Category Archives: Gerard Oosterman

Like Peas in a Pod

10 Friday Jun 2011

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Like peas in a Pod

June 10, 2011 by gerard oosterman

Anyone having visited the main supermarkets of late could not but have noticed that we as consumers have now entered a totally new world of devastating health. Gone are the bleak advertisements of chocolate bars or croissants. It’s all health, health and more health. Giant posters of apples, Pink Ladies or Jonathans, all pink and roseate, viridian green Granny Smiths, a tsunami of huge fruits have now been posted and pasted on every square metre of wall or window at the supermarket entrances. Let’s not also forget the vegetables though. Yesterday at Aldi’s there where peas in their pods so well photographed and blown up in size they almost looked dangerous.

There is now the push on in earnest for all to get violently healthy and no excuse for getting girths above the OBM measurements anymore. This is how so often things are handled. Obesity as a result of supermarkets pushing very profitable but dodgy foods still continue as ever but a veneer of concern for robust health is cleverly being promoted.

Those giant posters of fruit and veggies not only soothes those that have genuine concern for the millions of overweight people but it soothes above all the shopper thinking that entering the supermarket now delivers them from junk food. The mood is set in believing all is well and their shopping continues as before. The trolley still features the same cooking sauces, the same chips, biscuits, choky brekkies and other high carbon junk foods. The relentless race to diabetes goes on and the millions of overweight no doubt will queue our surgeries and hospitals as never before.

A cooking and food expert interviewed on ABC FM radio gave an account of a person faced with a fish and a saucepan and could not relate that to cook the fish it needed to be placed in the saucepan and heat applied. Jamie Oliver some time ago travelled through UK schools and found some children could not identify the potato. They simply thought it came in golden coloured strips.
Despite all those TV shows and all the cookery books with millions watching and reading, cooking wholesome meals at home is getting less. Just because our large Mansions now have Caesar stone kitchen benches, butcher blocks and huge knifes hanging from the wall, doesn’t mean that families sit down to eat a well cooked and healthy meal.

On the ABC program of QA, the panel was asked why Solariums were not being banned. The answer; It is a State issue and there are many warnings on the use of Solariums causing cancer anyway.
Apparently a similar answer was given on junk foods with the opinion that ‘surely’ adults can make up their own mind and take care that their children eat healthy foods and don’t become obese. We ‘should all exercise good and healthy choices’ and that should not ever be taken away by banning junk food ads during children TV, one opposition minister , Christopher Pyne, suggested. This was also T. Abbott’s refrain when health minister during the Howard reign.

No one came up that ‘the free choice’ available for decades had not resulted in improved dietary habits. Would it not be prudent to try something else? Free choice also gave us thousands clogging hospitals with people dying from smoking. It was tackled very successfully. Plain packaging again will lower the number picking up smoking and many will give the habit up.
Surely, with food, the same can be tried. No-one wants to deny a chocolate or the biscuit, the frozen meal or the soft drink. But why not have those foods costing more and made less attractive. Much of the junk food exterior packaging are depicted with images of healthy food while in fact the food inside is just rubbish of very dubious nutritional value.

Could we include much more dietary advice with perhaps a star system the same as on white goods. The Mars Bar a single star, the apple or stick of celery 5 stars. I read that at Saturday school sports, the tuck shops still sell sausage rolls and junk sugar stuff that no one seems to question. Kids don’t buy the treats if they are healthy, some complained. Well, let them go hungry and see if they will get into the apple or fruit salad, the chicken and cheese or egg and tomato sandwich?

The check-out counter inevitably pushed the worst of junk foods and many a mother despair going through without the child throwing a tantrum for another sweet crunchy bar or sugary drink. At petrol station we are exhorted to spend another $5, – to get another 4 cent per litre of petro discount. The extra money is for either soft drink combined with sweet bars etc. Again, a pushing of junk food is featured. It is wrong, wrong, wrong.
When it comes to ‘free choice’ we are in the grip of very clever advertising giants with millions to spend which drives us now in  their clutches, dressed up with good health posters . The ‘free choice’ morphs us all into very obedient but overweight people.

Blue Dolphins, golden dolphins and get stuffed here.

04 Saturday Jun 2011

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The delights of Nelson Bay here in NSW are enjoyed by hundreds of thousands who will end up renting holiday accommodation available but always in short supply. Signs galore everywhere and the closer to water’s edge the more prolific the signage.

Nelson Bay I remember driving to some years ago. We were invited by our neighbour opposite us when still living in Balmain. It is just a bit North from Newcastle, she advised us. It was a considerable ‘bit more’ and as always the last bit takes the mostest. I remember it was a lovely if not a somewhat boozy week-end with many partying the week-end away.

This time around the accommodation was pre-booked on-line and pre-paid without any trouble. One gets many photos and previous quests comments all on-line giving the distance from beach -water, how many bedrooms, all the technical gizmos including size of TV screen, dishwasher cycles, micro-wave, reverse cycle air-con.  The wonders of the internet have many advantages.

Driving there also a cinch complements of GPS stuck especially for the occasion on the front screen. ‘You are over the speed limit’ from a pleasant English voice warning us every now and then.  It even warns you to ‘stay left’ 3 kilometres before the actual left turning event. It remains a puzzle how I ever found Nelson’s Bay all those many years ago.

About twenty kilometres before arrival one knows that Nelson Bay is getting close. There are now a profusion of hoardings with water sports and dolphins sprouting up wherever there is a bit of vacant bush still available. We passed a house which had a giant golden dolphin fastened on a trailer. Where this dolphin would be hauled to and what it would end up advertising would be anyone’s guess.

 It seems that most go there to either race around on jet skis, watch cavorting dolphins or eat ‘to get stuffed’. It defies how anyone could be enticed to eat at a place advertising ‘A Hog’s Breath’, showing a pig’s snout, but at Nelson’s Bay anything goes.  I suppose all those water activities makes for such a dire and urgent hunger that an advertisement to eat at ‘Ernie’s dung pile’ would be chockers with starving hordes.

We all had a fantastic lunch at a place that I often wished there were more off. It was at the Northern end of Nelson’s Bay in a pub overhanging the water. Perhaps it was called the Blue Dolphin. It did have dolphins featured in the design of the carpet. Anyway, nice tables with white linen and a superb dish of flat-head crumbed and cooked to perfection with a salad and crunchie chips. Below us, there were activities of boats getting ready with hoisting giant lobster pots and fixing long-lines. Those long lines are fitted with GPS’ as well; I was told by my brother, who does a lot of volunteering watching and reporting on whales. All those boats fishing with long lines have those lines fitted with GPS’ which then sends continuous rapports out to Canberra of their positions.  

I hope the fish caught by that method appreciate the technology! At one stage a group of school kids arrived with their teachers. I suppose it was a private school with the girls in those long Jane Austen skirts and the boys in long beige coloured pants and fancy jackets. They were taught to put bait on and throw the line in. All those activities were below our window while we tucked into our flatheads.

No-one there that ordered lunch was drinking beer. Beer drinking in pubs is dying. The latest figures out show a disastrous decline in beer consumption which is balanced by the increase in wine quaffing.

  It is a sign of the times.

From ‘Le Salon des ABC refuses’ (death of suburbia)

22 Sunday May 2011

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Death of Suburbia?

   Who can’t fondly look back on the days when our suburbs were havens for the warm smells cosily wafting over the hardwood paling fence with Donna, Ernie’s wife from next door, passing some freshly baked scones? Soon after, Ernie would start the Victa and the rattle of many mowers would join all over the place in a peaceful chorus. This idyllic suburban symphony would be repeated in all our suburbs and in all our cities and at every week-end. We knew who we were and where we were. 

All this is now coming to an end. Mowers and their associated gadgetry,  motorized leaf blowers, leaf suckers, edgers, whipper snippers, hedge trimmers; all being pushed to city’s  outer limits miles away. Those still hanging onto their dreams are doing so with grim determination bordering on the heroic, but being pushed to the edge of tolerance.  How long will suburbia with its endless rolling out of subdivisions into the distant sunrise continue to last? Is suburbia’s sun sinking below the horizon? In its last death row, gone forever?

More and more, the rise of medium density with apartments and town house/villas are being rolled out at an ever increasing pace. The closer to the city the more unlikely any of us can afford to live in the separate free standing house with garden and trampoline for the kids. There would hardly be a free-standing house under the one million dollar mark within 5 kilometres of our main cities. 

The push away from a free standing 3 bedroom house with enclosed louvre glassed veranda and big garden is on in earnest. The change of demographics and peoples living choices are inexorably moving towards a more maintenance free mode of housing and towards overcoming the tyranny of having to drive to overcome distance. No matter how we increased the size and bulk of our cars, we seem to have become thoroughly fed up with the endless driving to and fro work, child-care, our al fresco dining experience and entertainment. We are voting with our feet and the weekly footage on TV with queues at the Real Estate Auction for inner city living, proof of seeking a new way of city living. 

Free standing houses that still survived the roving eyes of the spec. builder keen to convert a single block into a dozen townhouses are fetching millions, becoming totally out of reach of the average battler. Not to worry though. Most of those seeking to buy into a closer more intimate inclusive, dare I say it, ‘life-style’ are happily snapping up the town/house/villa or apartment with courtyard or balcony, but within the inner city. They do so because they want to be able to stroll to all the amenities that through the last few decades involved the owning of the cars and subsequent driving…It just became intolerable. Many, especially for those arriving at our shores from other countries, expect to see people on city streets with coffee lounges and cafes, theatres and shops. They reject the idea of mowing or crouching on grass, prising out unwanted bits of other grasses or weeds. 

Some might feel nostalgia over the demise of suburban housings but those have still the choice of going where suburbia still flourishes, and ‘choice’ is now more available than ever before.

The European migrant in the fifties and sixties could only buy or rent into suburbs. The block of land and own house was portrayed, and sold, as being so desirable that rejection was sometimes seen as heresy. Own block, own house, was proclaimed Australia-wide as having reached the very pinnacle of an achievement and dream bordering on a Nirvana.  Without most Australians ever having seen much else in the form of city housing elsewhere; they would often state that our suburbs were the envy of the whole world. Indeed, the ‘best of the Southern Hemisphere,’ the more geographically enlightened, would proclaim with Anzac pride.

There has been some solid arguing with both the defenders of free standing housing and their opponents. http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/sydney-lets-stop-the-rot/2005/09/16/1126750124219.html Both sides seemingly as eloquent in portraying survival of endless suburbia with free standing housing, with those that predict that more people will choose to live closer to work and other amenities including closer to other people. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/life-in-suburbs-drives-up-emissions/story-e6frg6no-1111117525526 

Some defenders of suburbs and free standing housing are even suggesting Australia should consider de-populating ourselves. Well, I’ll be lining up with great curiosity to see how that could happen.

It will be safe betting that our choices will be widened as ever before, but that most of us will move towards a form of housing less reliant on driving. 

The choice is ours and isn’t that what it should be all about?

Because (Nr7 the end)

21 Saturday May 2011

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Still another five months to go now meant one more time going around cutting the entire Goulburn jail population. Every lice infested head meant getting closer to my Kelly, brother and sisters and mum and dad. Those last few months were spent on ‘the farm’ as ‘trusted’ planting thousands of pine trees near Young. The freedom to see greenery and flight of birds became a warm-up for a return to my home of Muswellbrook and its wooden bridge.

‘Brother is getting worse,’ mum wrote. ‘He can’t ride the quad-bike but is as cheerful as a button, never complains, always tells us he loves us.’ Dad now has to bath and toilet him, sleeps with him, and turns him over when needed, massage him to keep him as good as possible. ‘He asks after you, Frankie’. ‘You better come here soon son!’

I had vowed, the first thing I would do, when at home again, to swear on the bible I would never do crime again, take up being a barber instead, marry Kelly, have a family just like ours.

I caught the train back to Muswellbrook with my belongings, including bible and well fingered book of psalms inside my small suitcase that I carried when entering Long Bay a very long eighteen months ago.

Hi mum, dad, dear brother and sisters. I never lost or did not love you all, ever. Forgive me, please. Brother died two days later in bed next to dad…His big heart failed him.

I am 59 now, with my Kelly and children of my own. I am good with words but never learnt spelling….Because.

Because (Nr6)

17 Tuesday May 2011

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 ‘I miss you so, Frankie’ were the sweetest words I ever heard. I miss you ‘SO’’ I scratched the SO into the wall next to my bed with the end of my toothbrush  and whitened it with the paste, adding a small s, just in case the screws thought I was up to something. Previous decades of inmates had scribed endless salubrious messages of dripping carnal lusts, drawings of big cocks and fannies, the main extend of their incarcerated years and artistic oeuvre. Kelly’s letters I carried permanently on me. A balm soothing the pain I felt for all, mum, dad, brother and lovely Kelly.

Was it having perfected my sweeping-up skills that satisfied the authorities, or, more likely, the overcrowding, but I was suddenly ushered into a van with some others? ‘You’re going to Goulburn, matey’. All of us shackled to the inside rail of the van. It took almost half a day, after which I was ushered into a cell not dissimilar to the one I had left, except, this time shared with another grim looking character. Some years back dad made me learn to cut his and my own hair. He was never shy to save a quid on the household and I did the same to my brother which earned me half the cost of a haircut on the list of ‘shave and cut’ at Tony’s Barber-shop. When I told them of my hair-cutting skills I promptly elevated to becoming the hair cutter of Goulburn Jail.

“Dear mum, dear dad” I wrote. It would take me hours to write the letters. The combination of both my bible and psalm book offering me the words to copy, letter by letter. The word ‘because’ easily found but not so ‘wasting’ and muscles’. Brother had not improved and dad massaged him daily now, sleeping with him, turning him around and doing the tasks that required strength that mum just didn’t have. On one visit mum was happy. The family had got together and bought him a motor quad bike with automatic gears. He was full of beans when going around the paddocks belonging to someone they knew that had level areas for him to race around on, chasing sheep with Kelpie. He still had control over his body in the use of throttle and steering but needed his feet strapped to the footrests. He couldn’t attend school anymore, she said. “Some boys with dystrophy can still survive and last for many more years”, she added hopefully.

 Mum was always as cheerful as a freshly baked coconut slice, sunny and exuding a crunchy kind of cosy warmth, never given much to the luxury of introspection. She had a gift for the wisecrack but not at the expense of anyone. “Drink the milk before it goes off” she sagely used to advice to anyone about life’s possibilities or foibles. Even so, her shoulders stooped and her sigh was clear. “See you in a few weeks time my son.” Perhaps the milk was starting to sour, with one son in jail and the other with a bad illness inherited from her side of the family. ‘Incurable’ the doctor told her. His need would be endless massaging and getting him to remain upright and move about as much as possible. Granddad reckoned there were a few in his background up north that had died young. “They couldn’t walk about”, “just died in the dust”, he added. “No doctor about either”.

‘Dear mum, dear dad’ I wrote again. Some words now gleaned from a real book taken from goal’s library, a medicine book with ‘dystrophy’ in it together with ‘muscular’. M U S C U L A R, I copied with a cramped hand from effort. So S O R R Y.  This copied easily from the book of psalms. Lots of ‘sorry’ in that book. ‘How is brother going?’ ‘Won’t do crime ever, never no more.’ ‘Say sorry to dad, I love all.’ Your son Frankie. Goulburn.NSW.

Dear Kelly: ‘All colours are grey here.’ ‘The walls grey, the floor grey and peoples, all look grey,’ ‘even food is grey with the green for peas giving some relief.’ ‘Thinking of you gives my life colour, colour like yellow and happy orange.’ ‘I miss you and smiling, your hands I miss too.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘I want to go for the marry you’, ‘when I come again back to Muswellbrook and you.’

Because (Nr5)

15 Sunday May 2011

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The screws at Long Bay weren’t at all like the friendly folks in Muswellbrook. The cell measured mere two by three and half meters. I was considered low risk and given the job as sweeper. It wasn’t easy and the nights were long and boring. I swore never to do anything like crime again. Un-expectedly, a  screw called ‘Punchy’  cracked me one below the belt which made me double over, racked with a busted bladder for which they gave me a couple of aspirins. A doctor was only called two days after when I was sick with fever… The fever became so bad I was put in hospital but that screw stayed on smirking as ever. It was a hostile place. The radio was centrally controlled and blaring out loud all day with ads waxing on about Cadbury chocolate bars together with 43 beans in Nescafe… The food was terrible and the mutton routinely wriggled with pale looking maggots that one just learnt to brush off. What have you done Frankie? How did you come to this? Bloody Ernie. He never told me he had a pistol.

Kelly and bra straps

Kelly’s lovely kiss and her bra straps kept me going as much as ‘going’ was possible. Geez, how the time crawled. My only relief was writing letters to mum, dad, and Kelly. My dear mum had tucked the bible and book of psalms inside my little suitcase, no doubt worried sick of whom else I would get mixed up with inside those forbidden brick walls. Her visits were sporadic. It’s not so easy to travel up and down from Muswellbrook. ‘Your dad is too busy with your brother’s health, has to keep massaging him to keep his muscles going”, she said each time. My brother was eleven now and his bones growing bigger but his muscles were not corresponding, keeping up. Tests were being done in Sydney but she had forgotten the complicated name. Something to do with wasting muscles,  dystrophy or something like that, she added crying, her tears soaked up by  her Aunt Bellum’s embroidered hanky on the little table behind the screen that separated us…’”He sometimes has trouble walking up to his bedroom”’. “‘He keeps buckling over”’ and Aunt Bellum reckons that in her family some boys had had the same disease, eventually dying from it. “Women can’t get it, only boys, but we carry it over”, she was sobbing now. I was starting to see the reason why Aunty Bellum never got married and her always worrying about me. I remembered her saying about girls, ’be careful not to get taken’. Was she considering that I could succumb to the same disease that my brother had inherited?

Kelly’s letters became a life-line that kept me from losing the will to keep going. The Long Bay ambience was getting to me. ‘Punchie’ was still creeping around with his fondness for unexpectedly knocking blokes out in the one expert punch, when no-one was looking.  I stayed away as much as possible, with my broom at the ready, just in case! (to be continued)

Because (Nr4)

13 Friday May 2011

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The job of getting money together was more driven by Ernie to buy his ‘romance’ rather than my own lack of money. For me it was more of a dare and show of bravado and wanted to somehow make up for my well- known lack of spelling in swaggering around town with money in my pocket.   Kelly would be impressed! Being young and having experienced the hot wiring of cars it wasn’t such a big career deal to step up to a next level. I should have stayed at school but they were confusing times and my younger brother had also been troubled by suddenly buckling while climbing the stairs to our bedroom. My parents seemed worried.

 We took to climbing a fence of the factory where we knew electric fans were being made. Sauntering nonchalantly past the factory earlier, we had seen the truck being full of the fans. The padlocked gate was easily prised with the jemmy bar. What wasn’t so easy to prise open were the jaws of the Rottweiler which, soon after, clamped itself on Ernie’s jacket, determined not to let go till the guard arrived with gun drawn. This snarling monster-dog was trained to remain out of sight till a penetration was made inside its perimeter.  I reckoned the Rottweiler took a fancy to Ernie, possibly could smell the Bull Terrier on him. How fortuitous for me! We were opening the latch of the truck and admiring the boxes of fans when the snarling dog came upon us. The temerity of the guard to lock us then up inside the truck with fans was an insult not lost to me while pondering the time inside.

Still, I did not lie in Court, confessed all and was duly sentenced. Mum crying on Aunt Bellum’s shoulder. Dad hugged me and said, “don’t add anymore to our worries, you brother is getting a wasting sickness…” “Do your best in jail and write to us”. “At least you told the truth, didn’t fib like Ernie”. Ernie’s plight did not bring him any ‘romance. Instead he got 3 years, no parole. He had pinched the pistol from his dad’s shooting club. Dad and Ernie used to go pig shooting at the back of Macquarie Marshes with the help of a totally disinterested and untrained bull terrier. Ernie used to run with the dog in his arms while dad trained his rifle on the wild pig. The bull terrier just refused to engage in pigs, preferred to get stuck into the German Sheppard across the road instead.

(to be continued.)

Because (Nr3)

11 Wednesday May 2011

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Before the episode in the clink between leaving school able to read but not spell but having some money, Ernie, I and some others managed to learn to crack a few cars, doing a bit of hot wiring and joy riding but always returning the cars. Getting a license was easy in those days. I wrote and filled in all forms with the help of Aunt Bellum who kept saying, “I worry about you”. How come you can read but not spell?

One day while trying to get the attention of a girl who kept kind of standing near the window while I chucked the Herald in the garden I had the gall to ask her for a date. She was in the garden and I asked her name, “‘Kelly” she said. What’s yours? Frankie, I answered. Want to see a movie, I dared the second time when I managed to chuck the paper at her feet? She stood outside again.  Its”Clockwork Orange.” Kelly was nice, had cheeks like Jonathans and wore a nicely filled bra of which I could see the straps showing through her blouse. The experience I had with girls was limited to looking at pictures in Pix and Post while dangling with mates from the Muswellbrook Bridge. As I grew so grew my eagerness to explore the opposite of myself. Aunt Bellum always said, “Girls are nice but don’t get taken”. What did she mean by that, I wondered? I wanted to be taken, would dearly like a girl, and this might even be better than pinching cars or nicking the milkman’s money.

‘Frankie’ was getting ready for a ‘first time’ and it could not come soon enough, especially as Ernie had already experienced it twice. The first time wasn’t much chop, he explained. The girl wanted some ‘romance’ first and he didn’t really know where you could get this or where you could learn romance. I explained that my dad sometimes came home with a special wrapped gift which mum liked. He even bought her once a nice meal at a Greek Cafe in town. As far as I could fathom, mum was always very happy when dad showed he loved and cared. I think that might be ‘romance’, Ernie, I said. Well, I can’t give presents and I can’t take her out to a cafe. I don’t have money. But I shouted her to a strawberry milkshake with extra malt before last time, Ernie stated solemnly. How was the second time, I asked? She cried and did not think the milkshake was ‘romantic’ enough, Ernie said. I told her I loved her with much ‘romance’ and she said, “If that is so you would not want me to take my bra off.”   “I don’t take that sheila out anymore”, Ernie said gruffly.

He remained troubled by romance and the apparent link to the cost of it. “We need to get some money together”, he told me, while flicking his butt away

 After the movie I had finally experienced a first time with Kelly leaning against me with her well filled bra and giving me a first but lingering kiss on the cheek.  I was overwhelmed with it all. She hurried through the gate afterwards and waved to me with a smile that stood me in good stead throughout Long Bay and Goulburn afterwards…The bone cold in winter with those grey weeping concrete walls condensing into tears that none of us dared to show.

( to be continued.)

Because (Happy 2nd Birthday Pigs Arms)

06 Friday May 2011

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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

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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.