What is the white supremacist patriarchy?

I have been bogged down here, nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, on this introductory course on the history of Australia's New England that I am delivering. Yes, I know that this is an anatomically strange combination, but it captures how I feel.

The course itself is going okay. I have 45 internal students (around 35 come on average, which is more comfortable) plus 148 following along via Facebook.

That's not bad for what is, after all, a niche offering. However, the pressure not just of the delivery but the preparation of course ware for 18 lectures and nine discussion groups is very time consuming.

I console myself with the thought that once I am through all this I will not only have the base for future courses but also the structure of my long delayed full history of New England. Meantime, I was cleaning the house this morning preparatory to doing more writing when my attention was caught by an ABC Radio National program, the Minefield.

I may not agree, but I quite like this program because it explores ideas. It is normally presented by Waleed Alyand and Scott Stephens, but this morning it  was presented by Kaye Quek and Meagan Tyler both academics from RMIT in a special edition to mark International Women’s Day,   Program guest was Celeste Liddle, described as an Arrernte woman, feminist, opinion writer, trade unionist and public speaker as guest. The short ABC summary of the program reads:

 The corporate rebranding of International Women’s Day (IWD) couldn’t be further from the day’s revolutionary roots, or any meaningful discussion of women’s liberation. It negates any discussion of the nature of power under patriarchy, and how relations of power between women and men might be genuinely transformed.

During the discussion one of the presenters used the phrase "white supremacist patriarchy". As i listened, I wondered just what this phrase meant in general and in the context of International Women's Day. Clearly the speaker thought that the tag had meaning.

 If we take the individual words, both white and supremacist are adjectives qualifying patriarchy. Patriarchy itself can mean:

• a system of society or government in which the father or eldest male is head of the family and descent is reckoned through the male line.
•  a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.
• a society or community organized on patriarchal lines.

There are different elements in these meanings but the core elements from the speaker's perspective appears to be descent and power based on male gender. I suppose that as a factual statement, patriarchy rather than matriarchy  or gender equality (is there an equivalent word for that?) is still the dominant global social mode although there are many shades. The position in Denmark or Finland is different from that holding in Australia or Korea or Japan, still more different from that holding in Saudi Arabia.

White is a slippery term. At one level, it refers to skin shading. However, with the return and rise of racially based (and racist) language over the last fifteen years, "white' has become something of a pejorative racial insult. This is made clear in this case by the attachment of the word supremacist, normally interpreted in this context to mean someone who believes not just in such a thing as the "white race" but in its supremacy over others.

If we combine all this, we appear to have a presenter who appears to believe that:

• there are patriarchal societies whose core element is that they are white and supremacist
• and that such societies are a significant problem in the context of International Women's Day.

Subject to correction on the facts, I beg to differ.   

   

Monday Forum - rebuilding community cohesion

Today's Monday Forum focuses on one current issue in Australia life: declining community cohesion. As always, feel free to go in whatever direction you want.

Yesterday's post was a parochial one dealing with the proposed redevelopment of Astrolabe Park. This has energised the small Daceyville community. This is another shot of of the Bayside Council information session. The woman on the left is the Council GM, beside her in the jeans stands the project manager for the Sydney Water, UNSW, Cricket NSW and AFL consortium In that post I mentioned that in the few weeks since the protest  started I had met more people in Daceyville than in the previous three years.

On 30 January 2017, Australian social analyst Hugh Mackay delivered the Gandhi Oration on the topic the state of the nation starts in your street. In April 2018 he returned to the the broad topic in a new book, Australia Reimagined. On 17 May 2018 he explored his ideas in an ABC Radio National Program, Conversations with Richard Fidler. This one is on-line so you can listen to his views.

On objective measures, he suggests, Australia has done very well. And yet Australians have become more insecure, edgier: :"We are a society in the grip of epidemics of anxiety, obesity and depression."

"How did this happen? Where did this edgy, anxious, too-violent society come from? This uneasy blend of arrogance and timidity?"

Noting that the problem is not unique to Australia but can be found in other Western countries, Mackay provides various explanations including:

• growing social inequity that affects those involved but also Australians' perceptions of themselves with a growing disconnect between those perceptions and external reality
• rise of individualism creating a me first mentality, a decline in real social connection, a focus on the pursuit of happiness
• a decline in respect for our social institutions
• a growing feeling of powerlessness accentuated by the growing rumble of the three big threats – climate change, international terrorism and the threat of a major global economic disruption.

These things interconnect and feed each other. To Mackay's mind and recognising how little influence we have over broader matters, the solution begins by focusing on repairing and rebuilding those things that we can influence and that starts with our neigbourhood and local community.

What do you think of all this?

The return of the autodidact

Autodidact - a self-taught person. Australian Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley  was an example, another was steel magnate Andrew Carnegie

The second half of the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth has sometimes been called the age of the autodidact or self-taught man.

Educational opportunities were more limited, while our obsession with credentials still lay in the future.Outside certain of the professions or the church which required a basic degree, most training was craft based. The period was one of scientific advance, great curiosity and a belief in human advancement. There was a great thirst for knowledge:  Many read widely and took part in self-improvement activities through bodies such as mechanics institutes.

Both my grandfathers were autodidacts. Both left school at an early age. Both became actively involved in politics, if on different sides. Both were religious. One became a Primitive Methodist Home Missionary. Even in that church, you required a university degree to become a full minister. The second became a long standing Minister for Education in NSW and wrote quite extensively on historical, political and educational topics.

The rise of formal education and the increasing requirement for formal credentials over the second half of the twentieth century effectively stamped the breed out.  The dominance of formal ever cascading credentials introduced increasing increasing rigidities into every aspect of life. It meant that people had less time for thought, less time for reflection. less time for free choice in what to study, were reduced in what they could do without the obligatory ticks. Autodidacts still existed, but were marginalised, forced to the periphery..

There was a time in the 1980s when I believed that the rise of competency based approaches with their stated emphasis on the capacity to do regardless of how that capacity was acquired might free the system up, break the hold of the credentialers, encourage the return of the autodidact. By 1992 I knew that that was not going to happen as the professions, the officials and the education system asserted control over what had to be learned, how it was to be learned, how it was to be measured.  .

I had thought that the internet might break the cycle by giving people access to a broader range of knowledge, greater freedom. At first, things seemed promising.

The acronym MOOC for massive open online course was coined in 2008. MOOCs are online courses aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. They are generally provided for free, although fees may apply if you wish to get a formal tick for the course. By 2010,  MOOCs were seen as the wave of the future, something that would open further study to all of their own choice and at their own pace. By 2012 universities and other providers were rushing to role-out MOOCs.

August 2012. University of New England (UNE) Sydney alumni challenge then VC Jim Barber on his vision for the University's future. 

In August 2012 I attended a UNE alumni dinner. There I heard VC Jim Barber  start by talking about the university as a business, about the on-line revolution, about the need to deliver a low cost product. UNE, he seemed to be saying, had to survive by delivering a mass, cheap, on-line product.

There was not a single word in the first five minutes of business/CEO speak that explained to me why I or other alumni should continue to support UNE. Under persistent attack, Jim refined his position, setting out a broader view, but it was an example of the effects of managerial speak and of the obsession with new technology seen in terms of delivery platforms by existing institutions.

By 2016 MOOCs were past their peak. Jim Barber had resigned in 2014, replaced by Annabel Duncan. In 2016 as I completed the latest on-line work  place health and safety obligatory course I realised that I had become jaundiced here too. Don't get me wrong, I think workplace safety is important, but so much of this stuff is really teaching people to comply with the rules. Internet based systems have become the weapon of choice in delivering stuff within the bounds set by existing rules and approaches.

I began blogging in March 2006. By 2008, I saw blogging as a key platform for learning, for open conversation, for discourse outside the academy. Google blog search became a key search tool. It was, if you like, a good platform for the autodidact!

Facebook was founded in 2004 and then began to expand from 2006. Twitter was established in 2006. By 2009, many bloggers had migrated to these new platforms, replacing analysis with short form repeats and comments. The echo chamber had been born.

Apart from missing their previous contributions, I found much of the new material boring and repetitive. I already knew their views and really didn't take well to constant re-tweets limited to stuff that I knew that they supported. There was another problem, for I found myself experimenting with the platforms themselves. So if I wrote a post, I would then FB it and tweet it as well, adding to the time involved. I also found myself pulled by a key question: to what degree should I become involved with the new platforms that kept emerging? How many new platforms could or should I add? How did I balance all this?

By 2018 I found myself weary. I was trying to do my own original writing. I was trying to use my various platforms to educate and discuss, but I seemed to be getting no where. Or, at least, not making much progress. Then I realised that I was missing the point.

Outside the bounds of the increasingly complex education and training system with its multiple layers of credentials, outside the still increasing requirements for mandated ticks, a quiet revolution has been underway.

We have, in fact, seen the return of the autodidact. I am proud to be one in the sense that I pursue my curiosity, seek to learn and to share. Here we have more opportunities open to us than at any time in human history. I am not talking about "self-directed learning" with its connotations that one is studying for a career purpose, but the seeking of education, knowledge and understanding for our own purposes including sheer curiosity.

I am sure that this will not come as a surprise to you. It's just that my own sense of weariness has stood in the way, has blinded me to the scale of the revolution of which I am a small part. I talk about myself as a public historian, I have tried to articulate my role there, but I'm not sure that I have really come to grips with what that means. Part of the problem is that I am still too locked into formal structures, into requirements mandated by others.

In history, for example, for every person studying or teaching history at school or university, there are probably 50 interested for their own purposes.The number could be far higher. I haven't worked out how to calculate it properly. More broadly, I haven't worked out a framework to help me analyse the ever-growing informal sector.

The existing education and training sector itself is starting to crumble under its own weight. You can only mandate so many qualifications, impose so many costs, extend study time horizons so far, before people stop playing, start looking for alternatives.

I think that this is already happening, in part because of the constant repetition about multiple careers, about the need for flexible education, about the need for constant re-education.. Why commit to a long course of study to get a particular ticket for career purposes when faced with a constant shortening half-life for that course of study? Surely better to do the absolute minimum now and then top up as required?

Again, I haven't thought this through properly. I think that it has quite profound implications for the structure of education. In some limited areas such as medical specialties where you have rigid mandated requirements, significant income advantages and a continuing expectation of life-long careers the status quo may survive. Elsewhere I think that the first part of a revolution may be well underway.  

Gender equality, gender roles and flexible working arrangements for men

Interesting piece in the Australian Financial Review by Fiona Smith drawing from research by Bain and Company and Chief Executive Women. My thanks to Legal Eagle for the lead.

According to the research, "women who can set their own hours, work from home or are part-time are much more likely to recommend their employers to others, but those "freedoms" have the opposite effect on men."

Men in the same position take the opposite view. They feel unsupported and harshly judged. They take a career hit because they are often regarded as anomalies within current working cultures The differences in attitude are summarised in the chart. The report's core conclusion is that women's choices will be maximised if it is made easier for men who wish to opt for part time or flexible working arrangements.  

I wrote quite a lot in this space several years ago and for that reason was interested in the analysis. I also noted that some women's reaction could best be described as diddums. 

I will leave it to you to read Fiona's piece and the report. However, I thought that I should make some brief observations on the issues involved as a way of clarifying my own thinking, focusing especially on families and child rearing. 

We can think of the problem in terms of three overlapping circles: issues that are common regardless of gender; issues that are specific to women; issues that are specific to men. While the circles overlap, they are distinct.

Families take many different forms. There are single person households, the fastest growing household type and one that is changing the structures of our cities. Then there are share households especially but not exclusively among the young. There are single parent families where child rearing devolves upon that parent, sometimes with help from grandparents or other relatives. This is another category that grew rapidly and is now feeding into the growth of single person households as children leave home,.   Couples without children is another growth category, in part because women are choosing to have children later or (in some cases) choosing not to have children at all. The traditional two parent with children family structure may still dominate the debate, but is now a minority in terms of household types.

Note that I have put all this in gender neutral terms. A single parent, for example, may be male or female. In fact, the first case I came across as a manager which really sensitised me to the issues involved a man whose wife had left him some time before leaving him to bring up the five children on his own. This obviously affected his work and working patterns, leading to what was in effect discrimination. If we look at couples now, while the male/female combination dominates, we also have female/female and male/male combinations with and without children. Penny Wong and her partner Sophie Allouache is one prominent example of female/female with children.  

Flexibility in working arrangements is important across the spectrum regardless of gender, although its importance will vary depending on personal inclination and circumstances. For example, a working single parent who has to balance work and children needs a degree of work flexibility to accommodate the myriad things that come up in a child's life; sport, start of the school term, parent-teacher interviews, sudden illnesses that require the child to be collected from school. The list is almost endless.

Flexibility, however, is not the only need. While much of the discussion and indeed policy making in this area is driven by middle class people in relatively secure jobs in the professions or larger organisations, an increasing proportion of Australians live in a world of often insecure sometimes poorly paid part time, temporary or contract work. In these circumstances, it makes perfect sense, indeed it may be imperative, to trade of flexibility for an enhanced degree of security. Availability of other family members such as grandparents can also be important.

 Within two parent plus child or children families, arrangements again vary. At one end of the spectrum you have high powered couples pursuing careers with sufficient money to delegate a significant child care component to nannies. These couples are usually sufficiently senior for both to have a degree of flexibility in their working arrangements.

At the other end of the spectrum, one partner adopts a full time role. In the middle are a variety of sharing arrangements. However, a common feature is that one parent takes a larger role. Traditionally, this been a female role, although male participation has become more common. Roles may vary over time. Partly perhaps because male partners tend to be older, there seems to be an increasing trend for gender reversal in roles with the women playing the major role initially and then roles switching to allow the female partner to concentrate on her career.

However, it remains the case that women do more than men. The Bain and Company and Chief Executive Women report sits in this space. Increased flexibility in working arrangements for men may allow them to take on a greater childcare role, thus giving women more flexibility.

Whatever the gender of the primary child carer, the role comes with costs including reduced career opportunities, life time earnings and retirement savings that need to be considered. A significant proportion of marriages end in divorce. There are difficulties here with the statistics, but as a rough guide around 28% of marriages entered into between 1985 and 1987 can be expected to end in divorce.This proportion increases to 33% for all marriages entered into in 2000–2002.

In general, the lower earning partner (usually but not always the partner taking primary responsibility for child care) ends up worse off in terms of final retirement resources. I can't give a link here, I am quoting from memory, but this effect was clearly seen in the longer term position of women who divorced following the passage of the Family Law Act in 1975.

Turning to gender specific issues, women's issues are reasonably well covered, men's less well so.

The idea that child rearing is primarily a female responsibility remains deeply entrenched in Australia and among women as well as men. This is partly connected with the fact that women bear the child and are primarily responsible for its initial nurture, but also reflects deeply entrenched social attitudes.

From a women's perspective, this can be seen as both a curse and a blessing in career terms. It's a curse because it reinforces still extant if unsaid prejudices against female employment, thus reducing career opportunities. Regardless of the law, managers may be reluctant to appoint or promote women because they perceive pregnancy and child rearing as reducing flexibility and increasing costs. This can favour a male applicant compared to an equally competent woman. However, it's also a blessing at two levels.

At a societal level, considerable pressure has been placed on organisations to develop ways that will allow women to return to work and to work flexibly while pursuing career advancement. These may be imperfect, but they do exist and are continuing to evolve. At an individual level, women are more proactive than men in factoring pregnancy and child rearing into their career plans because they have to be.

The position facing men who might wish to adopt a larger if not primary child care role is more complicated.

The deeply entrenched societal view about the primacy of women in child care creates very real difficulties across a number of dimensions.

At a work level, there is no real expectation that men would wish to do so.A man who seeks reduced hours or greater work flexibility for child care reasons may experience considerable resistance. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that men can experience difficulty in accessing existing parental leave provisions even when legally entitled, while the decision to work flexibly is seen at best as opting out in career terms, leading to a career hit.

The figures in the above chart are quite telling. While women's willingness to recommend an organisation increase with work flexibility, men's collapses, from 26% for those who have not worked flexible hours to 11% for those who have worked flexible hours to just 4% for those currently working flexible hours. I don't think it any coincidence that nearly all of us who did play major child care roles when my daughters were at school were self-employed.

The societal view about the primacy of women in child care has other effects. The dominance of women in the daily routines of school and life, I think that this is true for boys as well although my experience is with the girls, creates difficulties for men in simply fitting in. This is compounded by suspicion, especially but not only with girls, about the presence of men, a suspicion that has got worse with the growing concerns about paedophilia. From experience, all this means that the primary child care role can be very isolating if you are a male.

Two further factors are worth mentioning.

The first is the timing effect I mentioned previously, the apparently increasing trend for gender reversal in roles with the women playing the major role initially and then roles switching to allow the female partner to concentrate on her career. Depending on the exact timing as well as the barriers I referred to earlier, a decision by a male to take a more active and especially the primary role can indeed be an effective decision to opt out of a career.

The second factor is the dependency factor. It can be extremely difficult for a man to opt for a bigger child rearing role where that makes him financially dependent on his partner.

Summarising, there is no doubt that the report has highlighted a genuine issue, that both men and women would benefit from the adoption of more flexible working arrangements for men. However, that conclusion has to be qualified in certain respects. To begin with, it is difficult to apply such arrangements to the growing proportion of the workforce in temporary, contract or part time arrangements. The proposal also has to recognise and accommodate the particular difficulties men face in opting for more flexible arrangements. Finally, it is actually hard to see significant change so long as the dominant societal attitude among women as well as men that women have the final primary responsibility for child rearing.

Note to regular readers

I'm sorry for the delay in posting. This post took me longer to complete than expected. 

Sunday Essay – the niqab, Cory Benardi and questions of feminism

The on again off again ban on wearing a burqa in Australia’s Parliament House has, rightly, drawn a degree of ridicule. It wasn’t quite a ban in the end, more a placement of such wearers who had passed the normal security checks on entry to a glassed in portion overlooking the chambers more normally occupied by school children.

I actually have a degree of sympathy with Mr Abbott’s earlier comment where he expressed discomfort with the outfit on the basis that he found it fairly confronting. While the niqab is more commonly worn in areas in which I live and work, the effect is the same. I don’t know where to look! I want to stare, but know that I shouldn’t. However, that has nothing to do with security, simply curiosity and a degree of embarrassment. If someone has passed security to enter Parliament, that should be the end of the matter.

For those who haven’t heard of him, Senator Cory Bernardi is a Liberal Senator from South Australia. In a tweet after the recent terrorism raids, Senator Bernadi wrote: Note burqa wearers in some of the houses raided this morning? This shroud of oppression and flag of fundamentalism is not right in Aust. To Senator Bernadi, the Burqa is reportedly a "symbol of female oppression and Islamic culture", carries security and identification risks and is "un-Australian".

I am no longer a feminist, something I had been (if not under that title) since at least my early twenties. This included reading and understanding Betty Friedan’s Femine Mystique a few years after its publication. I grew up in a world of strong women, if usually still in within traditional roles. To a degree I both struggled with and welcomed the changing perceptions of women’s roles over the first decades of my working life. Then came fundamental disillusionment,

That change is another story. For the present, I find myself in agreement with my feminist friends that Senator Benardi’s comments on the burqa as a symbol of female oppression is deeply hypocritical. I am sure that Senator Bernadi does not see it that way. He strikes me as an honest man with deeply held views. But his other views strike, or seem to strike, at the questions of women’s choice. How can you say that the burqa is a symbol of oppression when you wish women to adopt particular views or conform to particular standards?

I may be wrong in all this. For example, Senator Bernadi might, perhaps would, argue that he is applying general views and rules that apply to all. Yet the application of those rules would seem to have gender specific applications. How, then, is he different from Muslim fundamentalists beyond a question of degree?

Mrs Stace’s jump

Today I feel like a break from more serious stuff. Well, not too serious anyway.

One of the issues at present in Australia is whether or not Prime Minister Abbott might choose to call a double dissolution election. ABC commentator Antony Green had a useful piece on the mechanics involved. My thanks to Don Arthur (@donattroppo) for the lead. As an aside, I’m inclined to agree with Don’s piece on Club Troppo, Humiliation and the dole: a forgotten debate.

One of he things that I enjoy about history are its byways.

This photo shows Yarrowitch woman Mrs Esther Stace setting  a world record for a sidesaddle jump of 6’ 6” (1.98m). The year is 1915, the place Sydney’s Royal Easter Show.

Yarrowitch lies to the east of Walcha on the Oxley Highway, so a local connection so far as I am concerned. I know nothing about Mrs Stace beyond the apparent fact that she came from Yarrowitch.  

I hadn’t realised now recent the modern sidesaddle was. It was invented in the 1830s by Jules Pellier. It was revolutionary, for it allowed women to ride at a gallop and to take part in equestrian events.

By time time Mrs Stace jumped, the sidesaddle era was coming to an end as changing concepts of modesty along with changes in women’s clothing allowed women to ride astride. I wonder if her record was ever beaten?

Update 16 September 2017

A comment from La Chienne Shady Lady provided a partial answer to my question, was Mrs Stace's record ever beaten? This fascinating 2012 piece from Flora Watkins, Side saddle high jump record broken, in Horse & Hound provides a partial answer. As an aside, I didn't know that when William "Will" Thacker (Hugh Grant) in the film Notting Hill said that he was from Horse & Hound I didn't realise that it was a real magazine!

Returning to my point. With the exception of one reported higher jump in the US which does not appear to be properly documented, Mrs Stace's jump is still the highest. But, and it is a big but, the height is challenged because the horse jumped off a springboard. I have no idea whether or not this is true, but it appears to be a major issue in the competitive world of sidesaddle jumping.

Update 10 June 2019

Cheryl Castle was quite cranky on this one. I promised to bring her comment up int main text:

"Hi Jim. There is no debate over Mrs Stace's use of a Springboard. One was NOT USED ! The jump was done at the Royal Show not a circus and a quick question to the R.A.S. would quickly debunk that ridiculous theory. If you knew how horses jump you would know that jumping off a springboard would slow them down as they jump off four legs not two like a human. This crap was made up by some American woman on her blog and is totally unfounded and a scurrilous LIE. Please stop perpetuating it. Horse and Hound UK also based their info on this LIE without ever checking the facts which is just LAZY JOURNALISM. It is easily fact checked!
Cheryl Castle"

Sydney school sports' wars

Here in Sydney, the issue of the professionalisation of sport in the GPS (Greater Public Schools) competition has finally broken into the open. This is an example of the coverage. I have been following this one for a while, watching it slowly boil over.

The problem is not unique to the Sydney GPS competition. I have been collecting material to write an interpretive piece, but will wait until the dust settles. It's actually a rather interesting case study of the way that management and measurement systems affect institutions in a competitive environment.  

Saturday Morning Musings - innocence, respect, the invisible person with a dash of money

This morning's post is a round-up, a muster, of things talked about on this blog and elsewhere. For the sake of simplicity, I am using headings to separate multiple topics.

Respect, informality and the art of listening

In The importance of the Aboriginal concept of respect,  I expressed my concerns about what I perceived to be a decline in respect in current Australian society and contrasted this with the Aboriginal sense of respect. In response, Winton Bates commented that the use of surnames alone did not constitute disrespect. He also wrote: "In my view respect is a basic human need. I remember a person who had an official role in an American prison telling me that respect was the basic requirement survival. "It is all about respect, man"."

I agree with Winton that the simple use of surnames such as Gillard or Abbott does not constitute disrespect; it's the way the names are used that concerned me. Winton's comment was followed by a short comments thread on the rise of informality. Formality and respect are different concepts, both linked also to manners.

I like the less formal Australian approach as compared to, say, England or Germany. By Australian standards, the world I grew up in was relatively formal with complex overlapping social hierarchies. I once tried to explain the naming conventions, the way you addressed others, to a Chinese friend. He was astonished at the complexity!

That world is largely gone, swept away by Australia's economic and social changes. I write about it now from time to time because it was important to me in in a personal sense, more because it is interesting and very different from other Australian worlds. While I regret some aspects of the changes, I also welcome the relative informality that replaced it.   

In terms of Winton's prison comment, I think that the need for respect for us as a person is deeply imbedded in all of us, more so for those who are in some way dispossessed or marginalised. Here Evan wrote: "I am wondering if respect has to do with honour/shame." I think that's accurate.

Evan also wrote: "My feeling (based on hugely limited experience) is that the aboriginal sense of respect has a greater feeling of being personal than our idea of 'respecting the office not the person'." I'm not sure that that is absolutely right. However, I do think, and should have drawn this out, that the Australian Aboriginal concept of respect does incorporate a listening component, a respect for person, that is lacking in the broader Australian society,

The importance of the reader or listener

In recent discussion in various fora, I have said that I try to write for people, A fair bit of my writing has particular individuals, sometimes just one person, in mind. In my mind's eye, I am talking to to them. You can see this in the start of the respect post, That post was written with very particular people in mind, as was my current New England Aboriginal language series in the Armidale Express. 

While I enjoy the craft of writing, this personal focus and the response it gets has proved to be by far the most satisfying aspect of my writing. Here I quote from a Facebook comment. I have deleted names because it was a personal message.

I also mentioned to XXX, that I enjoy reading your articles, because it feels like you’re having an actual conversation with me. So I’m pleased to be a part of your audience. As far as being energised, I must thank you and XXX for motivating me. I am so eager to learn more and have decided to do a BA in History, majoring in Indigenous Studies.

To say that I was flattered and pleased would be a gross understatement. I went dancing round the kitchen (my computer is presently there). One of the messages that I have tried to get across to my fellow writers and especially my fellow bloggers, is that we do have an influence. Of course, I am trying to keep them motivated, I am trying to slow the thinning of the blogging world, but its also true!  

The Invisible Man

In a comment, Ramana reminded me of one of his posts, The Invisible Man. I had forgotten it. Its a very simple post, not long, but I found it to be a very good post directly relevant to the concept of respect. Have you ever felt like the invisible person? I know I have.

Real vs Nominal Economy

Turning to the more mundane, in a comment on Budget conundrums - real vs nominal growth, kvd wrote:

Now you've really got me confused. I thought that in order for 'real growth' to exceed 'nominal growth' you would have to be in a period of deflation. As I'm not aware that we have recently been in such an environment, I'm wondering what report you have read which suggests we've just experienced such an effect?

One of the simplest explanations here is provided by the Sydney Morning Herald's Ross Gittins, Rising damp: why nominal GDP is so flat. It all comes back to the way we measure things!

In responding to kvd's comment. I realised that what was really puzzling me was why this should have affected the estimates. How come Treasury got things so wrong, underestimating tax revenues on the way up, overestimating on the way down? I guess it has to do with the econometric forecasting models and the way that real growth is built in. I should add that I don't know, I'm just guessing.

If that's the case, it strikes me as a bit dumb. Still, it appears that Treasury is promising to focus more on "nominal" growth (ie the normal money measures) to get things better!

Loss of Innocence

In response to Loss of innocence, Ramana wrote:

Paranoia about children's safety. Society has gone bonkers everywhere Jim. I have young nieces and my daughter in law who are frequently seen with me and on more than one occasion I have been called a dirty old man! For exactly the reasons that the grand father could not understand, I have stopped making friends with young children in our local park as some parents think that all of the oldies there are perverts.

So it's just not an Australian problem. As I said in the post, I don't have a solution to this. It just is.

As I write, there are multiple paedophile inquiries running in Australia, while the Anglican Bishop of Grafton has resigned over his treatment of allegations about abuse at the North Coast Children's Home in Lismore. It's really all too hard,

Maybe it's time to bring in some hard rules.

No male can be seen in public with a child, male or female, unless a woman is present. No male may speak to a child of either sex unless he can demonstrate under later investigation by the police that the child is relative and that, further, he can prove that he has done no damage to him or her. No person at a public beach, male or female, may undress a young child to wash him or her under the public shower. No male taking a young female child to the beach on his own (not on, see rule one), may take her into the male changing rooms because she needs a shower or he does and doesn't want to leave her alone.  

  Seriously, it's become all too difficult!  

Katy Waldman and the sometimes influence of our twenties

Today I had intended to write about politics or economics or, perhaps, a combination of the two! Instead, I got sidetracked.

The long weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review combined the normal Friday and weekend editions. I often buy the Friday edition just to read the Review section  for its collection of longer pieces from around the world. This time, the Review reprinted a Slate article by Katy Waldman, The Mysteriously Memorable 20s. The subtitle gives the theme: "Why do we remember more from young adulthood than from any other time of our lives?" It's a well written piece, but it got me thinking. I don't think that she is quite right. At least, that's not been my experience. But then, the evidence may be drawn from what we think of as "normal people" as classified at points in time.

In saying this, I am drawing from my own experience, but also from the people that I have spoken to or even interviewed. My experience has been that people remember most vividly those periods of their life that have an emotional intensity both high or low that in some ways marks an important period of passage. Often, we do block out the bad. We don't forget about it, we just don't want to talk about it. But in many people's lives, the subsequent good is valued more highly because it contrasts with the dark night. We carry the scars always, we try to put those aside, talking about things highlighted by the black unseen light of the dark past.

As both a reader and writer, I am fascinated by biography. The thing that stands out to me, the fascination, is simply the complexity of it all. In many western societies, we have forgotten how unstable life is. What we think of as normality is not normal at all.

Just take Australia in the twentieth century. At Federation, many parts of the country had just emerged from a great depression. Drought was raging, affecting people in ways outside modern ken because so many were directly or independently dependent on the land. The Great War began thirteen years later, with Australia suffering some of the highest casualties relative to population of any of the belligerents. The Great Depression followed twenty eight years after Federation, then ten years later came the Second World War.

The new Australian migrants and especially the million plus displaced people, what we would now call refugees, who came to this country were focused on survival, on recreating life in a new land. In conversation or interview, they did talk about the past prior to the war, ut did so because that more peaceful time was a relief from what was to come. And, even then, it was not clear-cut. They didn't say that their values or scripts were formed in childhood or in their twenties, but in the meld of their earlier memories with the horrors that followed.

By contrast, those born locally during the war or afterwards were the lucky generation, the first to experience a really long period of relative piece and prosperity. The nearest previous equivalent was the long period between the depression of the late 1840s and that of the crash of the late eighties, also a period of relative peace.

So I'm not sure about the validity of Katy's writing or the research on which it is based. I think that it's validity is time dependent and depends upon circumstance.

As a final aside, the nearest equivalent period to me in terms of her model is not the age twenties at all, It is the time from which I entered what is now called grade ten until I graduated from university and started work in Canberra. I was then twenty one. That early working experience and the life of a young relatively well paid single in Canberra in a share house far from home was another right of passage. But it was different.

My own life has been a series of chapters marked by sudden book-ends, abrupt shifts. If I was to apply some of Katy's questions, I would say that the period with the greatest long term impact on my values and attitudes was my school period. My views have changed considerably over my life, but I think that the statement is still true. And I left school at seventeen after repeating final year because my parents thought that I was too young to go to university.

When I look at my daughters, I think that the same thing is probably true. I have no idea how they will remember their twenties, I will ask if I survive long enough, but at twenty three and twenty five, they are closer to Katy's generation. They also come from a very different generation to mine. And that, I think, should be my end point, for our views are formed by our times.  

Is modern technology destroying interaction and empathy?

I have mused before on this blog about the impact on new technology on human behaviour.

One example was the way in which it affected the behaviour of my own family. TV was one thing, but then add wife and eldest daughter looking at TV and playing with their laptops, while youngest was playing with the computer in her bedroom. When dinner was ready, wife and eldest would pause to watch TV while eating dinner. Youngest would simply grab food and return to her computer.

I am a naturally gregarious person who likes conversation, so I actually found this quite isolating, especially during those periods when I was working from home. Starved of conversation during the day, wanting to talk, I had no-one to talk too. It was much easier to go to the office area and work on my own computer where at least I had some interaction!

At the office, you see something of the same pattern with email traffic. People’s routines are dictated by a combination of their electronic diaries with email traffic. Instead of popping to a nearby desk to say something, you send an email. With modern workflows, you workflow a document to someone for action, send an email to confirm, and then wait.

On Sydney buses and especially trains, a remarkable number of passengers sit there with ear phones on listening or watching their hand held device or talking or SMSing on their mobile.. No one looks at anyone else. Obviously there are exceptions, a group of chatting school friends is an example, but the base pattern described is pretty accurate. Now there is evidence that all this is affecting the way we think and interact, our basic personalities, our very sense of our own self.

Most of the reports I have seen of the work of Susan Greenfield and Bruce Perry and others on this topic appear to be behind pay walls. This is one example that is not. Much of the reporting is also influenced by the very particular slant of the outlet and the purpose of writing. But if we cut through all that, we find certain features.

First, survey results of teachers suggest that children’s attention spans have become shorter as they opt for screen based activities over conventional reading. This would fit with my observations of work environment.

Much more time has to be spent on packaging material, less time is available for developing and testing the real content to be packaged. Don’t get me wrong here. I have always used diagrams. I did so in my final school exams, I do so today. A simple diagram or flow chart can make it easier for people to understand, while forcing simplification of the author’s thinking. It’s the balance I am concerned with.

Secondly, studies of US university students have found that the level of empathy, the understanding of others measured by conventional tests, among US college graduates has declined by 40 per cent over the last twenty or thirty years, with much of the decline concentrated in the period after 2000.

It’s not possible to make a judgement without reading the original research material, but again this fits with my own observations. Empathy is built through interaction with others and especially those who are in some way different from you. If everybody you mix with is broadly the same, how can you learn to interpret and respond to difference?

To a degree at least, the social structures that used to bring people together in face to face situations have declined. The on-line interactions do not substitute, for we have all seen how they tend to group people based on commonalities. Of course this was true of other interactive mechanisms. It’s a scale question.

From this point, the reporting seems to largely focus on implications, building pyramids of conclusions. I will leave that part of the discussion aside.

Old boys, young boys & a bright, sunny day - TAS OBU weekend September 2012

I drove to Armidale Friday for an Old Boys' reunion at TAS (The Armidale School). I took my camera and took a lot of photos; a few were okay, although I had difficulty balancing light on a very bright day. This is a photo from the rugby. Downlands College from Toowoomba (red stripe) were visiting as part of the weekend. 

As you might expect, I cam back with many possible stories, some of which I may even write up! This next photo taken in Big School is a shot of my group.  People had travelled from Hong Kong, Canada and the US for the reunion, as well as from different parts of Australia. Few people who go to school or university in Armidale stay there. Their subsequent journeys are part of the changing fabric of life in Australia and well beyond.

I suppose that it's inevitable now, but in both Armidale itself and among the TAS group I learned of deaths that I had not known. Australian writer Gwen Kelly, Jim Burling, Rennie Barnes. That added to my sense of refection; I will record some of that too.

All of us were struck by the changes in the school, changes that also reflect the changes in Australian society. The last photo is of the TAS Stage Band. The school has a very strong theatre tradition.

We sat in the sun, drank beer and talked, listening to the music and the more distant sounds of the cheers and war cries from the nearby sporting fields. I was glad I had come, even though getting away had been a bit of a battle. 

Sunday Essay - the importance of the individual

Going into Saturday's Queensland elections, the opinion polls suggested that the ALP Government faced electoral disaster. Even so, the scale of the disaster still came as a surprise.

As I write, the latest electoral figures are:

• Liberal National Party 49.7% with a predicted 78 seats
• ALP 26.6% with a predicted 7 seats
• Katter's Australian Party 11.6% with a predicted 2 seats
• The Greens 7.6% with no predicted seats.

A defeat on this scale creates obvious difficulties for Labor in both being an effective opposition and in rebuilding. It also increases pressure on the ALP Federal Government.

Over on the Lowy Institute blog, Sam Roggeveen's Is there an Australian blogosphere? is, as the title says, a short muse on the existence or otherwise of an Australian blogosphere. The post begins: 

'Europeans can't blog', reads the headline from a newly created blog by the Brussel-based think tank Bruegel. One phrase in particular stuck out at me from this lament about the poor state of European blogging: 'Europe has bloggers, but no blogosphere'.

It seems to me this might be true of Australia also, at least in the political sphere in which this site operates. The distinction between blogs and the blogosphere is that, on its own, a blog is a platform to push out ideas, information and links to other sources. That's a powerful thing in and of itself, but it's when many blogs form a blogosphere that you get, in Bruegel's words, 'a living ecosystem to exchange and debate'.

We have some outstanding political blogs in this country, but from my observation, the 'ecosystem' is a bit barren.

For their own reasons, the Lowy Institute has a somewhat clunky comment system. You have to email your comment and then wait for it to be moderated. While I understand the reasons for this, it does work against interactivity. For that reason, I thought that I should reproduce my comment here: 

Hi Sam. I think it true to say that the Australian blogosphere is fragmented. It’s also true to say that Australian bloggers don’t cross-link as much as they might or indeed should. But it’s not quite as clear-cut as this.

Back in 2010, Dr Alex Bruns released some initial mapping results on the Australian blogosphere. I dealt with it in a post at the time - http://belshaw.blogspot.com.au/2010/10/mapping-australian-blogosphere.html.

If we look at political blogs, you find a clustering effect around main nodes. You also find outriders – the independents – who also link. The patterns change with time, but they are there.

One of the difficulties in the clustering is that, not unexpectedly, the major nodes attract people of common views. A second problem is that there is sometimes very little cross-linking on the major nodes. Yet that said, there are underlying currents that are not always apparent.

The very partisan blogs including those attached to some media outlets tend to attract only the like minded. However, there is a broader and different stream that, while sometimes still partisan, actually focuses on issues. Most of the bloggers in this group either know or know of each other. I call this the village. There are links and interlinks that are not always apparent on the surface.

I was trying to think of the best way of illustrating this. Perhaps one way is to say that I have some ten bloggers who are Facebook friends, another overlapping but different group who follow me on twitter. Then there are those who email me or come through in comments.

I am not an A list blogger, although I have reasonable traffic on my main blogs. My point is that there are a whole series of interactions that have a cumulative impact over time.

There are particular issues that attract major bogging attention. However, a lot of the real work is simply the on-going discussion.

Most mainstream bloggers don’t just blog. They reach out through a variety of channels. We do influence each other, but we also influence the broader debate. The effects here cannot be easily measured, but they seem to be significant over time.

I guess that’s my real point in this comment. Don’t focus on the headline, the grand impact on public discourse. Focus instead on the cumulative effect.  

Regular readers will know that the type of issue raised by Sam have been of interest to me for a long time. I blog a fair bit, so its only natural that I should be interested.

I do think that the Australian blogosphere has declined measured by interactivity and cross-fertilisation. I have suggested that this is in part due to Twitter. Twitter is an aid to interactivity, but it also distracts.

There is only so much time. Some of my fellow bloggers put so much time into tweeting that they greatly reduce the time available for other writing or, indeed, responding. Twitterdom has become a community or series of communities in its own right, but it is a very different community.

Turning to other matters, at his place Neil Whitfield's Trundling into the 21st century talks about a new ABC documentary series Country Town Rescue. The series is described in this way: 

Produced by Zapruder’s other films, Country Town Rescue is the compelling story of how ordinary Australians come together to save a small rural town whose falling population threatens its very existence.

Filmed over twelve months, this series follows five families who ‘up sticks’ with their kids and move to Trundle, a small town in central western NSW. They are welcomed by a passionate group of locals determined to see the small town not only survive but prosper.

Now in what will seem like an unrelated segue, this photo shows the old mining settlement of Silverton outside Broken Hill.

Once much bigger than Broken Hill, Silverton now is a scattering of picturesque buildings in the middle of the desert.

At school, I was fascinated by Nevil Shute's book A Town Like Alice. This tells the story of Jean Paget,  spanning her experiences as young Englishwoman and prisoner of war in Malaya during World War II, then in London and finally in outback Australia. There she sets out to turn a small outback community into a town like Alice.

It wasn't so much the first part of the book that interested me, but the last part, the re-birth of the community. It created an interest in community regeneration that has stayed with me until today.

A Town Like Alice was very popular, generating a film and a TV mini-series. The second was part filmed in Silverton, hence the photo.

The interest created in my mind by the book has really had a profound impact on my life.

Decentralisation and community development was one of the planks I ran on when seeking Country Party pre-selection. It influenced my approach as a policy adviser. It was a factor in the creation of Aymever as a national business headquartered in regional Australia. It influences me today in my writing and in some of my professional work.

I guess that one of my continuing personal frustrations lies in my inability to make some of my ideas stick in a practical sense. I have put my heart, my time and indeed my personal cash into community redevelopment at local and regional level and beyond. There have been successes, but there have been far more failures.

One of the things that I have tried to do in my writing is to get across the importance of the individual. When I look at my own work or the results of my historical research, what comes through time and time again is the importance of individual effort.

If you look at national level, individuals start to blur in the face of broad trends, of the need to summarise and to consolidate. As you drill down, localise, individuals start to stand out. Broad based history, indeed everything that happens, actually comes back to the combination of generally unseen individual effort.

In Queensland, the ALP won't be rebuilt by Party wide election studies, by national or state efforts, although these are necessary. Rebirth will come from the electoral workers who hold the faith and provide the base required to mount future efforts. Individually, each has miniscule impact. Collectively, they are the future. Lose them, and the Party is lost.

I spent a fairly large slab of my life campaigning against the ALP. Yet I never lost sight of the value, indeed the necessity, of those ALP people that I saw on the booths. Often, I had more in common with them than I had with my own party machine. You see, we disagreed but we also cared. As we shared tea and cake and talked, we talked about things that jointly mattered.       

In blogging, I talk about the village. It's the same thing.

Sam Roggeveen is concerned with what we might call macro failure, the big picture stuff. My perspective makes me focus on the small, the cumulative. Real change, the best change, generally happens there. It happens because people strive, hold the faith, even though things sometimes seem hopeless.

I went to Parkes (Musings on a visit to inland NSW) for a workshop. There I talked to an Aboriginal woman who had spent much of the last seven years working to improve housing for her community. She was tired as indeed I am tired, yet she kept on going.

As I listened to her, I thought how marvelous she was. Her impact is not easily measurable on the grand scale, nor in our obsession with macro performance indicators. However, to the families that have better housing as a result of her efforts she is far more important than all the big picture stuff. I think that's kind of important.     

Sunday Essay - resilience and the need for slack in an overstressed world

Such a little thing, really. Youngest pranged her car. She was okay, no one else was injured, but it really threw me.

The photo shows the car outside our old house just after it was purchased. She was so proud of it.

The episode got me musing on the importance pf resilience, the capacity to bounce back, to recover quickly from illness, change or misfortune.

I don't know about you, but I find that when I'm under pressure or stress I can cope and cope and cope. Then, suddenly, I fall in a heap, unable to recover or respond. In the most extreme cases, I can lose the ability to make even simple decisions.

Clare's car was a case in point. I had been dealing with something else, then I suddenly had to drop things to go to pick her up. Suddenly, I was struggling to cope.

Quite a bit of the personal and professional writing I do is concerned in one way or another with resilience.

My suggestion that the Australian PM was struggling to establish that small island of calm that she needed to properly manage events is a case in point. Without it, she had no choice but to just keep reacting and reacting and reacting. My recent writing on management and competition is another example. Stressed organisations lose their capacity to respond in the best way to events around them.

Our personalities vary. In my case I have come to place stress on resilience because I have a somewhat driven personality that draws strength from enthusiasm.

I can sometimes do remarkable things as a consequence. Yet it's also true that that enthusiasm can become a weakness, leading me to over-extend. Worse, if enthusiasm or joy goes, then I can operate effectively for periods, but only for periods. Suddenly I collapse.

Some years ago I was working on a cabinet submission setting out proposals that my then minister, John Button (and here), was to take to cabinet on the development of the Australian communications equipment industry. It was an important submission because it aimed to set the industry on an international growth trajectory. It was also one of a suite of policy measures that we had been pushing with considerable success, measures that tested the bounds of conventional thinking.

That afternoon I was sitting in my office finalising the document for circulation to other departments for coordination comments. I was working under a very tight deadline because the submission needed to be lodged with the Cabinet Office later that week.

Our Deputy Secretary came into my office to tell me that unknown to me one of my senior colleagues had persuaded the Departmental chief that we needed to go a different route. I was instructed to redraft accordingly. I just looked at Alan and burst into tears.

Tired, under pressure, unexpectedly defeated, I could no longer cope. I knew that the revised approach was not going to deliver the expected results, I knew that I should try to find a way to fight back, but I just couldn't do it. We did a scissors and paste job and got the submission out, but the joy had gone.

We live in a world today marked by increased tension and pressure. We also live in a world of unreal expectations.

At an organisational level, we set objectives that in total across industries cannot be delivered, yet we mandate that delivery through performance agreements and reporting requirements. We cut corners to get the immediate outcomes, knowing that longer term problems must result. But then, we probably won't be there in the longer term!

At personal level, we are exposed to constant expectations about what we should eat, how we should look, how we should perform, what we should achieve, what we should possess. Failure is inevitable, as is tension and distress. The simple idea of cutting people some slack, of accepting what is, is lost in the haze of what should be.

We were talking at work the other day about the rise of depression. This has become a national problem in this country, especially in the professions. It is also a problem that I understand to some degree because depression is the opposite side of the mirror to enthusiasm.

The rise in depression is a simple reflection of the loss of resilience in our society, our organisations and at personal level. We are losing the ability to cope, to bounce back.

I have no solution to this problem.

At a professional level, I can do something in a practical sense by tailoring my advice and also the way I manage to try to compensate. This was not something I had to cope with when I first became a manager. Then my aim was to get the best results from my people. Now my aim has to be to take stress away, to support and help so that people can actually do their jobs.

At a personal level, I find it hard to avoid becoming caught. It's not just the lists I do, nor the desire to achieve or to improve. It's far worse than that.

We live in a judgemental world.

Last October my hair turned completely white almost overnight. Suddenly, and for the first time, I found myself worrying about my age, about the way that people were perceiving my physical appearance. I found myself sensitive about photographs, about the way I looked. It was suggested to me that I should shave my head, get my eye brows tinted, to ease the impression of age. I actually did the first on convenience grounds, but not the second.  

As we grow older, our abilities change.

I can no longer play tennis in quite the same way, although I still enjoy the game. I get far more aches and pains than I used to. I cannot maintain quite the same sustained working pace. And yet, I can do things that I could not do even ten years ago. People I work with are constantly surprised at just how fast I can do things. It's just a matter of applied experience, of skills.

I know this, I know that I should not worry about my age, but it's hard to break free. We are all conditioned whether we like it or not. The practical effect is reduced resilience; it becomes harder to cope.

As I said, I don't have a solution to the problem. But more and more I feel that the simple idea of building in some slack - slack in organisations, slack in society, slack in personal relations -  is the thing that has to be got across.

Just as I in managing people or activities must now aim to take stress away, to give people some peace and freedom so that they can do their jobs, so society has a whole has to find a way to do the same thing. Without this, the systemic problems now built into Australian life will simply get worse.  

Competition, Charles Darwin & our heroin corporate culture

I  mentioned (Damn the interneteratti) that Google's changes to its reader had forced Neil Whitfield (Ninglun) to abandon the reader that so many of us followed. Now Neil has responded by creating a new blog in its place - Neil's daily readings. It won't be quite the same, more single lines, but it will be at least a partial substitute to the lost reader.

Addendum: Neil has already decided to stop his Daily Readings, thinking that he can cover it on his main blog. I see his point, but still sigh! All this is an outcome of the process I referred to in Damn the interneteratti. This is a criticism of Google, not Neil. I really am going to miss Neil's original Google reader. 

Over at Stumbling on Melons, Marcellous in a rush of writing posted twice on the same day. The two very different posts cover two of the themes in Marcellous's life, music and writing.

A startling statement deals with an aspect of Justice Ward's decision in the Australian Receivables Ltd v Tekitu Pty Ltd (Subject to Deed of Company Arrangement) (Deed Administrators Appointed) & ors [2011] NSWSC 1306. Marcellous quotes part of Justice Ward's decision as follows:

Common law damages for breach of a contractual warranty will not be awarded to a party who has not relied on the alleged truth of the warranty because in those circumstances the breach of warranty is not causative of any loss.

If I understand this correctly, it does appear to represent a significant change. On the surface, it is not sufficient to have a breached contractual warranty. You have to show that you relied on that warranty and suffered loss as a consequence.

Did Charles Darwin really say that? deals with one aspect of a speech by Lyndon Terracini, artistic director of Opera Australia. Marcellous focuses on aspect, a "quote" from Charles Darwin: 'I’m reminded of what Charles Darwin said: “It is not the strongest that survive, or the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change”.'

The quote caught my attention for reasons that I will explain in a moment. However, I clicked through to the original story (the link is in M's post) where my attention was caught by something else, Mr Terracini's analysis of the implications of demographic change for Opera Australia's performance.

His argument seems to run this way. There has been significant demographic change on Australia's Eastern Seaboard. Opera Australia has not responded to this and especially the rise of the Asian communities. Opera Australia needs to respond to this by presenting Asian material in Asian style. Just as previous migration had affected Australian food doing away with meat and three veg, so the Australian approach to culture needed to change.

I have no especial problem with Mr Terracini's approach. At one level, it sounds a bit like the old SBS approach, provide a foreign dab here, one there. SBS material was greatly welcomed by individual migrant groups because of the way it aided access to language and home. However, in so doing the network failed to attract a significant mainstream audience. It also found it difficult to accommodate the ever increasing diversity in Australia's ethnic mix. Even now, it has a Europe bias, although I now think that it actually does rather well.

Unlike SBS which attempted to use broadcast to reach what was a narrow cast audience, Opera Australia is already a narrow cast niche artistic form despite the company's attempts to broaden its appeal. It may be that there are now sufficient Chinese or Korean citizens to provide an audience base with the addition of those in the broader community who might be interested to see new forms. Still, I would have thought that it was a courageous decision, especially if driven by Mr Terracini's view of what is culturally appropriate in a changing Australia.

Ironically, Mr Terracini's comments on food come at a time of resurgent retro interest in Australia's tradition cuisine. Problems of obesity and malnutrition have re-ignited interest in the simple balanced diet, while nostalgia has also played a role.

I first spotted this trend four or five years ago and it's gathering strength. It's not that it is replacing later dishes. Rather, it is an interesting re-balancing.

I said that I would come back to Mr Terracini's "quote" from Charles Darwin  - the word "quote' is in inverted commas because Marcellous suggests that its not a quote at all.

One of the saddest and most pernicious aspects of the current obsession with competition, with the Darwinian idea that It is not the strongest that survive, or the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change, lies in the idea that change is of itself a good thing, that organisations must constantly strive to improve market position.

It is sad but true that that the majority of changes do not deliver the desired results. Change involves risks: the majority of changes do not achieve the desired results. In their constant obsession with improvement and improved position, too many organisations and their dominant leaders actually destroy the very things they are seeking to build.

As I write, Macquarie University has announced that it's doing away with honours degrees, replacing the one year honours degree with a two year masters. At macro level, the University believes that this will help it compete. At a micro level, it has created problems in the Belshaw household.

Youngest started at Macquarie with the intention of doing an honours degree in ancient history. Then her interests took her in new directions. Just a random photo because I wanted one.  Clare on left.

We have been trying to encourage Clare to continue with honours because we thought that it would give her better longer term choices and also played to her interests. We don't know what the Macquarie changes mean, but as reported our plans have just hit the dust.

This a small personal example, but it is repeated across the board. In a way, the current approach to competition, change and instant results has created what we might call a heroin culture focused on immediate gratification.

The organisational world - public and private - is littered with the carcases of once great organisations. The victims are buried in unmarked graves, dead or taken over. The living dance like whirling dervishes in a hashish induced frenzy until exhausted they, too, collapse. 

Sadly, no one has yet invented the organisational equivalent of a safe injecting room!         

Saturday Morning Musings - boxing & the power of blogging in history

Yesterday's post here, Boxing, history & social change, was one of three linked posts. The others were A visit to a Cessnock boxing tent and Classical Greek, boxing & New England history.  I do this from time to time when a single post, in this case the first, takes a lot of time. The other two on my New England blogs linked to the first and added some comments tailored to the interests of those specific blogs.

Two of the posts drew substantive comments that allowed me to extend the posts. This is one feature  of blogging that I really love, the way in which reader feedback tests and extends thought.

I said in the main post that the post was triggered by some reading that I had been doing linked to my New England history project. While I hoped that the post would be of general interest, it was also placing boxing in an historical context that I could then use as a framework for my specifically New England writing.

The responses I got far exceeded my expectations.

The original post that I wrote, Memories of Jimmy Sharman's Boxing Stadium, drew a range of comments from people with direct family connections to boxing and the troupe. That also led me to find links to some photos. This time, the comments extended the New England story. From my viewpoint as an historian, this stuff is gold.

  In a comment on the original Sharman post, Jason Kells referred to his father: "my dad fought for him under the name Curly Ryan before sparing for Dave Sands until Dave's unfortunate death." I did find some material for Jason, but requests on the blog for more information and especially photos of the Sharman troupe in the 1940s and 1950s drew a blank.

In a comment this time, Greg reminded me again of Dave Sands. Sands, an example of the Aboriginal fighters that I was talking about, came from Burnt Bridge near Kempsey and later lived in Stockton; there is a memorial to him there. From a compositional viewpoint, if I can use that term in a history context, the earlier work that I have been trying to do on the history of New England's Aboriginal peoples should set a context for the Dave Sands' story. 

As an aside, and so often happens, the check search I did to update material on Burnt Bridge almost totally side-tracked this post today. I found a lot more material on line than previously, including a strange piece about Armidale. I disciplined myself, and just created temporary bookmarks!

In my post I mentioned the The Tent, by Wayne McLennan, a remarkably good short piece on a visit of a boxing tent to Cessnock. kvd kindly dug down and found that Wayne had actually fought for Bells and that Bells still existed, so I added some material here as a postcript. He also found that Wayne had been admitted to the Cessnock Hall of Fame and was now a writer, thus adding a new writer to my New England writer list.

Meantime, Greg had reminded me that boxer Les Darcy came from near Maitland,and had added some additional historical material on boxing Newcastle. Boxing really was strong in the lower Hunter.

I am sure that you see what I mean by the richness of all this because we now have interconnected and interesting threads: we have boxing as a sport and entertainment whose changing role reflects broader social change; we have the concentration of boxing among two groups, Aborigines and the working class people of the lower Hunter; and we have interesting descriptive material about sport and lifestyle.

My main post took a long time to research and write, but the payback has been enormous.

Boxing is necessarily a small element within my main history, but it's still interesting. I absolutely love the juxtaposition between the world we are talking about now and that presented in 1923: Classical Greek in the New England countryside. As I said in the post on my history blog:         

There is a huge difference between the hot, dusty and sweaty world of the boxing tent and the desire to establish Armidale as a national centre for classical Greek studies. Yet boxing was also a school sport at TAS. I used the school gloves many years later when boxing had already dropped from the frame.

One of the joys of history to my mind remains the contrasts, the way that very different things coexist at the same time. We do ourselves and history no justice when we try to jam things into acceptable frames, ignoring the comparisons and conflicts inherent in any historical period.

Becoming more practical, less lyrical, my next step is simply to consolidate all the leads I have been given into a summary post on the New England history blog.

Isn't blogging fun?! I am trying to tempt more of my history colleagues into this space. I may have something to report here a little later. For the moment, my thanks to all my research assistants (honoris causa)! 

Comfort reading - to serve them all my days

Regular commenter KVD has been after me to resume my Greek odyssey. I will do so!

Have you heard the phrase comfort reading? I think that it's more common among women than men. Simply, it means books that strengthen the soul, that reassure when things are hard. 

I first came across R E Delderfield’s To Serve Them all My Days when I came back to Armidale.

I had been away if with regular visits for some fourteen years. Now I came back to stay at home again in my old room while I completed my PhD. I am very glad that I did because within three years both my parents had died.

My parents and I watched the BBC mini-series based on the book. I loved it so much that I then bought the book and have read it many times since.

For those who haven’t read the book, it is the story of David Powlett-Jones who comes from a shellshock ward in 1918 to teach at Bamfylde School, a fictional public school in North Devon in the south-west of England. Set against the backdrop of the changes taking place in England and beyond, the story follows the hero through from a junior master to school head, ending in the early days of the Second World War.

I suppose that I identified with the book in part because some aspects of the school were a little like my own, more because I found it found it positive and good.

Positive and good; such wishy washy words, yet they capture the essence. To my mind, there is just too much of the opposite around at present for my own comfort.

It’s not my all time favourite, but it does pass a key favourite list test. Each time I read, I actually stop at key paragraphs.

I have been thinking for a little while that I might take some of those paragraphs from this and my other comfort favourites and use them as the base for posts. You see, they provide a base for challenging some of our current automatic assumptions as to what is good and right.

I actually find that helpful. Maybe you would too.

Whigs, law & the concept of progress

Has The Law (caps) lost meaning? generated some interesting comments that I will come back too in later posts.

One issue that I want to address later is clarity in language and the importance of recognising variations in definitions. This is not a comment on the discussion on that post or on LE's The Art of Law, but on my own recognition that I may be using certain words in a different way to others.

I grew up in a world in the which the idea of progress, of advancement, was deeply embedded. To the people of that world, the First and Second World Wars and the Great Depression were part of living memory. I make this point because the idea of progress survived despite personal experiences of cataclysms that demonstrated the frailty and uncertainty of life.

This was also a world in which the now disparaged Whig view of history was still dominant. I say disparaged. Here I quote one commentator from the Adam Smith Institute, a UK Libertarian think tank:

"The Whig view of history" is more often than not now used as a pejorative. When first coined it was to describe a narrative where everything just got better all the time. Whiggish people (almost universally the Great and the Good among white men), Whiggish politicians (this is all for your own good!) and Whiggish activists (we know what is right for you!) enabled civilisation to scale previously unheard of peaks of delightfulness. Certainly it's true that many things done were imporvements, but it always carried the overtone that the next set of Whiggish ideas would enable the scaling of ever yet more ecstatic mountains of joyousness. You can't argue against those ideas, for, see, civilisation is made up of all the ideas that we have previously so righteously proposed.

Just at present, I am reading some material on the work of Dr R B Madgwick in establishing and developing the Australian Army Education Corp during the Second World War, work that flowed on to the establishment of adult education at the New England University College. I will write something on this later, for it provides an interesting context for some current discussion in Australia.

For the moment, I simply want to note that Madgwick held and acted on the Whig view of the capacity for human improvement.

 Law and the court system occupied a particular place within the Whig view of the world. Courts and law could be corrupt; the idea of the venal lawyer has a very long history. However, the courts and common law were also seen as one of the key underpinnings of British freedoms. To those holding the Whig view, the genius of the common law lay in its capacity to evolve.

Growing up, I would not have called myself a Whig. The term was restricted to those of particular political persuasions in, was part of the history of, the UK.

 To those on the left today, the Whig view of the world has been discredited because of linkages with Empire and England. To those on the economic right today, the Whig view of the world has been discredited because it is seen as interventionist, paternalistic.

Despite these changes, I find that I still hold many Whiggish views, including my belief in the possibilities of progress and human advancement.

This explains my personal discomfort at what I see as detrimental changes in the legal system, changes that I am seeking to understand. To my mind, I accept that this is simplistic, the law and legal system have become increasingly complicated and mechanistic.

Now that we as a society have apparently rejected the idea of progress and human advancement, it seems to me that it leaves the law as just another control device.

Postscript

My friend and colleague Noric Dilanchian has a new post, Is more law a good thing?  Like Noric, I am absolutely staggered at the way in which Australian minister Anthony Albanese apparently wants to use the volume of legislation passed as a measure of Government performance.