TheFarFarSouthwest

Just a little administrative business here. Sorry.

2007-05-02T10:11:00.001+10:00

Y'all come

2007-05-01T19:10:00.000+10:00

When I was growing up on a farm in Texas and guests were leaving the common thing to say was, "Y'all come back to see us when you can." Like Australians, we tended to shorten expressions, so this one would get whittled down to the minimal: "Y'all come."

Two years ago, my wife and I got on a plane at the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) airport and began a move to a new life in a new hemisphere on a new continent, a leap that one website I checked says is 8,333 miles. Dallas to Brisbane: a neat 8,333 miles, and in a southwesterly direction, from the perspective of a Texan. Before long, we learned to drive on the wrong side of the road, saw our first 'roos in the wild, and started eating "brekkie" instead of breakfast. We also discovered that Aussies often use the word "reckon," which pleased me because I thought that was a term restricted to Texas.

We love this Land of Oz and I continue to write about that, now and again, but I've moved most of my attention to a new site. It's www.twotexansdownunder.com

I reckon you know what I'm going to say next. Yep. Y'all come!
-- Bob

Silently, daily, diligently – cow plop beetles at work

2006-10-20T14:27:00.000+10:00

Australia, I’ve just learned, is the home of an organization known as CRC CARE, which stands for Co-operative Research Centre for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of the Environment.

In a media release optimistically entitled “Here comes the clean-up army,” CRC CARE is promoting a book of articles about the possibilities of “clever trees, smart shrubs, cunning grasses and designer fungi” that may be used to produce “truly clean cities for the first time since cities were built.”

For only $230 you can buy “Trace Elements in the Environment,” edited by Ravi Naidu. For free you can learn more about it at www.ScienceAlert.com.au.

That web site is edited by Julian Cribb who published a related but less optimistic article recently in “The Australian” newspaper about how a reduction in rainfall due to climate change may bring back to this continent something it seems to have had not so long ago -- a plague of flies.

Flies used to be so bad here that eating outdoors in the summertime could be a health hazard and sweaty backs would be quickly covered. The plague may return if the worst-ever drought continues.

Plop, plop

Why? Because dung beetles need rain-softened soil in order to bury the 270 million cow patties that plop down on Aussie dirt every day. Left on top of the ground, each of these bovine gifts, Cribb writes, can produce 3,000 flies within two weeks. Let’s see… 270 million times 3,000 times the number of hot days each years equals: a lot of flies.

There’s no plague of flies here now but, sometimes and in some places, flies can be bad enough to encourage the sale of not-so-cool hats with drop-down nets that keep flies off one’s face and neck. A couple of those green hats made hiking north of Sydney possible for me and my wife last summer.

Without nets dangling from our hat brims, we’d have been driven batty by Blue Mountain flies, but according to Cribb we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet if the worst drought in Australia’s history turns out to be non-transitory, a permanent feature of climate change. Too much dry, hard dirt and our beetle friends are shut down.

The relatively fly-less life we enjoy is due to an expert in beetles who introduced the little dung collectors here forty some years ago in a program that Cribb says is probably “the greatest recycling enterprise in our national history.”

George B’s beetles

It may not be wise to consider too closely why these beetles choose to ball up and bury cow poop, but the result for humankind is the enrichment of pastures as well as the removal of millions of fly nurseries. The increased yields of meat, milk, and wool should have made this scientist’s name an Aussie household word, except that his business card read: George Boremissza, coleopterist.

George B’s program was axed after a couple of decades and Cribb says dung beetle science here is dead as the dodo, with only a few scientists trying to figure out what to do if the beetles can’t continue to silently, daily, diligently save our necks from flies.

It’s not the kind of science we do these days, Cribb says, in part because it doesn’t generate intellectual property that can create profit. Trees, grasses, and fungi that may absorb pollutants in the soils of our cities, it seems, have greater corporate income potential.

So, are we headed for cleaner cities that are fly-blown?

It showered yesterday in our part of Brisbane. Not enough to help a beetle, I fear. Just enough to darken the pavement, but a reminder that rain may someday return.

Meanwhile, though, with reservoirs at 30% of capacity or less, one hears few Australians poo-pooing global warming and its effects. And I’m thinking about how to make a hat with a drop-down net that reaches to the ankles.

Or, of course, we could all become vegetarian. Fewer beef eaters = fewer cows. Fewer cows = fewer plops. Fewer plops = fewer flies. Eat your veggies; save the world.

Maybe I’ll write a book about that idea, which I hereby claim as intellectual property. Maybe I’ll publish it myself. Maybe I’ll offer it for $230 a copy. Or maybe I’ll just do a rain dance. What do you suggest?

New Orleans a Year Later

2006-08-22T10:41:00.000+10:00

After the Katrina disaster, I challenged a widely-distributed email critique of the people trapped in New Orleans at the Convention Center and the Superdome. Brisbane folk had been quite civil when this place flooded in 1974 and the writer found the behavior of New Orleans citizens, "minorities" in particular, to be shameful and a sign of the decline of Western civilization.

I argued that the situations were not comparable. Now it turns out that the horrifying reports of civil unrest among the flood victims were wrong. Despite the appalling conditions that existed there a little more than a year ago, only one violent death at those locations has been confirmed and it was a suicide. “People comported themselves with patience, with generosity toward those with even less, and with as much dignity as they could manage,” writes John Biguenet in an Aug. 20 New York Times web journal article.

Nearly everything we think we know about what happened in New Orleans after Katrina, he says, is probably wrong.

About 1,300 New Orleanians, about half white and half black, died from drowning, dehydration, and/or exposure within a week, but they were not victims of a natural disaster, he says. Other areas took the brunt of the storm and parts of New Orleans that would soon flood were high and dry after the storm had passed.

Katrina itself didn’t kill those people, Biguenet argues, citing the draft final report of the U. S. Corps of Engineers, in which the Corps admits: “foundation failures occurred prior to water levels reaching the design levels of protection, causing breaching and subsequent massive flooding and extensive losses.”

Only parts of New Orleans is below sea level. Biguenet and his wife own a house that sits a foot above sea level, but his neighborhood now floods uncharacteristically after rains. Why? The Corps of Engineers has, since the hurricane, plugged up a drainage canal, reducing drastically its ability to carry away water.

One thing most of us are probably right about? FEMA functioned terribly. The little horror story at the end of Biguenet’s report is well worth reading in the Aug. 20, 2006, New York Times.

Green Bridge Middle Closing Today...Hooray!

2006-08-11T14:37:00.000+10:00

“Only four or five people a week will use it,” predicted a retired gentleman waiting on a park bench this morning to see the middle section of the St. Lucia-Dutton Park Green Bridge set into place, but he’s wrong. This suspension structure spanning the Brisbane River is coming together ahead of schedule and my wife and I will be among herds of folks using it several times a week as soon as it opens, perhaps before the end of the year.

A crane was in place this morning to lift a 3.6 meter mid-section piece into place and with that done, only a span over Sir William MacGregor Drive on the west end will be unconnected. Earlier this week the eastern end was linked to its approach ramp, so this $55.5 million (AU dollars) bridge for busses, walkers and bike peddlers is tantalizingly close to becoming useful.

What a joy it has been to see the two towers rise up out of the river over the past year and then to watch the decking spread bit by bit in both directions from each one. I have a few hundred digital photos of its progress and I think it's a beautiful structure.

A contest is underway now to name it, and one of the names being considered is “Green Bridge.” That would get my vote.

Another choice may be made by the officials, but this will always be the Green Bridge to me and, I suspect, to most of the rest of us who have watched it rise from the river. May it help keep UQ, St. Lucia, Dutton Park, Annerley, Fairfield, and the rest of Brisbane green and lively for many generations to come.

Oh, no! 01:02:03 04/05/06

2006-04-05T14:37:00.000+10:00

Oh, no! 01:02:03 04/05/06

A friend in the United States sent me this:
>>On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. That won't ever happen again!!!!!!! Thank you.... You may now return to your life.<<

But it won't be true here, where the day is listed before the month and a digital timepiece might show 01:02:03 05/04/06. Not so much magic in that. I suppose Australia experienced a similar event at a minute and two seconds after midnight on the morning of April 3 last year when the time was 00:01:02 03/04/05.

We've heard no reports of major social disruptions because of that, but then we live in Brisbane, where people appreciate calm and boast that they live in "a big country town." Perhaps Sydneysiders partied in the streets.

I can't say because we were not here then. And we won't be where clocks line up so sequentially on Wednesday morning. We seem to be missing out on a lot of good stuff, just as we missed out on June 25 of last year completely. Who knows what happened that day?! Well, I supposed you may know, but we don't. Evidently we slept through it on a Qantas flight from LAX.

Oh, well. Australia gets its chance on the 4th day of May. So, you might say, it IS happening again, in Her Majesty’s Kingdom.

Wherever you are and whichever day this happens for you, I hope you enjoy this numerical oddity. But remember to celebrate responsibly. Your neighbors may not appreciate fireworks at 01:02:03 in the morning, especially if they are uninformed, which is surely what I would be except for having a friend in Maine, where people have time to notice major events.

-- Somewhat Befuddled in Brisbane Bob

Pre-emptive homesickness

2006-03-24T16:49:00.000+10:00

“The farther from Texas a Texan gets, the more Texan he becomes,” wrote Willie Morris. Even though he was from Mississippi, he got that right. He’d spent some time at the University of Texas in Austin before moving to New York, writing books, and editing Harpers magazine. After a few years in Massachusetts, I developed a taste for something I had disdained while growing up: country western music. C&W for short.

All that “born to lose” and “your cheatin’ heart” music, I’d concluded, contributed to the pervasive sense of depression and defeatism I experienced in the part of rural Texas in which I grew up. I wanted nothing to do with that. Give me jazz and folk music and rock. Then, after a few years, I began to re-discover Ray Charles and Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson. Next thing I knew, I’d begun to care, for the first time, if Oklahoma beat Texas in the Cotton Bowl. Suddenly, I could be brought almost to tears by hearing Dolly Parton sing about how she would always love me. Yee gads! Football? Country music? Thousands of miles from Texas, I had, in fact, become more Texan than I’d ever been.

Now, although I’m living in an entirely different hemisphere, I don’t feel so distant from “the old country.” The world is tighter because of this – the Internet and email – and because of air travel and cheap long distance phone cards. On so many different levels, everything is interconnected now and we’re only beginning to realize how profoundly that is so. I’m in Australia and one of every 20 Australians is living somewhere else, many in the United States, some in Texas. I wonder if it’s all different now, or if some of them have begun to develop new-found appreciation for Slim Dusty?

For sure they have to miss the sound of kookaburras. Just thinking about a time when I might be living somewhere else and unable to occasionally hear their loud, racous, insane, laughter-like sounds gives me a taste of what a nephew of mine refers to as “pre-emptive homesickness.”

Now there’s a term that could form the basis of a country and western song: homesickness for something you haven’t left yet.

Oh, wait… I think it’s already been done. I vaguely remember a C&W song that says “I miss you already and you’re not even gone.” Drat! My song-writing career is over before it could soar.

Hmmm. Maybe not. Let’s see... in the key of G… “Before I got started…”

The smell is not Chanel...

2006-03-22T14:24:00.000+10:00

To my friend, Bill: Thanks for not accepting uncritically the email headed: ‘From Ed Chenel, A police officer in Australia.’

This not-dated email claims to offer statistics on what’s happened Down Under now that it has been ‘12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced by a new law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by our own government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500 million dollars.’ Ed Chenel, if there is such a person, claims that in the first year homicides increased 6.2%, assaults were 9.6% more frequent, and armed robberies shot up 44%.

His point: ‘The Australian experience speaks for itself. Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws affect only the law-abiding citizens. Take note Americans, before it's too late!’

A quick search of the Internet’s Australian sites reveals that this email has been circulating, unchanged and apparently unquestioned by touch-not-my-gun folk, since at least as far back as Dec. 7, 2002, when members of a forum were asking, as you did, ‘Can this be true?’

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Ed Chenel email wasn’t accurate in 2002. Charged with keeping national crime statistics, this government agency reported: ‘Between 2001 and 2002, the proportion of murders, attempted murders, kidnapping/abductions and robberies that involved a weapon decreased.’ Note: DECREASED.

Two researchers, Mouzos and Rushforth, published in the January 2004 journal of the Australian Institute of Criminology a study entitled, ‘Firearm Related Deaths in Australia, 1991-2001.’ They found a 47% decrease in the numbers of firearm-related deaths during those ten years.

In April of 2005, using data submitted by police in Australian states and territories, the National Armed Robbery Monitoring Program found that more than twice as many people reporting armed robberies faced knives (46% of victims) as faced guns (20% of victims).

My web search of Australian sites showed me that the Chenel piece smells, but not like Chanel.

Finally, it occurred to me that this email might be something long since identified as bogus, so I went to the www.snopes.com web site and typed the supposed author’s name into their site-search engine. Bingo!

This much-circulated email has been well known for quite some time as untrustworthy. The Snopes site says: ‘The piece quoted above leads the reader to believe that much of the Australian citizenry owned handguns until their ownership was made illegal and all firearms owned by ‘law-abiding citizens’ were collected by the government through a buy-back program in 1997. This is not so. Australian citizens do not (and never did) have a constitutional right to own firearms — even before the 1997 buyback program, handgun ownership in Australia was restricted to certain groups, such as those needing weapons for occupational reasons, members of approved sporting clubs, hunters, and collectors.’

The guns banned after 1997 were primarily semi-automatics and pump-action weapons and ownership of those is allowed in some cases.

Writing in January 2004, the fraud-busters note that ‘the Australia-wide percentage of homicides committed with firearms is now lower than it was before the gun buy-back program, and lower than it has been at any point during the past ten years.’

Maybe that’s one of the reasons this American living in Australia feels safer here than at home. Take note Americans, before it’s too late.

Damned if I know…

2006-02-16T14:02:00.000+10:00

A Canadian friend of mine wrote me recently that he’s pleased that I’ve settled into the part of “Her Majesty’s dominion” that is, with the possible exception of Alberta, most like Texas.

Both Queensland and Alberta do remind me of Texas in some ways. I was in Calgary during their annual Stampede week once, a rodeo-centered celebration much like the Texas State Fair, though smaller, of course. (We Texans still think size matters, except in regard to Alaska.)

Surrounded by plains as flat as the Texas Panhandle, many Calgarians, by their own choice or feeling pressured to do so by their civic-minded employers, spent the week dressed in cowboy hats, jeans, and sometimes even pointy-toed boots with high tops and big heels. Unfortunately, I didn’t own any cowboy boots, but I had jeans and I borrowed a hat with a wide brim to wear to the Stampede grounds.

I don’t see many cowboy hats here, but, as in Calgary, it is easy to imagine oneself to be within the bounds of her Majesty’s dominion. Bill Bryson, in his fine book about this continent called “In a Sunburned Country,” reminds us that Australian citizenship became possible only in 1949. Until then, Australians were British. To this day, Lions Clubs here open their meetings with a toast to the queen and no one has ask, “Which queen?”

So we’ve had to learn how to drive on the wrong side of the road while steering from the passenger seat. Canada somehow managed to escape that oddity, at least.

Australians also show their British heritage when they speak. Subways are “trams,” for example, baby carriages are “prams,” grocery carts are “trolleys,” and candies are “lollies.” The term “bloody” gets used a bit.

-- Our dams are low

Some of the terms and usages that strike our American ears as unusual seem to be logical variations of phrases we use, improvements, even. People here don’t “take a look,” they “have a look.”

Others make no sense to me at all. Clerks in stores use “thank you” where I’m accustomed to hearing “please,” as in, “That will be $12.98, thank you.” I’ve never heard “please” here at the end of these requests.

Chickens are “chooks.”

“Mob” often gets used a lot affectionately to refer to family, as in “our mob,” although it also means Mafia.

You may not need to raise your voice to “shout a beer” for someone. You just buy the next round.

But shouting is involved in “barracking.” My Aussie Pocket Oxford Dictionary says barracking can be either jeering at someone or cheering them on, as in “We’re going to barrack for the Lions.”

And then their’s the word “dam.”

For months there’s been too little rain both here and in the parts of Texas where my brothers live, and Brisbane’s water restrictions are about to become a notch more severe.

Why? Because, the local papers and newscasters say, the dams are low.

Then we should build those dams up, shouldn’t we, raise them higher so they can back up larger lakes of water when rains finally come? Wrong. Here, in Australia, “dams” are what I believe the rest of the world refers to as lakes.

There’s a beautiful color picture in a book I’m reading now, a naturalist’s report of a year spent in a rural area close to Melbourne, and the caption says, “Sunset reflected in a dam below Cochran’s Gap.” It’s a photo of water. The “dam” is the water itself, collected behind a …

Until this week when I asked the guy who drives the ferry we ride across the Brisbane River from Dutton Park to the University of Queensland, I didn’t know what Aussies call that damn thing that holds the water back. It is, he said, “the dam wall.”

Perhaps I should have guessed. The lake… I mean, the dam, is held back by the dam wall.

In the name of politeness, I am censoring all remarks beginning with “Up against the dam wall, you….” Politeness, I’m glad to report, does matter here a great deal.

-- Polite as Texans and then some

We Texans pride ourselves on being polite and friendly, but residents of Brizzy (as our city is called by people caught up in the national drive to save letters and breath whenever possible) are friendlier than most Texans in towns or cities of similar size.

You cannot stand still on a Brisbane street with a map in your hand without someone immediately asking if you need help. Even in the middle of Ekka, the Brizzy equivalent of the Texas State Fair, our brief pause to figure things out not only got us verbal directions to a display we wanted to visit, but a helpful critique of what parts of it were worth visiting and which were not, plus a tip about where to find free samples of wine, snacks, and honey. All this from a woman pushing a pram and holding the hand of a fidgety four-year-old.

And, bless them, our friends here make frequent use of a word I thought was a Texas colloquialism, "reckon," as in “I reckon so.” Makes me feel as at home as fried okra, but the politeness of these folks warms my heart.

Both Australians and the Texans I grew up with are careful to avoid giving offence. There’s a delightful civility about the Canadians I’ve met also (granted, I’ve never been to Montreal), but the politeness of Aussies is both noticeable and pleasant.

Sometimes, it can be tactical, too. I’d wondered about the frequency with which I was getting asked, “Are you from Canada?” Or, “Are you from Canada or the US?” Never having pronounced “about” so that it rhymed with “boot,” I began to suspect that politeness was involved in these questions.

A neighbor has now confirmed for me that suspicion. Because US folks are never offended by being thought of as Canadian but Canadians can get huffy if they're "accused" of being from the US, polite Aussies take no chances.

Being still in touch with what's going on with the US government and foreign policy via several US newspapers on-line and, on cable TV, delayed broadcasts of the CBS Evening News, I've been working on my Canadian accent. Maybe I can learn to “pass,” eh?

Oh, well, according to someone Bill Bryson interviewed for his travel book, Queenslanders are all “as crazy as a barrel of cut snakes,” anyway. What a put-down! Not at all polite.

That colourful falsehood makes me think of New Englanders describing a person of suspect abilities as being “one brick shy of a load” or, worse yet, “soft as a grape.”

My favorite put-down phrase, though, sounds Texan to my ears. About me and about most of the others attending Calgary’s Stampede the year I was there, you could have truly said, preferably with a bit of a drawl, “He’s all hat and no cattle.”

Now, that is a put-down!

Thanks for reading this. I reckon I’ll blog again one day soon, the lord willin’ and the dams don’t rise. -- Bob

Everything from A to Zed

2005-10-07T13:05:00.000+10:00

Lots of little things catch your attention when you’re new to a culture. Sometimes they make perfect sense, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes they just add a bit of spice to one’s day.

Here in Australia, for example, the last letter of the alphabet is not pronounced “zee.” It’s “zed.” So one of the major banks, ANZ, is not described as “A-N-Zee” or “Ann-Zee,” but “Ann-zed.”

Sports scores are not “six to nothing” but “six to nil.” Games or “matches” are called “tests” here.

And then there’s cricket, which can have wildly lopsided scores and gets reported in language I don’t understand. I saw this in a local paper recently: “Hayden lasted five deliveries as Valley reached 6-191 at stumps. Marriott took a career-best 6-27 to rout Wests for 97 in friendly bowling conditions.” Marriott, the story goes on, “bowled 13 overs.”

Ooookaaay. If you say so.

Of course, I’m just showing how little I know about cricket. All I know for sure is that much of the world loves the sport almost as much as soccer (which is called “foosball” in Mexico) and “footie,” the term here for rugby, which is a kind of fast-paced football without pads or huddles.

Of course, I could puzzle most Australians by talking about the infield fly rule, but if I bring up baseball, I lay myself open to the question: “Why do you Americans call it ‘the World Series’ when it involves only United States teams?”

Stumps me. Because we tend to think we ARE the world?

Still, I’m delighted the Astros have made the playoffs and since I get to read the Houston Chronicle on line each day, I’m cheering them on, hoping they make it to the Part-of-North-America Series and bowl over the Yankees four tests to nil.

I suppose scores like 191-6 would be too much to hope for, but they would be nice.

-- Bob

Two Floods: Brisbane and New Orleans

2005-09-27T15:48:00.000+10:00

I thought so, and now I’ve confirmed it: the Liberals here are conservatives. What would you expect from a country where everybody drives on the wrong side of the road and it’s getting warm outside when garden thermometers reach 32 degrees?

Prime Minister John Howard, a conservative who is not a Liberal, seeks to align this country with the George Bush vision of how things ought to be, in world affairs, at least, and -- Liberal, liberal, or conservative -- the Australians we’ve met have been much too polite to say anything negative to us about our home country or its current leadership.

On Saturday, though, I overheard an elderly Brisbane man expressing a harsh viewpoint to a friend about Hurricane Rita’s threat to the Gulf Coast. “As individuals, some Americans are great people,” he said, “but as a country? Who could deserve a storm like that more!?”

Some of my friends back home who are politically to my left would understand immediately, as I did, why he might say such a thing. At the top of a long list would be Iraq and global warming. Other friends politically to my right, including some I respect, admire, and even love, would dismiss the old guy’s rant with the wave of a hand. They would have no inkling of a justification for such a harsh view of America in the second term of Bush and Chaney and their neo-con friends.

THE CONSERVATIVE/LIBERAL DIVIDE

Conservatives. Liberals. Where I come from, those of us who identify with one side or the other have difficulty imagining how any decent, intelligent person who pays attention could have voted for (or against) George Bush. Because of the huge divide I see even in my own family, I am fascinated by various reactions to the horrors of post-hurricane New Orleans. Some of those reactions seem to me to be profoundly colored by biases indicative of extremes in political outlooks.

Last week I received by email one assessment of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, written by a not-identified person (a man, I’m guessing) who recalls being in a cyclone-triggered flood here in Brisbane, in 1974. After the storm passed, the relatively high ground of his neighbourhood was an island surrounded by a large lake of floodwater. Marooned and isolated from the rest of the city for days, he and his neighbours, the writer recalls, organized themselves, shared what they had, and made it through quite well.

People here still talk about that terrible flood frequently. It’s a living part of the psyche of Brisbane residents to this day, but the email writer says there was virtually no looting or other bad behaviour and he wants to know why, in New Orleans, people behaved differently? “Why didn't the people in the Superdome make any effort to organize themselves? Why didn't groups of men patrol the restrooms to prevent rapes?”

He has answers to his own questions: “We have gone a long way in the past 40 years to creating a dysfunctional society where self reliance, pride in one's self and a sense of right and wrong are no longer esteemed or even valued.”

At fault, he says, are “our government and media” who have (a) told minorities that whatever happens to them is a result of racism and that they cannot succeed in our societies; (b) allowed crime to be excused because it results from poverty which is not the criminal’s fault; (c) shown adolescent girls that it’s okay, even lucrative, to have babies with little hope that their boyfriends will become true fathers; and (d) promoted the notion that society has no right to impose on people morals and old-fashioned judgments of right and wrong. He concludes, “God help us. We're reaping what we sowed.”

While there are grains of uncomfortable truth here, the implication that the people waiting for rescue at the Superdome last month were inferior to the writer and his neighbours in Brisbane in 1974 is answerable in several ways.

He and his neighbours, for one thing, were high-ground dwellers. I expect that what is true in Brisbane today was true in 1974: the elevation of the land on which one’s residence sits correlates with its value, and, therefore, with one’s own financial resources. My wife and I learned quickly that we probably couldn’t afford a Brisbane-area house advertised as having a view of any sort, and we’re not poor. Those marooned above the 1974 flood line were, I expect, people with resources not so common in the swampier neighbourhoods here at that time and not so common in the poorer parts of New Orleans when their flood came.

ON-SITE REPORTING

Further, there is already one report, from two emergency technicians (EMTs) who were in New Orleans when Katrina hit, which indicates that citizens there did organize and did do a lot for each other. Larry Bradshaw and Lorie Beth Slonsky wrote, in a piece that has been widely circulated on the web, that they were barred by National Guardsmen from both the Superdome and the Convention Center after they were turned out of their hotel on the fourth day after the storm hit.

Their experience from then on, they said, was one of self-help and organization being met with official hostility and deception. After being prevented by an adjacent suburb’s police from simply walking out of New Orleans under their own power, Bradshaw and Slonsky and others set up an encampment which some of us may have seen on TV because they built it where it would be noticed, “in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits.”

Supplied with found and/or stolen C-rations and water, they made a community that flourished for a while. Bradshaw and Slonsky wrote: “We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).”

They offered food and water to people passing by and their numbers grew to 80 or 90. A woman with a battery-powered radio learned that their high-ground encampment was being noticed by relief and news organizations and that those organizations were asking officials what was being done for these families.

The result? Bradshaw and Slonsky report: “Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, ‘Get off the f---ing freeway.’ A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up … our food and water.”

Law enforcement agencies during this crisis, Bradshaw and Slonsky concluded, were threatened by congregations of people of 20 or more, fearing gangs or riots. Their group sought to stay together to have safety in numbers, but that was impossible because “the agencies would force us into small, atomized groups.” These two EMTs and about a half dozen others took refuge together in an abandoned bus, seeking to be safe from both from criminals and from the police. The next day they walked for hours in their small group until they found some New Orleans firemen who arranged to airlift them out of the city.

COMMUNITY, HEROES

So maybe immoral, dependent childishness was not the main story in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. It was, in fact, a brutal place when people were fighting for food and water for themselves and their families, Bradshaw and Slonsky observed, but, when these most basic needs were met (as, indeed, they were in the situation of the Brisbane folks reported upon earlier), “People began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.”

This testimony from two who lived through the situation and reported from their own experience concluded: “If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.”

Help was promised but did not come, and so ordinary people stepped up, according to Bradshaw and Slonsky, and it was the common folk who were the real heroes of the situation. Among those they single out for praise are these:
• “The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled.
• “The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running.
• “The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots.
• “Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive.
• “Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators.
• “Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, ‘stealing’ boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters.
• “Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City.
• “And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.”

From a distance mediated by TV images, those of us who were not there may project upon stranded New Orleans flood victims our liberal or conservative biases, but at least these two who can speak from experience tell us that a lot of people acted with skill, organization, and pragmatism on behalf of each other even when the appointed guardians of our society failed, for so many days and nights, to do so.

Sounds like good old American (or Australian) initiative to me. – Bob

P.S. As I eat lunch most weekdays, I watch delayed telecasts of the U.S. evening news from ABC and CBS. Today I learned something shocking, and the CBS anchor prefaced this item by saying “you may not believe this:”

Former FEMA director Michael Brown is continuing to work at FEMA for two more weeks (with full pay according to another source) as a “contractor.” A spokesman for the Homeland Security Department said he’ll advise on "some of his views on his experience with Katrina.''

Jaded in Brisbane?

2005-09-15T20:18:00.000+10:00

After just ten weeks in Australia, I’m noticing a diminishment of “newness.” Granted, there is much for us to puzzle over and there are frequent surprises, but what was noticeably odd to our eyes and ears in July is already beginning to seem almost ordinary.

Getting comfortable is good, but I worry about becoming prematurely jaded.

Surely Anthony Trollope, the writer who focused on the British upper class, was jaded when he travelled in Australia in 1871. Once he got past affirming his not-great expectations of society in this colony, Trollope did some insightful reporting, but he was often less than impressed with what he saw.

About a trip to Perth, he wrote: “No man perhaps ever travelled two hundred and sixty miles with less to see… The bush in these parts never develops itself into scenery, never for a moment becomes interesting.”

And, after taking a horseback ride alone through the bush, he said: “It was all wood. There arose at last a feeling that, go where one might through the forest, one was never going anywhere…. One might ride on, to the right or to the left, or might turn back, and there was ever the same view.”

My partner and I recently had similar feelings about the scenery in a eucalypt forest in southwest Brisbane. During two earlier weekend trips, we’d wandered through forests similarly made up for the most part of one variety or another of the gum or eucalypt tree, of which Australia has about 700 native varieties. We had loved the first two hikes, but three weekends among eucalypts seemed to us to be one too many, right then. (Last weekend’s bushwalk lived up to the name of its locale, Mt. Glorious.)

Perhaps a less jaded viewer or a more knowledgeable one might have noted interesting differences missed by us and missed earlier by Trollope. An Aborigine, for example, might have seen, in the same forest through which the English visitor rode, plants with edible roots or indications of recent animal activity. Even Trollope noted that an “astonishing phenomena of these runs is the apparent paucity of sheep,” even when there might be, grazing in the area, as many as 18 woollies per square mile. Even a trained eye could miss them, he said.

Discernment depends on knowledge and those with trained eyes can often find what is different, varied or new where others see only boring sameness. One wants, normally, some of each, sameness and novelty.

SAME AND DIFFERENT

Noting that a lot of life here is much the same as what we knew in the United States (people eat, sleep, work, play, and most speak English as their first language), my partner and I wrote some friends about some of what seemed different to us in our first days in Brisbane when our sensitivities, only weeks ago, were fresher than they are now.

We said:
• Australians are generally friendly and forward-looking, like many ordinary Texans and Oklahomans, but even more so. The most commonly used phrase seems to reflect real attitudes: “No worries!”

• We have to remember, when stepping off curbs (actually, “kerbs” here), that there are worries, life-threatening ones in the form of cars coming rapidly from our right.

• Pedestrians on sidewalks, like drivers in the streets, keep to the left when meeting others. “Walk left, look right” was our mantra.

• The wonderful, raucous, crazy-laugh sounds we kept hearing came from Kookaburras, we learned, and the melancholy, downward-trending “aaawwhhh” sounds came from crows. (Trollope thought this distinctively mournful birdcall was from magpies.)

• There are no squirrels here. At least, we’ve seen none. There are, however, possums and “bush turkeys,” smallish wild turkeys that roam all over residential areas and the bush.

• Lots of things are smaller here, including cars, refrigerators, washing machines, some soft drink bottles, rolls of paper towels, and toilets. The latter often have something all toilets should have: two buttons to push for flushing, one for urine and one, as a plumber who adjusted one of ours delicately put it, “for solids.”

• The 230-240V current here powers large heating elements in tea kettles, bringing water to a boil quickly, and the wall sockets each have on-off switches that save current by reducing the number of appliances on standby.

• People pass right by pennies on sidewalks at home, but dropped coins are retrieved quickly here because they include $1 and $2 pieces. There are no $1 bills and no pennies, although there are prices like $1.97. Clerks round up (or down?) at cash registers. The various denominations of bills are multi-colored and of slightly different in size, and they feel more like plastic than paper.

• With an exchange rate fluctuating at about 1.30 Australian dollars for every U.S. dollar, one can feel suddenly richer after transferring funds electronically from home, until one does the math. And compares prices.

• Banks here sell car and house insurance (for other companies; they don’t issue the policies themselves) and offer investment advice. Interest on readily accessible savings accounts is well over 5% without term limitations.

• Phone calls almost always cost money. There are some “free call” numbers, but a call from one’s own home phone costs 20 cents most of the time, and from pay phones, 40 cents (more if you’re calling the number of a cell phone). There is a positive side, though. So far we’ve had only one wrong number call and no calls from telemarketers.

• And they’re not “cell phones” here, they’re “mobiles.” That’s pronounced with a long “i” and with emphasis on the second syllable. It rhymes with “aisles.”

• Australian television is digital and based on a standard developed in Europe, DVB, and it provides high quality pictures on inexpensive TVs. Some programming is Australian and some British, but much of what’s on cable channels consists of U.S. re-runs all the way back to “The Brady Bunch” and “Hogan’s Heroes.”

• British influence is stronger than U.S. influence here and the recent London bombing was heavily covered by local news media, but then, so were the horrors in and around New Orleans after Katrina. United States politics does get a good bit of coverage here, also, although China is a more important trading partner than our country.

A hot national issue at the moment in Australia has been the in-power party’s attempt to sell the government’s 51% share of Telstra, the major telephone company, to make it entirely privatised. Legislators passed that proposal last night amid predictions from proponents of telecommunications heaven just ahead and, from opponents, the immanent arrival of hell for the less profitable service areas in the bush.

I haven’t figured out yet the political landscape in Australia. Two Queensland parties, the Nationals and the Liberals, were identified by a Courier-Mail writer last weekend as “the two conservative parties.” There’s also a Labour party and who knows what else, given that some conservatives here are aligned under the Liberal label.

My listening to some of the Telstra debate on radio makes me think that politicians of all types here are quite out-spoken when challenging each other’s views and that strikes me, thus far at least, as refreshing. Maybe that’s a sign I’m not well informed or maybe it means that I’m not yet jaded. Regardless, it gives me something to share with Anthony Trollope. I, too, perceive an apparent paucity of sheep.

***

ABOUT NEW ORLEANS

For a balanced, well-reasoned, angry, and heart-felt “Pastoral Letter” concerning New Orleans please read what the Rev. Bill Sinkford has posted at www.uua.org.

And for a disturbing, first-person account of what it was like to try to leave New Orleans in the days after Katrina hit, written by two emergency medical technicians who were at a convention there, go to any number of web sites carrying a report usually entitled “Hurricane Katrina-Our Experiences.” It’s by Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky. Type her name into a Google search box and you’ll find it.

If you are bothered by the fact that Bradshaw and Slonsky’s piece is featured on a socialist web site, as I am somewhat, please look past that to the article itself. I understand it was first published by a web site for professional EMTs. Regardless, its authenticity seems to be supported by (a) its specificity and detail and (b) the authors’ willingness to admit that they were among the tourists who tried to use their relative wealth and standing to hire busses and flee the flooded city, knowing others would be left behind with no similar opportunity to leave. Propagandists usually avoid admissions that put them in questionable light.

The busses they hired never arrived, though, and they report experiences of thug-like behavior on the part of people who should have been helping them. This is information that, if accurate, should be a part of our national understanding of this event, and it is information that may not be made available by mainstream publications.

And, if it is true that three college students in a two-wheel-drive car were able to get into New Orleans when FEMA was saying there was no way to get in to help the stranded, and if it is true that police would not let survivors walk out of the city, we all need to know that and I, like Bill Sinkford, am angry.

For quotations from the Bradshaw and Slonsky article, for commentary, and for other corroborating reports please go to
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006754.html.

***

FOOTNOTE: My information about Anthony Trollope’s visit to Australia comes from a fine book entitled “The Australians: From 1788 to Modern Times” by John Fisher (Rigby Limited, copyright 1968).

Not cutting edge, but a start

2005-09-12T17:00:00.000+10:00

To Family and Friends –

Thanks for checking in on this blog. I’m a novice and I sense that I’m getting into blogging late, so late that Doonesbury is already making fun of bloggers, portraying them as reporters of trivial news (two characters were recently racing to be the first to review a new type of Krispi Kreme donut).

Nevertheless, for good or ill, as purveyors of truth and not-truth, bloggers have become a part of the world of many who are seeking to stay in touch, particularly those who believe that our media is too centralized and too much in the control of major corporations more interested in stock price than in digging for and reporting facts, pleasant or otherwise. Lately, I’ve been reading blogs more than ever before, finding inside reports and insightful coverage of the terrible events in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina hit and caused damage that had been much predicted, with ghastly results that had been fully anticipated in official reports. (Remarkably, even some television reporters became uncharacteristically blunt with officials attempting to spin attention away from failures toward rosy projections of help to come.)

So, on the one hand, I begin writing this blog with a sense that blogging has social usefulness and, on the other, a touch of worry that I may be deserving of Doonesbury disdain. I have no special angle on events and I hope to never be a lone reporter trying to use my laptop to get a message out to the world as disaster closes in around me and others.

My idea has been and is more mundane, to post some personal observations about cultural differences. As a not-so-innocent abroad, a Texan who has also lived in Massachusetts, Alabama, Florida, and Oklahoma, I’d been planning for months to begin this blog about the new home my partner and I are claiming as our own for the next few years. Ah, ha, there’s Observation 1, an example of the sort of thing I’ve wanted to call to your attention as a cultural difference between the US and Australia. Here, it seems, everyone says “partner,” not wife or husband or spouse. My “partner,” is Kristi, the love of my life, my wife, and, in fact, my partner as well.

VERY WEST, VERY SOUTH

I told some of my Unitarian Universalist friends as I was leaving the Southwest District, that Kristi and I were moving to the “far, far, Southwest,” and, depending on one’s perspective, one could say Australia is that. It is way more Southwest than El Paso or Phoenix, from, say, Dallas or Norman or Boston.

And this place seems to be, in some ways, more Southwestern than many parts of Texas these days, if by “Southwestern” one means to call up images of helpful neighbourliness, a desire to avoid pretension, and an easy-going spirit of optimism. We feel very much at home here. We feel welcomed.

We also feel the newness of it all. Have you tried driving on the left? While sitting behind a steering wheel on your car’s “passenger side?” That’s newness and then some. And did you note the spelling, above, of “neighborliness”? Spell Checker here keeps wanting me to put in the letter “u” in the strangest places. Sometimes I will, sometimes I won’t. No worries. It is about such things that I expect to report here. Mostly, anyway. We’ll see. And I welcome your responses.

NEWS

Wait, though. I do have a sort of a news flash having to do with food, and it’s only a couple of hundreds of years old.

The background: I’ve never tasted a Krispi Kreme, but I adore mangos. They grow here and they’re about to come into season.

The news: I’ve just learned from a Brisbane TV program that the man who imported the first mango plants to Australia, the horticulturalist who brought them here as a cash crop, had the same last name I do: Hill. (First name: Walter.)

So, there. A fact and a boast in my very first post. I’d better clear a space on our bookshelf for the Pulitzer, don’t you think? Or maybe not? Either way, without ignoring the profound events that are a part of all our lives, I hope to amuse and inform those who visit here about what, in this Southwest Down Under, seems interesting to two pairs of eyes and ears with born-Texan filters.

-- Bob