Author Archives: gerard oosterman

Economic Shrinkage

30 Friday Jul 2010

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Most of the developed countries are racking their brains out on how to resolve damaging climate change without lowering economic growth.  The big boys in town want of course our economies to keep growing with an ever increasing supply of energy for ever increasing goodies by an ever increasing number of people. The engine of materialism has to be kept oiled even if it is killing us.

Economic frugality is the bane of western capitalism with economies that rely on growth rather than shrinkage, always pretending as if none of us live in a finite world.  We hear murmurings of renewable energy, responsible emission targets for the future, but precious little on lowering our energy use, lowering our consumption, lowering the world’s obsession with economic growth. Yet, this seems to be far more logical.

Generally, if you are crook you take it easy. Not, it seems, with an economy though. You ramp it up, give it a couple of fiscal shots and hope it will all pan out. In the meantime the world is getting hotter, but so what; much of it is all a bit temporary anyway.

How capable are western countries in living frugally, or, more importantly, how will the population take to reducing energy consumption, reducing water, reduce our large houses, car size, income, standards of living, reduce spending?  Some will argue that to save the world ecology we need to reign in economic growth and perhaps, if not voluntary, the ‘economic shrinkage’ will force itself on us, almost as part of a natural selection and survival of the fittest.

While there are many claiming that they have missed out on the fortunes of ever increasing material wellbeing, there are also many that have more than benefitted from wealth. In blatant terminal material societies such as ours and most other OECD’s, there are indeed many having missed out and live miserable lives while others are floating on a warm sea of obscene wealth.

We can’t hide behind the fact that we, per capita, are the world’s largest polluters. The gall to point at countries such as India and China as being the worst is a mean trick conjured up by fat moguls, belching from riches and internal dollar bloat.

 The times ahead will be most interesting if not very hard for many people. The idea of forever increasing growth and ever increasing profits and wealth might be of the past.  Sustainability and environmental concerns will have to override economies that have become obsolete on ‘growth ideology’ while remaining blind to the world’s survival… A far more equitable sharing of the pie to others must come about. Time is running out and no way will the capitalistic methods of the survival of the richest and most cunning solve a world close to a climatic death throe. The cult of individual effort and winner take all, ought to get much more scrutiny.

In the meantime the world is getting hotter.

Of Skylights and Renovations

27 Tuesday Jul 2010

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There was a steady log of objections being lodged with Council, with the inevitable stream of Councillors and Aldermen strolling through our house to observe projected shadows or overhanging rafters and eaves, even possible stormwater run offs through our bedroom. No matter how much or how many objections were lodged, not once were we successful in getting a reprieve from jackhammers and nail-guns.  This was one of the reasons why we threw in the towel and retired to our over hundred acre glorious farm in 1996 with not a jackhammer within cooee ever since.

 During one of the many renovations, I’ve forgotten the exact couple, perhaps the ‘jelly all over’ neighbours, put a large sky-light in above their dining room ceiling. We objected in vain, pointing out that the sky-light was directly below the window of our son’s bedroom upstairs. If, for one reason or another, (fire perhaps?) the stairs could not be used for an escape route, he could at least get out through his window onto the single storey roof about one metre below it. The new sky-light might not carry his weight either! The sky-light would also enable us to look straight into their dining room. The objections were over-ruled when the neighbours changed the material to laminate and opaque but letting light-through polymer.

 Of course, the house was sold soon after. We sometimes saw the new neighbours at the dining table from our son Nick’s room, but apart from seeing arms scooping up food onto dishes or perhaps someone gesticulating while talking, the details were foggy and unfocussed. I had trouble even distinguishing between the sexes. It was as if looking through a cloudy milk-bottle bottom. Decades earlier and in Holland we would sometimes use these milk bottle bottoms as a primitive lens and focus the sun’s light on a shoelace until it started smouldering and then stink German teacher Kohler’s class-room out.

Anyway, the new couple had just about gotten over the jeering neighbours on the other side during the above pool wedding, with the suspended rat during the bridal waltz evening, and just when we were getting on a bit more neighbourly; She had even returned our prized hugely expensive French enamelled baking dish with lid, when the next drama occurred!

 Ronnie, who was born with the severe thalidomite effects used by his mum, had visited our son again and the age had arrived where the Commodore computer games and listening to music with the occasional bong, was now being enhanced by some beer consumption as well. Ronnie was amazingly deft with lifting his full glass with his strong teeth and with his shortened arm and splayed two fingered hand, heave it up and drink like the best of us. They were having a good time upstairs and even though the evening had arrived, it was still light.

It was about 7 o’clock pm when there was an almighty banging on the door. It was her, the neighbour of the ‘above the pool wedding and Spanish maids’, with a complaint. While having dinner at the table with friends, someone had been urinating on their roof, on THEIR skylight. She said she at first could not believe it, but when she and all the guests looked up, it was agreed by all that it was definitely not water; it was yellow!  “It was yellow,” she repeated. Almost as if she was forestalling another objection by us to Council.

I immediately went upstairs to investigate about yellow liquid but had already guessed what had transpired. Ronnie found it far more logical, if not extremely convenient as well, to use the open window to piss out to his heart’s content. The struggle for him to go downstairs would have taken too much time, and the urge was so instant. Ronnie was so sorry and said he would apologize. He struggled downstairs to our neighbour lady with the previous hanging dead rat experience. When she saw him hobbling down the stairs on his stick legs, she instantly also recognized what might have occurred. She left a bit deflated.

Of Bob and Blanche and Botoxed Beauty

24 Saturday Jul 2010

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Helvi Oosterman

Never fancied Bob Hawke, the man, I’m not talking about Bob the Prime Minister here. All those polyester pants and white shoes, and the hair, talk about staying stuck in the time warp…

The imitation put-on, Aussie accent and the rolling of the eyes…give me a break, anyone sharing my birthday should not have a mouth permanently parked at twenty past eight, and that whining voice, please!

Then enters Blanche, a good-looker of a girl, blond, blue-eyed, enviable cheekbones and mouthful of nice teeth; she not just a beauty, but she can write as well, and rather well, they say. I haven’t checked if it is so. Blanche and Bob fall in love, it is not just an affair; they do get married later on, so true love it must be.

Now Bob is Octogenarian and Blanche has reached her retirement age, 66. For some reason she is not happy to age naturally, or as they say, gracefully. To me it seems like she has been blessed with ‘she’ll- keep-her-looks’ gene. Blanche begs to differ though, she doesn’t believe it. She gets busy with Botox and takes even more drastic measures in her quest to stay ‘young’.  This is not possible, she does not have to either; she is not an entertainer like our Kylie, who now looks younger than when she was still only one of our NEIGHBOURS.

Blanche is not someone who is battling to keep her job as a newsreader on Channel Ten, where the youth is the only currency. She’s also married to the much older Hawkie, and him being soo much in love, she’ll be his babe forever without having to look like a baby. Not being in the public eye anymore, (but sitting at home writing stories, some fact, some fiction, if we take Keating’s word for it), it might be time to pull on the old trackies, look dishevelled and get on with the real story, ageing.  

The smooth ironed-out pics in last week’s SMH almost fooled me into believing that Blanche has been successful in her quest of eternal youth; the harsh lights in Kerry O’Brian’s studio told a different story. The permanent wide-eyed-look-of- wonder, the overly luscious lips, made me think it was Hawke who now looked younger, HIS face still expressive, eyes still rolling…Strangely the old boy Bob now appears as the more attractive one of those two.

 Many of us feel sorry for Hazel. The gods have not been kind to her, first ‘Bob and Blanche’, and then her books, Alzheimer’s must have come to Hazel almost as a backhanded blessing…

Of Alex Miller & Christopher Hitchens

20 Tuesday Jul 2010

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Helvi Oosterman

I’m missing my books, they are physically here, in milk crates and sturdy boxes, stacked high in the garage of my temporary dwelling, but I can’t get to them without disturbing the equilibrium of our possessions waiting to be transported to our permanent abode in three months time.

It’s not only the books I’m missing but also the simple white built-in book cases, we had on the farm. One wall in the family room was ‘sacrificed’ to our old and most faithful friends, books. The bedroom shelves were a home for books in process, not to be written but to be read.

This small townhouse is easy to heat, we have nice neighbours, the living room is cosy and sunny, enough rooms to house the grandsons during school holidays, a garden for Milo, and not too far from shops, coffee lounges and libraries. This will do for us but I find myself complaining about the lack of shelving. The second bathroom eats up too much of the space; a space that I could use to put up a bookcase, however temporary. I’m totally unfair, and find the handy floor-to ceiling shelving in the laundry irritating. I’m even angry about the dishwasher: What’s wrong about using the kitchen sink!

What an unreasonable woman, I hear Daughter muttering to her dad behind my back, fancy complaining about a dishwasher when there are so people who are homeless. Thank god the little boys are outside on their bikes; otherwise they would join in with their homilies: Don’t you know Oma that the poor African children don’t even have books.

I’m fair enough to realise that family is right and that I’m being totally selfish, or did I hear the word ‘childish’. Looks like I have some explaining to do. See, I promised not to buy any more books, life’s too short and it’s time to downsize, libraries are pleasant places, I’ll swap my existing books with family members and friends, and I’ll have enough reading material till the end of my days.

All those promises were made when I was in the middle of the moving, when I was tired and fed-up just looking at yet another box waiting to be filled. Now it’s different, I’m close to shops selling new, second hand, and even antique books; I’m an hour away from my favourite flea markets, those Meccas for book addicts like myself.

I give up, I have a low chest of drawers next my bed, it has a good reading light, ear-rings, bottles of perfumes (some never used= wrong choice of Mother’s day present),last week-end papers, a writing pad and other such things sitting on it. I clear it all away sniffling a bit, no, I’m not crying, I have the flu, I leave only the lamp. I now have room for at least five or six stacks of books, I’m cheering up.

I have finished the Updike memoirs, so I place Hitchens’ Hitch-22, a memoir, carefully on top of it. Some other lovely finds in between and on top, the one I have to read in more or less in one session: Alex Miller’s Lovesong. It’s beautifully written by an older Australian author, it’s hard cover, and what a cover!

The jacket is so eloquent that seeing it you almost believe that you CAN judge the book by its covers; in Alex Miller’s case, you can. Now I have to get the rest of his books…

Magdalena Duma

17 Saturday Jul 2010

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Just yesterday we managed to take some time off to get our kitchen chairs re-rushed. The chairs were part of our farm  in Holland together with most of our other furniture, generously thrown in by the previous owner who was an antique dealer and father of 14 children. Those kitchen chairs were old then, and the rushed seating, through all the years with growing kids, together with a series of cats plucking at them from underneath had finally given way. We tried sitting on just the frame with the help of some string and cushions. This was hard going. Finally, as we could never find anyone who knew how to re-rush or re-thatch/cane them we gave up and stored them away. 

Last week we walked into a shop in Bowral with similar looking chairs. I asked about  the state of the rush and I got the address of someone who could do this. It was a phone call with a strong York-shire voiced answer with an address in Newtown, Sydney, that finally gave us hope of being able to sit in comfort around the dining table  again soon.

After arrival, we met this very old couple living near one of the quaintest and busiest car and pedestrian thoroughfare in Sydney, the extension of King Street towards the Princess Highway. The Yorkshire couple were almost as old as our chairs but a lot livelier. He immediately knew were our chairs came from, the type of rush used and the method. He already told us the rushing material is not allowed to be imported anymore and all those type of chairs including rocking, wicker chairs are now done in a paper product, very strong and similar in looks. The wife, Angela was the secretary and keeper of order, lifely as a finch, and  Chris her husband,  could hardly walk but was also very animated, full of knowledge about the different rushes and where they actually grow. Their small cottage was chockers with old chairs. She told us, their bed and the kitchen table were the only areas free from the clutter of cane, rush, chairs, tools and all sorts of other stuff.  

After dropping the chairs off and being entertained by this very hospitable couple we strolled around the corner and passed a Polish cafe/ restaurant. The people inside tucking into their food looked Polish and a little further was another shop with very fashionable looking clothing, it was called ‘Magdalena Duma.’. Inside the shop window was a sign by  Magdalena giving credit to her Polish born mother’s influence and inspiration, which we thought was a nice thing to do so  publicly.

Magdalena is some lady: Born in Poland with her family migrating to Australia. Looking in her shop she sure makes original items, seems gifted with a desire to cut the cloth and make fashion her world.

Anyway, if you ever are in need of re-rushing your old chairs, go and see Angela and Chris. But do have a look at Magdalena’s collection at 547 King Street, Newtown. They are works of art!

A Sort of Life

13 Tuesday Jul 2010

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The picture above is of my paternal grandparents wedding, back in the 1890’s or so. The tall rather forbidding looking man on the right at the back  is my Grandfather, sitting next him, his lovely bride with the gown, my grandmother. A rather sombre looking bridal party. In those days taking interior photos must have been difficult. Perhaps the party was fed up with posing and wanted to get stuck in the vino and food. One of the males seated at the table is Huib Luns. He was the father of Joseph Luns, a future Government minister and Secretary General.

Picture number two is the house that I stayed in after the war, and can still smell the turps and linseed oils that my granddad used for painting. My grandparents had all their six children there and lived there during their entire life.

Next a photo with buckets of  idealism; granddad seen through the window mixing a palette of colours while grandma is seen in the garden carrying some cups. I suppose there were quests seated in the garden. I feel granddad is posing here. He like to smoke and lived to an old age.

The last photo is them in old age. They both wear slippers and are now stooped.

Of Boys and Pull-Ups

30 Wednesday Jun 2010

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By Helvi Oosterman

The other day Susan Maushart lamented her teenage daughter’s lack of know-how or how-to with fitted sheets. In my youth we would have been so lucky to have sheets resembling huge shower caps. Our mums made sure that we became a deft hand with hospital corners; every girl but NO boy learnt this art of tight, nice and snug cornering.

Boys escape many lessons and it starts as early as potty training time; girls being clean and neat by nature move from nappies to panties in a couple of easy sittings, boys move semi permanently into pull-ups. They are too busy with their war games to worry about potties, and take to this comfort clothing with gusto. There is something magical down there, silicon maybe that keeps you dry even you have just wet yourself, or even worse.

For some blokes the pull-ups will return later on in life, but that’s another story…

Shoes are a must, but shoelaces for some reason are too hard for most males, and so we make life easier for them by inventing shoes with Velcro fastenings or with elasticized side panels.  Summertime the ugly and dangerous Crocs come in handy and later on you’ll graduate to thongs and by then you are also usually more than willing to learn to walk the thong-walk.

The toddler boys can just about manage to put their head through the biggest hole in the t-shirt, the hands and arms have to be guided by patient mums. Nothing tight or woollen or itchy or scratchy is to be pulled over any boy’s head; the tickets and tags at the back have to be removed. Later on that will make life difficult; how do you know what’s the front and what is back.

You have to be a girl to know how to find the right button holes for your buttons; the boys will have zippers or nothing at all. The zippers are no cinch either, the silly fabric gets caught in them and they are made of something hard that feels a bit cold on little male’s extra sensitive skin… So, pull-overs it is, not those old-fashioned knitted things (pullovers) made of sheep wool or something scratchy; let’s keep it soft and simple like Polar fleece. Hoodies are heavenly but not after mum has removed the tag and you end up with the pouch at the front. Please, mum, don’t dare to laugh…

Pockets are the favourite part of any boy’s attire, the more the merrier: one for the coins another for rocks, frogs and iceblock wrappers and other related rubble.

Toddlers, even of the male variety turn to teens one day, and aren’t they lucky to do it now when the shops are bulging with all the brilliantly coloured rescue wear, waiting there just for you to pull it on and find a girl or two in need of being saved from wolves or bushfires depending on where you happen to live.

The female teens are now wearing bras, leggings and flimsy tops and sadly not at all interested in boys dressed in workman’s gear. They are dreaming of older and more ‘mature’ boys who at least have learnt to tie their shoelaces and zip their pipe jeans up, and when needed, down as well.

Of course there are always girls, who are nice and wise, and who instinctively know it’s you boys who need rescuing, and when that happens, we know that the real dressing up starts, maybe a bit of dressing down as well.

The Wives of Fishermen

25 Friday Jun 2010

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Years ago I had a 12 ft Brooker on a trailer with Yamaha outboard, in which I would take my son outside Sydney heads to go fishing. I used to catch buckets of ‘roughies’. They were those orange coloured fish with large sad looking eyes. Looking back, what a dangerous thing to do!  Still, the 4am drive to the ramp at Rozelle, and then the slow trip outside the Heads I am sure he remembers.

It all started from our regular camping trips at Bendalong on the South Coast, where scores of campers and their wives used to line up at the only ramp and take out their boats. In those days, the wives tried to be as much as their husbands to be part of the ‘fishing scene’. Both feet shod in thongs, feet firmly planted apart and tits flattened, fags dangling from waver thin lips; They tried to be as blokey as possible while pulling the rings on their husband beer cans. If they wanted to be accepted, their female-ness had to be hidden.

It was the only way then. It made one wonder if those males were not homosexuals disguised as fishermen. Perhaps I am unkind here or intolerant of the different cultural aspects of varying societies. It was at the same time when at social parties, mixing by men with women was sometimes also seen as having ‘poofter’ inclinations.

Reading the plethora of comments about Australia having the first female Prime Minister in Julia Gillard, I detect certain misogyny. Perhaps those old fishermen’s ideas of women should still be the notion of adherence and conforming to their maleness instead of blatant feminism. Be one of the boys, as it were. Did you read Bob Ellis article on the UL?

Still, those notions have failed in parliament, at least on the ALP side. Just have a look at the line-up of those glorious looking females. As feminine as one could possibly hope for.

 Certainly nothing like those fishermen’s wives.

Of Porkies and Kiddie Porn

22 Tuesday Jun 2010

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Is it not amazing that certain people are deemed to be beyond being human and possess a quality that not even the purest of cherubic angels could possibly ever own?  Not just most times, but twenty four hours seven days, and over their entire lives. There was Justice Einfeld being caught speeding and telling a porky that most of us are more than capable of and probably doing most of the time. Yet, he was jailed for being what we all are, fallible human beings. The fact of being a retired superior High Court Judge, a former President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission and a Unicef Ambassador for children did not stand in the way of his punishment.  In fact, that was precisely why he was given such a harsh sentence.

There we are all cheerfully filling in our tax forms telling lies that will probably give us a nice little earner in refunds, hiding a few grand here and there in dodgy trusts or splitting income with our friendly stumpy Cattle dog  ‘Bitem’. All very legit, as they say.

 Good onya mate, Bob’s your uncle.  But for a mere bagatelle of a porky, poor Marcus in jail, hopefully with enough wisdom in contemplating the irony of it all.

Lately there has been remarkable diligence on the part of a blood hounding mob of do-gooders sniffing out scents in the discarded underpants of ethics, never of just ordinary folks like us, but only of those in the public eye.

Some time ago, the minister for Defence, having enjoyed a paid trip to China, compliments of a friend, apologizing for his lapse of memory or simply having forgotten it all, was being pursued by batteries of video cameras raised and aimed for his face from journalists with the well practised sensitivities of belt sanders. 

Where do the expectations come from that people in the limelight or of high position are somehow better or above the rest of us? There is the French President, divorcing his wife in full flight, taking a new one and being rewarded by a surge in popularity.  At the G8 Summit Conference he was allegedly filmed drunk. Such panache!  Are the French so much more sophisticated and tolerant and we in Australia so hypocritical?  Could a prime minister have gotten away with the’ flair and nous’ what the French President Nicolas Sarkozy seems to have managed so far?  Remember the uproar about young Kevin at the nightclub incident in the US? Where was our pride in our PM being one of us?

Is it also perhaps a fact that others elsewhere are more capable than us, of allowing even people in high places still to be human? The French President, after all, divorcing, taking another partner and sometimes getting pissed is what most of us intrinsically do as well.  Why the hypocrisy here when it involves only people in the limelight?
 
Those that get caught with child porn on their computers are also invariably ‘normal’ as well. From ABC employees to judges and magistrates, police officers, priests and prosecutors, and even ‘stranger danger’ educators. They all line up, worldwide, being charged, with having downloaded and/or spreading child porn. Now, if ‘normal ‘people are all so feeble and weak to fall prey to doing bad things at times, why are we always pretending those things are being done by others? Is it not true that we are all capable by just a hair’s breadth of doing unacceptable things? We can’t say that people caught are all seemingly respectable  pillars of society and absolutely ‘normal’ and condemning them, without also allowing and accepting that we are all capable of doing those bad things as well.

In the period of Queen Victoria, there were estimated to be over a hundred thousand child prostitutes in London alone. It is a fair bet, that those that abused children then were the judges, teachers, religious clergy, cabinet ministers, and regarded then as ‘normal’ as those now that are now caught with kiddie porn on their computers. Not that long ago, we stood by with terrible things being done to refugees, for years on end. The indefinite detention without trial of one of ours for many years, D.Hicks. The humiliation of Dr.Haneef and Cornelia Rau.  Basic and blatant breaches of human rights. All evil things done under our noses and with the apparent approval of most of us ‘normal’ people, without as much as a single prosecution so far. Where were the bloodhounds then?

Next time we hear or read about bad things, small or large, it is more likely to be ’us’ rather than ‘them’. We are ‘normal’.

Lost and Found in Transit

20 Sunday Jun 2010

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Helvi Oosterman

Moving from a big place to a smaller home is not easy. You are attached to your life-long collection of things; to your furniture’, books, paintings, to your “sendogu”, Japanese for beautiful but not necessary objects. We were given only five weeks to decide what to keep and what not. We came to the clever idea of renting something two weeks earlier than we had to, and decided to pack in a hurry and unpack slowly. This way we were giving away things at both ends; tipping and burning on the farm, and taking to charity shops discarded items from the new place.

The most delightful loss of all was the shedding of three kilos of my weight, through stress and hard physical work. The second best was ‘accidently’ misplacing hubby’s humble underwear collection into the new recycling bin. May I explain here that I gave up buying his underwear years ago. This was my way of keeping abreast with any possible extra marital happenings; you know what they say about men suddenly shopping for Calvin Kleins…

Being busy and too tired to cook we got into a habit of grabbing some take away food; Mc Donald’s, Korean noodles, Italian style fettuccine (is there any other kind), soggy fish and chips, and more horrors.  Opening the white box of noodles made me puke, and even Milo refused to touch my hamburger left-over’s. The tasteless pasta was swimming in tomato sauce, Italian Style is not the expression to use here. I always thought that take-out makes you fat, the reverse was happening with me. Better lose the urge to shop for convenience food, rather than lose the will to live.

I also gained useful skills these last few weeks. For example how to get in and out Kennard’s rental truck; you put your left foot on some pedestal and swing the right one inside the cabin whilst hanging onto some kind of railing inside. The nice manager, Richard, had cleaned the truck just for me. All very nice but the seat was so slippery I was afraid of sliding out. Some fat lady has sat there before and the seat kind of sloped towards the door …As husband was struggling with the multitude of gears and other truck paraphernalia, I kept quiet and gained some of my usual calmness by Buddhist meditations. All the Christian prayers ,learnt at Sunday school, came in handy when the driver accidently reversed instead of going forward at a busy intersection…

Now to the gains: no more muck for lunch, but quick shop for sourdough bread and some nice cheese, and after unpacking the car, the trailer or the truck, it was to our newly found  real pub and fantastic twelve dollar steak for dinner. The usual Shiraz was not quite right here, so a big schooner of beer it was. We haven’t been to a pub for years, nor have drunk beer anywhere. Steak and beer was a good combo and we have now become regulars at the Bowral Royal. The nice barman, Hugh comes to chat to us and we even have our pub-loyalty-cards.

Among the plusses is the safely moved Persian Delight; Milo did not crush it at the back of the car. My Kalanchoe was not so lucky.

The books are stacked in the garage in their milk crates; I left some out even there wasn’t much time for reading. I had saved all John Updike’s books when packing. I’m now so pleased to re-read  his wonderful early memoir ‘Self-Consciousness’, and I love it.

This is what Guardian says about it on the back page: ‘If he (Updike) has an unmelting splinter of ice at the heart, that is our good fortune. Who wants words as good as these with water?’