Quick, quick and slow ...

After all the flooding we were gradually getting back to normal at home and were doing a little maintenance about the place. The sort that requires a trip to a somewhat large, soulless barn of a hardware chainstore.

In our house, trips to this particular store are a dreaded event, so I decided to tag along with my husband to provide moral support, guidance and a hand written list so we didn’t deviate from our intended purchases.

I guess we should have expected it, because when we arrived the place was shut up having been inundated by flood waters a few days prior. So we decided to try a small local hardware store, one that we usually prefer to go to anyway but had expected would be closed this Saturday afternoon as was the owner’s normal habit.

But, bless him, he was capitalising on his rival’s bad luck and in true entrepreneurial spirit was doing a roaring trade in mops, buckets and rubber gloves. I left hubbie to it and ducked into the second-hand book store next door. Much more my cup of tea! Inside, almost buried among the stacks of dusty volumes was an elderly gentleman tapping painstakingly away on his computer. He must have been late seventies or even into his eighties.

“Are you still open?” It was 4pm on a Saturday afternoon.

“Yes, but normally I would be closed by now; I just have a bit more work to do and then I am going home. But come in and take a look.”

I asked him if he had any old knitting books, particularly those from the 40s and 50s. It’s a bit of a hobby of mine hunting out old patterns. Anyway we got chatting. He didn’t have any books for me but that was OK. Then he asked me, “Are you from a big city - like London?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Well,” he said, “you talk very quickly and I thought you must come from somewhere like that”.

I had heard that people from cities talked faster; and that they also required smaller personal spaces (the area immediately around a person that they regard psychologically as being their own): both traits arising from the fact they were used to being jammed into crowded spaces and having to talk quickly to get their message across in a tight time frame where everyone is so harried and hurried.

Funny really. I never thought of myself as being a fast talker at all. I had always assumed I came across in reasonably measured tones. Maybe we talk faster when it is something we are passionate about?

Anyway, I was out walking this morning and thinking, as one does, contemplating the world at large, and this man’s question about where I hailed from came back to me and it made me think about two friends of mine and how they communicated.

One is a woman from New York. We’ll call her Cindy. Cindy is stick thin, allergic to peanuts consequently watching everything she eats, and is of a nervy disposition. When you listen to Cindy talk it is like being on the receiving end of machine gun fire. Her mouth moves at extraordinary speeds in a rapid express torrent of verbiage. She briskly relates her story giving verbal asides as she digresses without any break in proceedings or hiatus on to some explanatory point before coming back to the main story without any punctuation or pause for breath as she fires out volley after volley.

Cindy is at the prestissimo end of verbal communication: she leaves allegro for dead.

Cindy, trained as a barrister, has so obviously come from a fast-paced city environment. Her words are clearly enunciated, you can follow every one, but you are left feeling out of breath as you watch her, fascinated by the momentum she accomplishes.

Then there is my other friend. We’ll call him Stan. Stan hails from Norfolk Island, a small remote dot in the South Pacific inhabited by a community of some 2,000 souls, many descended from The Bounty mutineers. Stan has for many years been a man of the soil, tending his small dairy herd, hand rearing his free-range pigs and chooks. Since his marriage break up he has moved to Australia to work in the mines. Stan is a solid, intelligent and, dare I say it, a somewhat mischievous man in his 60s. He wouldn’t know what an allergy was if it hit him and if he did ever have one he would tell himself to get over it.

When you talk to Stan, you talk slowly. Stan responds in carefully measured tones, each word searched for, deliberated upon, double checked to make sure it can’t be misconstrued and tasted and rolled around his mouth before eventually being uttered in an unhurried drawl.

Stan is the epitome of larghissimo.

Stan places pauses for effect throughout his prose. Stan will roll his eyes back in his head as he searches for what he wants to say. It is all that I can do not to finish his sentences for him, because that would be rude. I used to love my long conversations with Stan not that we said that much to each other. Silence wasn’t something to be feared. Silence was something to be revered. It meant that he was reflecting on what he had or wanted to say. And whatever Stan said was very important - and he only ever said it once. If Stan could say in three words what he wanted to say then why on earth would he use thirty?

Two very different people from very different environments.

This article was first publised in Eureka Street on January 27, 2010.

Australia Day 2011 - “We are one” leaves out a lot of people

This article was published yesterday in On Line Opinion. It is by Brian Holden. I have edited many of his articles over the years and this one I particularly enjoyed. It provided a great topic of discussion in our house-hold and gives a new perspective to Australia Day and Australians' place in this world. I can highly recommend reading it.

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“We are one” leaves out a lot of people

The Apollo 11 astronauts stood on the moon and looked back at the blue ball in the sky. They knew that there was only one intelligent species and it lived on just one planet. But they really did not comprehend that knowing until they saw the whole planet in the one gaze. It was a transcendental experience unique in human history.

Over on that blue ball within the vision of one man, there were billions of people who were playing and working, loving and hating - and all were assuming that they had a fair idea of what the truth was. Nobody at that moment knew the truth as those astronauts knew the truth.

Now to return to the world of you and I

I must have been aged about five. I can remember my mother’s reaction when she saw me sucking a penny: “Spit it out. A Chow may have handled it!” All through my childhood we referred to the owners of our local greengrocery as “the Dagos”. And yet, my parents were naturally kindly people. We were trapped in the same group-think as almost all Anglo-Celtics were at the time.

We were predominately of Irish stock. We did not know our history well enough to be aware that in the latter half of the 19th century, English newspaper cartoonists caricatured Irishmen as monkeys. If we saw our ancestors as victims of derogatory labeling, we would more likely to have concluded that breaking-up the family of man to put into various pigeon holes was stupid.

Fortunately, ethnicity is nothing like the problem it once was in this country. But we still have a problem. What are these words saying?

We are one, but we are many
And from all the lands on earth we come
We share a dream and sing with one voice:
I am, you are, we are Australian.

Clearly, they are saying that we over-here - the white, the black and the brown - are different to the white, the black and the brown over-there. So, with ethnicity no longer the driver of division it once was, nationalism (which will be jacked-up by the prime minister and governor-general into jingoism on Australia Day) is still keeping alive the most primitive of emotions - an emotion which can be traced back to the time when we marked out our territory with our own dung.

If we see ourselves as one with the planet - then we leave out nobody

Argon atoms in the air are inert. They just pass from one lung to the next unchanged. If I place my hand in front of my nose, then the next breath I exhale into my hand will contain at least one argon atom breathed out by Jesus sometime in his 33 years of life. My skin will have a material connection with Jesus! When I first learned of this, I felt as if I belonged to one great organism.

There is more to this than argon atoms. Every atom in my body has been borrowed from the one pool of atoms. Most atoms in my body I will have for no more than about four months before it is returned to the pool. Such is the extent of the recycling between soil, water, atmosphere and living organisms. What remains as “mine” over my lifetime is the organisation of those atoms. That organisation is kept from disintegrating into its constituent atoms by my DNA as it goes about building and maintaining.

The DNA molecule provides a set of instructions for every form of life. It is the arrangement of the parts of the molecule which determines if the organism is going to be a man, an ant or a eucalyptus. That one molecule connects every living organism into the one great living organism.

If we see ourselves as one with a web of lifelines - then we leave out nobody

The understanding of both DNA and the recycling between soil, water, atmosphere and living organisms requires some knowledge of chemistry. However, there is an abstract concept which can be grasped in its entirety with ease and without any technical knowledge. It describes a situation which is unseen - and yet glaringly obvious. One experiences a sobering feeling when first realising that it is there.

There is a web of cause-and-effect which binds every human alive and dead. Consider this hypothetical situation:

Say your father always caught the 7.45am tram. As he was rushing out the door his phone rang and he stopped to answer it. This caused him to miss his tram and he waited for the next one - the 8am. This was your mother’s regular tram. He sat opposite to her, and their eyes met. Let’s go back a bit.

A mate of your father was casually reading a newspaper when he saw an article on page five which made him think of your father and he spontaneously rang him. If the paper’s editor had put the article on page six, your father would have caught the 7.45am - and you would not be here. If the reader had been slowed down by an absorbing article on page four, you would not be here. If the reader took a minute longer under the shower before looking at the paper, you would not be here.

This analysis can progress forever. But as you regress from the event (which was the inspiration in the man’s head to phone), you are spreading out from the centre of a web of cause-and-effect with a near-infinite number of elements in it because no event stands in isolation of every other event. Returning to your hypothetical mother to bring home the point a bit more:

Why was the 8am her regular tram? We could regress back from that question with a never-ending series of questions. One could be; why was she even living in Melbourne?

Well, her dad once lived and worked in Adelaide, but one day he took a sickie and went to the races. He felt like having a pee and he was almost equidistant between two toilets. He took the one on the left which looked a little closer, and as he was entering, his boss was coming out. The next day he was summarily sacked. He then left for Melbourne to look for a job, and it was here that he settled down.

So, now your existence owes itself to position of a toilet at a racecourse in Adelaide! But if the man had one beer and not two, he would not have felt the need for a pee. Now your existence owes itself to a glass of beer! And, what of the second glass of beer the man’s boss drank which led him to the toilet? That also has to be part of the picture.

The lifeline of every person touches the lifelines of many others. Each one of those thousands touches the lifelines of thousands more to form a web the size of humanity itself. That revelation gives a whole new meaning to “We are one”.

A startling conclusion

It seems that the lifeline of every human on the planet can be traced back to the same woman. She is known as Mitochondrial Eve and she lived in Africa about 150,000 years ago. Now comes the obvious deduction which, if not enough to knock your socks off, will at least startle you; if just one of the zillions of squillions of events from Mitochondrial Eve’s reproductive life to the instant of your conception were missing, you would not be here.

How about introducing your children to this web-over-time concept after your family gets through its puerile flag-waving and anthem singing on Australia Day.

First published in On Line Opinion on January 24, 2011.

In the eye of the flood

There is no need to recount the events of the last week in Queensland. It began for Brisbane on a wet, rainy Monday as a wall of water tore through Toowoomba to the west of the capital.

There were forecasts that Brisbane may experience flooding so immediately we went into flood preparation mode. According to the predictions based on earlier floods we were going to have an inundated ground floor, so all our worldies were brought upstairs; we filled buckets and tubs with clean drinking water; bought matches, candles, and batteries; replaced our gas cylinder … and waited.

It rained.

On Tuesday morning something interesting started to happen. People started nattering to each other and telling their stories. Down came the usual reservations and people conversed freely. I wrote the following on my Facebook page:

Camaraderie among the tinned baked beans and bottled water

I was only pontificating just yesterday to my two daughters, about a calamity bringing communities closer together. It was interesting in the supermarket this morning. I wish I had had a recording device to go around and interview everyone, because they were all chatting to their neighbours in the long queues. Swapping stories, news, gossip. Listening to all the conversations around me actually made the time in the long queue go very fast. Now why can't we all be so chatty and have so much fun normally? Hmmmmm.

People who had lived close to each other for, quite literally, years suddenly got talking and offering to help each other in preparation for the inundation ahead. It was all so refreshing.

“Have you heard?” “What are you expecting?” “Are you ready?” “Were you flooded last time?” “Are you insured?”

The power went off in anticipation of the deluge on Wednesday morning … and we waited. And while we waited we talked to our neighbours over the fence.

And it rained.

The predictions were for early flooding of the lower lying areas in the morning with a rising tide throughout Wednesday with the first peak in the late afternoon. It became apparent that if we didn’t get my oldest daughter to the airport early that day (for a midnight flight to Europe) then she could be stranded. We bundled her on to a train, bid her a hasty farewell and went back to our preparations.

The highest peak would be at 4am on Thursday we were told. Expect the worst. And we did.

And still it rained.

At 4am on Thursday a huddle of men could be seen not far from our house tentatively creeping forwards, their torches sweeping the dark ground in front of them. Where was the flood? How far had it gone? They started chatting to their neighbours. They were OK, they had avoided the worst. But those unfortunates just over there, they were gone.

We were in the eye of the flood. Surrounded by water but sitting high and dry, we awoke to a beautiful, sunny Thursday morning - the first sunshine in what felt like days - and an eerie silence. All the local dogs were silent, the birds were silent, there were no trains and there was no traffic. Just silence. Over the airwaves we heard Anna Bligh dubbing it the “blue sky flood” - very apt.

We had no real idea of what had been happening all around us other than what we could glean from local radio. It quickly became clear that we were in the calm centre in the midst of complete chaos.

In fact, at first, we didn’t believe anything much had happened: there was such a surreal atmosphere.

Then we heard our Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, in her monotone drone: she was sending helicopters. All of Australia was behind us. Troops were coming. Food was coming. Help was coming.

I am sure we were all relieved to hear it, but she didn’t exactly inspire us, or fill us brimful of confidence!

And we heard Queensland State Premier Anna Bligh: Anna who had been so on-the-nose with the electorate in previous weeks and months was suddenly given her moment to shine. A tired and emotional Anna outlined to Queenslanders exactly what was happening and how she and the government were going about it. There is no doubt Queenslanders at that moment rallied behind her. It could mean victory for her at the next state election, depending on how she handles the recovery post flood.

And Brisbane Mayor Campbell Newman emerged from the slime smelling of roses. The next term is surely his for the taking if he wants it.

And the neighbourhood talked some more. About how Julia, Anna and Campbell were handling it all. And the straw poll was unanimous. Anna and Campbell: ten out of ten. And Julia? Julia who?

Then the phone calls started. Were we OK? Had we flooded? We got on our bikes to survey the scene. We walked the dog, and we talked to the neighbours.

With no power there was no work to be done, no housework or cooking, no computers, no TV, no games. With the roads blocked off there was nowhere to drive to. Everyone who was lucky enough to have stayed dry in our neighbourhood, or so it seemed, was out and about. And everyone was talking.

As the day wore on people lit barbeques, invited over the neighbours and drank the last of the chilled champagne that had been saved for just such a rainy day.

In those few hours an immense bank of good will, or social capital, was built up.

And it would be needed. Because the very next day all these neighbours were walking over to their new friends and offering a helping hand along with a mop and bucket.

Every scrap of this social capital is going to be spent in the big clean up ahead. But at least we all now know our neighbours!

This article was first published by Eureka Street on January 17, 2011

All washed up

I think everyone in Brisbane must be feeling like me: all washed up; wrung out and hung out - to dry. We have all discovered a lot about ourselves and about our community and city these last few days. Here are a few observations from my very fortunate perspective.

Ten bad things (not in any particular order):

• terrible mayhem, tragic scenes, and sad stories;
• livelihoods more than disrupted, but entirely obliterated - heartbreaking;
• the rotten, all pervading, odour of decomposing vegetation and slime;
• traffic jams to beat all traffic jams - I sat and watched the queues from my front deck - go home!
• rubber neckers - get out of your cars and help why don’t you?
• overwhelming tiredness from the upheaval and emotion;
• a week of truly awful food, very little fresh vegetables, lots of comfort eating;
• people in an undignified race to the milk section of the supermarket with avarice writ large across their faces;
• the constant, relentless, unceasing, persistent news about Brisbane. I’d still like to know how the rest of the world is travelling please;
• scared, terrified faces.

And ten good things:

• no power, so family time by candlelight - we should play fiendish Sudoku more often!
• solidarity;
• ABC local radio;
• looking like a mess and not caring - I am helping clean up here!
• neighbours and communities coming together;
• eating chocolate without feeling (too) guilty (that is all that was in the pantry - oh, you don’t believe me?);
• the rise and rise of volunteerism (long may it last);
• Anna Bligh and Campbell Newman (they are both public servants so I’ve lumped them together!);
• the decline in materialism - “it is only stuff after all”;
• taking time out from the clean up to go to the cinema with my daughter, just me and her!

Here are just a few more photos.

The edge of the flood, just across from our house

Broken dreams

The local school, under water

Sudoku by candlelight

Very fiendish!

It doesn't seem so very long ago we were lugging our grey water about the garden

Riverfront prime real estate

This is their second storey



The last of the chilled champagne



After an incredibly quiet night (we live on a normally busy road) we awoke this morning to the usual traffic noise and sunshine - the first in days. They - the authorities - are having us on! It all seems so odd.
The flood levels have been revised down - because of that lovely sunshine - so where we were certain to have our ground floor inundated now we are not so sure. At least for today ...
If it gets to the 1974 levels we will flood, no two ways about it.

No water - just cars. So far so good

I have the problem of how to get No1 daughter out to the airport today. She is off for a well earned break to Europe at midnight tonight so I may have to get her there this morning and abandon her there for a lengthy sojourn. It will be an interesting day watching events unfold.

Awaiting Armageddon

I went for a walk late this afternoon in between lapses in the heavier rain and took a few photos of our immediate vicinity. Down the road the water is lapping at the back doors of the million dollar riverside homes. The odd "For Sale" sign sitting forlornly out front, taunting the owners as they frantically move all their worldlies. Who will want to buy riverside now with such an importunate reminder of the power of nature?
But for all of us, richer or poorer, this is truly a worrying time. So many unknowns, so many imponderables.
We had a very welcome call from a kindly friend and neighbour today offering some masculine brawn to help get some of our heavier gear up to the top deck. Thank you to the Gibsons - good karma is all yours.
We are well and truly camping out now. As long as I can plug my hair drier in all will be well! :)
The Brisbane River has well and truly broken its banks. Here are a few photos: I love the one with the table. How surreal is that?

Brisbane River from the Walter Taylor Bridge with Monty and daughter No 2

Broken banks

Tea for two?

There goes the tennis court

Lapping at the back door

Camping

Making sure we have some clean water

The back deck now a storage facility

High Flying Libby

The Lob made it into the local rag! Go girl!
http://www.couriermail.com.au/ipad/choices-open-for-high-flying-libby/story-fn6ck51p-1225983795085

Coffee for rev heads

This morning Brian and I went for our Saturday morning coffee to a place in Newstead, Brisbane, called Blue Sky Coffee. From the outside it is most unprepossessing but as you step up to the front entrance you realise you are in for something a little different.

Not many places I know have cars and motorbikes parked in them and huge artworks on the walls. (I wonder if the owners make the wall space available for artists to exhibit their wares - it makes a fabulous venue.) The coffee was exceptional and the food looked fresh. Even better, the prices were very reasonable, $3 for a coffee, $4 for a muffin.

Being a car enthusiast, Brian thought it was the bee's buttocks because he could wander around looking at the vehicles. Meanwhile I liked the large tables to spread my weekend newspapers over.

I hope this venture is a success for the three owners: I love the idea that it is both a cafe and a coffee roasting premises, but I suspect they will need to get their beans out to a wider market for it to really work well. Definitely worth a visit.

The bean roasting takes place in a contraption at the back of the cafe space





Time to shine

With Christmas and New Year out of the way it was time to turn our thoughts to my oldest daughter having her 18^th birthday.

I had been planning what to give her for a couple of years (this needed some singular thought): I wanted it to be something special that she could keep, and that would be a part of me, a reminder of my love for her (you get like this when you are a mum and your babies move into adulthood - it is permitted!).

The completed Afghan

I love to knit and do needlepoint, so I decided to knit her an Afghan rug, something cosy that she could wrap herself up in and, hopefully, think fondly of home. I decided to do a classic cable design, a pattern called “Mystery Afghan” by Janet Szabo (available for a small fee from the http://www.ravelry.com/ site). Just an aside about ravelry.com; if you like to do any knitting or crochet, or think you might like to, then this site is the place to visit. It is a great place to look up patterns and learn how other people fared with a design you may be considering doing, any errata, yarn suggestions etc. It is truly a brilliant site - I just love it.

The rug was knitted in seven strips which looked uncannily like scarves and was then sewn into one big piece. My daughter did ask me once what I was knitting: “A scarf for Brian …”. She must have thought I was knitting a lot of scarves, or more likely she didn’t give it a second’s thought, so my gift was a complete surprise for her.

I wrapped it in tissue and tied it with a huge satin ribbon and placed it in a sturdy box bought especially to store it. I tucked a spare ball of yarn in with it - for any repairs - and sewed on my own label.

The box - now she wants the whole set of them!

Another part of her pressie was a photo book which catalogued her childhood from when we adopted her to her graduation, just before Christmas 2010. I used a company called Momento to put it together. The photos I had of her spanned the analogue and digital ages, so there was a bit of fiddling around to upload and to get them into some sort of order. I imagine there are many families like ours with photographic memories stored in a hotchpotch of albums, cardboard boxes and CDs. It took me ages to get them all together. Many of the analogue ones had succumbed to the ravages of time - mould, scratches, fading and so on - but with a few minor tweaks in Photoshop I was able to make them look pretty reasonable.

And the finished result was spectacular (if I may say so!). It was definitely worth all the hours of work.

And of course, the final part of her present was a small piece of jewellery, because what would an 18^th be without that?

The thing I am most pleased about is the personal nature of her present. I hope I have given her something she will treasure as she moves into adulthood and has her own family.

My daughter hiding under her blanket

On another note, and still on my oldest daughter, she got her International Baccalaureate results a couple of days ago. The IB Diploma is marked out of 45 and she got 45. What a most impressive result. I had a quick look at the IB site stats and it seems that, on average, only 0.2 per cent of candidates achieve that result. Out of nearly 40,000 candidates, worldwide, at the last sitting that meant only 96 managed that score. I am a suitably proud mother. Well done indeed my girl. I am so proud of you. This is YOUR time to shine.