to. As is still the norm today, Queensland then did not want to change too rapidly and become part of Federation, preferred to remain a British colony for a while longer. The struggle for Federation went on for a number of years. Even though Australia finally became ‘Australia’, it still took another 26 years for the Australian parliament to meet and hold its first sitting in its own Parliament building in Canberra 1927.

http://www.kidcyber.com.au/topics/federation.htm

We now jump over the next sixty years or so to the next hurdle, the acceptance of a decimal system. My god, this was heresy. What? Change from our beloved Pound of Twenty shillings and one shilling containing 12 pennies to a foreign currency? The sixpence, the Zac and Bob, the quid, the guinea, give all that up?  Even then, we could not bring ourselves to giving this new decimal currency an Australian name; (austral, merino and royal.) preferred instead the Yankee Doodle name of “Dollar.”  It felt safer and the US was our protector.

Then, in the 1980’s Australia was struck down by the wider-comb sheep shearing equipment dispute. It occupied the Arbitration Commission for over four years. It was a fight to the death between the National Farmers Federation with new ideas of how Australian society should be organized and The Australian Workers Union… Shearing sheds were subject to arson, burnt to the ground amongst shouts of ‘scabs and mongrels’. Even worse was that the wider combs had been introduced by New Zealand. The indignity of it all was all too much. It was however a huge shift into modernity in its final acceptance of the wider and more economical shearing hand-piece from a traditional staid rural society. The sheep kept their calm through-out.

http://www.shearingworld.com/Information/widecombs2.htm

The next bit of progress to oppose was the containerization of our wharves. Boy oh boy, I remember it well. This was going to be the death knell of all employment on the wharves. The picket lines were stretched between Darling Harbour and Botany Bay. Stevedoring was finished, doom and gloom would spread and we would all end up queuing at soup kitchens. It didn’t matter that containerization had been effectively introduced in many countries. It did not matter what took a month to turn around in Darling Harbour took a day around the wharves in Rotterdam. By hook and by crook, this progress had to be stopped in the bud. It took many legal battles and endless compensations to the workers and their unions to finally get it accepted. Harold Holt called the whole lot ‘red commies’.

The latest revolution to jar our conscience to an extreme edginess is the proposal to introduce carbon trading or taxing. It’s on par with having similar percentages of pro and against as that old smelly herring of becoming a ‘republic’. Having our own head of state just doesn’t seem to cut it here.

The primitive fear of change is well known by savvy politicians and exploited to the maximum by all parties. The ‘children overboard’ resplendent with ’armadas and hordes’ of boat people would invade our shores, corrupt Australia with foreign gangs raping our mothers and daughters and ripping off our generous welfare to boot. It is almost daily fare in our media.

With taxing carbon polluters, fear against change is again being exploited. “We all have to pay and become poorer”. “We are being led by lying Prime ministers”. “It will cause massive unemployment”. “The climate is not changing”. “The big miners will take our resources and go overseas”.”Industry will go overseas”. Our harvests will fail. Kids will run amok.

Nothing is surer that we will finally end up with some kind of carbon trading or carbon taxing but not before we have steadfastly refusedto accept it as much and as long as possible. We’ll object, protest, linger and point finger. Our beloved motto, ‘don’t fix if it isn’t broke’ will raise its ugly head again and again.  “It’s all the fault of leftist latte sippers”. Kicking and screaming we will finally get it. In the meantime the world has moved forward again. Again we will waste years, battle on and play catch-up.

This is Australia.

Of Burrawang markets, Leggings and Corduroy

26 Tuesday Apr 2011

Posted by in Gerard Oosterman

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In amongst Babe’s country is a village called Burrawang. It has a yearly market whereby the main road is blocked off. That’s how big it is. We were told about it by a neighbour. We had never been before, always a good reason to check it out. ‘Checking out ‘is very popular language now amongst the young and so is ‘oh my god’ and ‘stuff like that’, also still going strong is ‘der or duh’. Rising inflections are now well established, even amongst news readers.

We arrived at the Burrawang country village on the day of the big market and were directed to a paddock to park our car. There were hundreds of cars already with lots of volunteers wearing those fluorescent jackets directing the stream of cars to follow the car in front for parking. Following ‘the car in front’ wasn’t too difficult and after parking we followed, just as effortless, the endless stream of the car exited drivers and passengers to the Burrawang village up the hill.

Burrawang is the Sussex of Australia. It is as beautiful and as close to the ‘old country of England’ as you could possibly make it. The red volcanic soil is home to the best potato but also miles of conifer hedges, maple trees, willows, elms, cedar, and massive gnarled oaks and even real holly with red berries. All this, but also old strands of giant eucalypts having escaped the cruel axe of the forties and fifties hell bent on ring barking, obliterating chances of dangerous bush-fire and make room for pasture and bellowing cattle…

I love Australia and its bush, the Eucalypt and Casuarina, the melaleuca and Cootamundra wattle, but haven’t forgotten the deciduous beauty of European trees. At this time with autumn chasing summer I am chuffed to be jarred to Europe once more. Forgive; I am getting a bit sentimental, will soon purple prose with fallen leaves and tear-shed memories of ‘times gone by’.

We followed the tails of market seekers before us and noticed there were some people waiting near a sign which read ‘bus transport’. Some people queuing and being elderly, I thought that they were from a nursing home. Helvi, observant as always, disagreed, ‘I think they are people that don’t want to walk uphill to the markets and are just waiting for a bus’ she proffered.

She was right and as we plodded on we noticed most walkers had sturdy shoes or runners. I had my comfy RM. Williams and Helvi nice boots.

We noticed at the beginning that many were passing us. We decided to take it leisurely. It wasn’t a race. The distance to the markets was huge and steep too. We kept on seeing walkers as far as the eyes could reach. We plodded on stoutly as they sometimes say but the nice boots were somewhat regretted by H.

 Most walkers were either younger, older or our age but all had rather rose coloured or claret coloured faces, some were panting or even standing still somewhat crouched forward, catching breath. In the meantime the little buses carrying those that wisely waited at the sign below at the parking lot were flying past us. Was this going to be a re-run up the Mount of Calvary, after all, it was Easter? Was the C o E involved? You just never knew in this area. No, it couldn’t be.

I suppose, the planners of the event thought to combine keeping cars well away  from the village together with a regime of teaching us all a fitness lesson, a worthy reason in which to organize the Burrawang event. Indeed, why not?

I noticed that not only was nature splendidly English and very Sussex with a bit Yorkshire dale and flagged stone walls but so were a lot of the walkers. They even spoke somewhat differently. I suppose we were in the hub of gentrified Highland’s territory. After finally arriving at the market, most were so famished and thirsty; they went straight to the food stalls. There was a mile long queue at the Turkish gorem pide bread stall. Hamburgers ditto. Yorkshire pudding was sold out, even raw pumpkins were being besieged by the hungry.

We sauntered around, noticing some in horse type breeches leggings,  some old but young women with smart equistrial type hats and hints of Botox, moustached men in corduroy, guffawing and laughing loud with a ‘har har’ type bonhomie.

The ‘Scottish short-bread’ stall; all decked out in little coloured squares was also popular. The quest for food was endless and looking hopeless for us, the queues were just so long but I promised H a nice coffee.

The coffee stall was a converted VW bus with a promising sign proudly displaying ‘The Grind and Co”. There was a queue, but a promise is a promise.

I finally managed to get two coffees and bought a nice bottle of Fume-blanc after first tasting it (twice) from a cool climate winery called ‘blue metal’.

The walk downhill was a lot quicker and our fellow walkers considerably jollier.

We had a great day and hoed into a loaf of Burrawang crispy bread and some smoked salmon. The fume blanc was a nice one too.

An Ode to Cricket, but nearly a Funeral

23 Saturday Apr 2011

Posted by in Gerard Oosterman

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Bradman Oval Bowral
Bradman Oval with the adjacent Bradman Museum of Cricket. 

 

It was an auspicious start to the day. I thought of doing a quick walk around the ‘world famous cricket’ ground at Bradman oval. I do this walk almost daily at least once and with autumn in its full glory, you would have to be legless not to walk. Any walk always has to involve Milo. As soon as he spots the ritual of putting shoes on feet, he becomes intolerable. He jumps up against the door handle like a maniac let out of Bedlam. I usually take the Norwegian nurse’s dog Louis as well.

 All of us trotted along very nicely and were half way around the oval where a youthful team or two were doing what normally gets done on a cricket oval, play cricket. There was the usual sporadic clapping just after the sound of a ball being batted. The crowd was just as sporadic, all wrapped in blankets with some sipping tea from thermoses.

I had almost gone over half way, lost in thought,  if that is possible, with in between telling Milo, ‘nice walking Milo’  at the same time jerking the lead. “Nice walking, Milo” a bit sterner now again. I have hopes of Milo learning to ‘walk nicely’ without trying to forever pull my arm out of the socket. I feel justified to jerk him as well, to balance the books as it were. He takes notice for a second only to resume pulling again. Jack Russell are obstinate. Their noses are not like any other dogs that we have ever owned and will sniff out a wood-duck from miles away. All of a sudden a chorus of very loud shouting.  “Watch out”.

I was still lost in ponderings or whatever, probably a bit of Alzheimer, when out of the blue a cricket ball landed right next to me in between Milo and Louis. I could have been killed.  Everyone broke out in clapping and cheering, ‘well done’, I heard a few shout. Sport has never been keen on me nor me on sport. At school sport I was always happy if a ball did not get kicked or thrown towards me too closely and was mightily relieved if I had to stand somewhere near the back of the grass. A short stint at Scarborough Basketball club in Cronulla taught me to stay well clear of sport. I suffered broken nose and spectacles.

 I threw the ball back but even failed to cover the distance between where the ball had fallen and the wooden picket fence. This was only a short distance away. Anyway, this caused some hilarity amongst the sparkling white clad cricketers. The oval is a very well maintained cricket place and the distance between me, outside the oval, and the wooden bat was considerable. No wonder they were clapping.

I continued the walk back home pondering (again) how our lives are just so incidental, hanging by a tenuous thread of a possible unfortunate landing of a cricket ball.

I returned Louis to the blonde Norwegian neighbour. He always walks ‘nicely’.

A furtive glance at Socialism

12 Tuesday Apr 2011

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.May we just ponder what Trotsky said back in 1937 and Quote:

But all those for whom the word ‘Socialism’ is not a hollow sound but the content of their moral life – forward! Neither threats nor persecutions nor violations can stop us! Be it even over our bleaching bones the future will triumph! We will blaze the trail for it. It will conquer! Under all the severe blows of fate, I shall be happy as in the best days of my youth; because, my friends, the highest human happiness are not the exploitation of the present but the preparation of the future.”

— Leon Trotsky, ‘I Stake My Life’, opening address to the Dewey Commission, 9 February 1937 [60][61]

We know that the Socialist-Communist system of workers getting a fair share of the pie didn’t quite work out. The pie grew fatter and richer but the portions were still unequal. There wasn’t any tom- sauce with it either. Some did not get any pie.  The mean Stalin and his gulags with Siberian winters and the Babushkas wheel barrowing the frozen bodies of sons and husbands out of trenches were not the rewards that Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) promised the world’s peasants while he was roaming around London during 1902-1906. Nor did the highly idealistic Trotsky envisage coming to his end with an ice pick embedded in his brain many years later.

The failure of communism has been expanded upon by many historians, writers and students of political science. The general idea was that Russia would get rid of its Czars and that its long suffering peasantry would rise up, change and revolutionize the status quo. The poor would gain their share and the rich lose much of their share. They would finally chuck off the shackles of the Czar’s imposed grinding poverty, be given plots of land and everybody would share. The hammer and sickle, a symbol of the alliance of workers and peasants finally bringing riches and tickets to freedom.

 The idea was noble but the execution of it was marred by wars and power struggles between those that meant well and those that didn’t. The result was the inevitable implosion of the ideals matched with an equal rise of opportunistic tyrants. The whole sorry saga of its failure was due to infighting and relentless squabbling by those seeking power and control. The counter revolution against the proletariat was taken over by power hungry future proletarians. And so it went.   

In another part of the world, freedom of expression and the right to rewards for individual efforts were being trail blazed by cowboys on horses and cowboys behind the wooden steering wheels of T-.Model Fords. Westinghouse fridges soon followed. Everybody was also given the freedom of a gun to protect all that hard-won glorious liberty as well.

 God bless America. Land that I love, Stand beside her, and guide her…To the oceans, white with foam…My home sweet home

. And so on… And America kept on dreaming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Bless_America

 Millions still believe that today, but many more are getting a bit skeptical as well. Despite its Constitution enshrined freedom and the protection of that by gun and law, there are more prisons in the US than universities, more incarcerations per capita than anywhere in the world. America’s poverty is growing, expressed by the millions living in the over 35000 trailer parks and even more millions of sick and disabled without a health insurance.

Can we still say that democracy and capitalism is working in the US and other developed countries? Is it still the success it was so enthusiastically touted many years ago, today? Globally, there are signs that the promised wealth is getting bigger but into fewer and fewer hands. Somewhere I read that some individuals are so rich, they own as much as the GDP of entire countries. In fact, many probably own entire countries.

The level of poverty in many undeveloped countries is as bad as ever. Millions still have to walk for miles to get a bucket of water or scrape together enough food to keep their children from dying. The idea of rewards for individual efforts doesn’t seem to have spread to those.

In Australia the richest man now owns more than he could possibly ever spend or use up, even if he ate stone crabs at $60.- a claw, for breakfast, lunch and dinner with a 1952  Grange Hermitage  (at $ 12.500 a 375mls bottle) and drove a brand new Ferrari every day.

 What’s more, his riches have come compliments of resources that I thought belonged to Australia and therefore to all of us. How can that be right? This single individual could supply Australia’s entire Mental Health budget at present about 100 million a year for the next 40 years. That’s just one individual’s wealth against tens of thousands of sufferers with Mental Health problems for forty years. How did the spreading of goodies pan out in such an unfair manner>.

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2011/s3164029.htm

Let’s not be jealous, but the top 10 wealthiest in Australia now have a kitty of over $27 Billion. Could we reflect also, that the richest man was also the most vocal in opposing the resource tax not long ago? A bit rich, don’t you reckon?  The latest sad news for the majority of those on wages and paying fair taxation is that there is a promise in the air by the present Government for the big companies to even pay less taxation in the future. Hoorah, I can hear the top ten richest roar in unison; pop the champagne once more…

Is there an answer to this seemingly endless inequality in sharing that which we all own?

 The second largest economy, China, seems to have propelled its population to a better life for hundreds of millions astonishingly fast. Yet, it has achieved this as a Communist country with a Communist Government. The people seem happy; they talk on mobiles, wear jeans and go to nightclubs. Sure, there are issues of human rights. We have our human rights abuses as good as anywhere. The unresolved, year in year out struggle we have dealing with boat people at detention and ex-army camps, the plight of indigenous people. The UNHCR points this out repeatedly. The US was no saint with the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the ongoing Guantanamo Bay detention camp with over two hundred people still languishing without trial for years. We are on shaky grounds if we cast stones or call for black kettles to Communist China on that ground.

Perfection is elusive, none more so than in political ideologies. In our own domestic world, the greens no doubt will offer some hope for a better future world. The liberals are hell-bent on sending the world into an environmental death throe.  Labor will have to make up its mind to lead or dither.

Richard the Plumber

11 Monday Apr 2011

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Richard the Plumber

In the late fifties and early sixties one of the worst addresses one could possibly live at was Balmain. One of the best was Pott’s Point. We first lived in Pott’s Point and then moved to Balmain. The bank manager warned us, said, “It’s an area of cut throats and commie wharfies”. He gave us grudgingly a $7000. – – loan which to buy a $12.500 weatherboard home with. This home was situated almost on the harbour’s edge with glorious views.

Last Saturday we, as we often do, went to Sydney to see a movie combined with a visit for a possible bargain to the famous Rozelle markets. As we sauntered around, a man kept looking at me. He had a Chinese face and seemed vaguely familiar. We had just bought a potato and bean salad ‘combo’. We know that this Turkish food stall would be there as always, another reason to also go there. As well as the Turkish food stall there was the same band that I had admired before. They go through a lot of work just to set-up. Amplifiers, crossover units, microphones and stands, sound mixers and massive power boards, miles of leads. Boy can they play, and not for money either. No empty guitar& violin case.  A drummer, guitarist, mouth organ and sax, and they let it all just rip. They are in their late forties and must just play for the heck of it.

The Chinese man kept looking and said,” Gerard”,” I am Richard, do you remember?”

Turned out is Richard Chiu, the plumber. He would be the most reliable plumber, always on time, always within the quote, always civil. That pesky old terracotta drain used to get blocked with the thirsty eucalypt roots. Richard would turn up with the electric eel, clear it in no-time.

He was the perfect reflection of us having aged, except in his case he was some years younger, still working but taking it easier, “just a couple of days a week”’, he said.” I am a bit crook, got a few health things”, “cancer”, he added. He looked sideways, for just a quick moment. I felt he did not want to elaborate. It explained his rather jaundiced look. He keenly talked about his plans, had bought some land up north, planned to retire there with his wife. His son had grown up as all our kids had. So and so, had moved, another mutual long ago friend had died, someone else had divorced. We went down the list of mutual acquaintances and history of years ago.

Now Balmain is gone. I mean the houses are 2 million plus and chockers with lawyers and other type of cut throats, different crooks.

 Everything changes. I suspect we might have moved into the era of saying goodbye to pasts and friends. Still, we won’t need the electric eel here, all brand new drainage.

Richard the plumber is hanging in there still.