The Wheel Turns - return of wood fires

Back in April I wrote a post, In memory of our old fuel stove, that was a somewhat nostalgic look back at the wood stove we used to have in the kitchen. That stove finally went in part because of age, in part because wood stoves themselves had come to be seen as environmentally unfriendly.

Now it appears that wood fires are back because of their small carbon footprint. The quantity of CO2 released by burning is apparently the same as that flowing from natural decomposition. There can still be issues in particular locations because the smoke can create local pollution problems, but it is nice to know that something I like is once again okay.

Looking back, it is remarkable how environmentally friendly my childhood now appears to have been!

We grew our own fruit and vegetables, saving on money but also transport. As kids we walked or biked everywhere. Much of the water used in cooking and to drink was tank water - the town supply was both heavily treated and very hard. The slow combustion stove provided heating, cooking and an unlimited supply of hot water.

Mind you, in all this I do remember very clearly the need to chop wood. I suppose I could say that that was a good thing too - exercise and all that. However, collecting or chopping wood on a cold frosty morning with frost everywhere can hardly be described as fun.

History of Child Pornography in Australia

One visitor came to this site because he/she searched on the history of child pornography in Australia. My one post on the Henson matter came up number five on the Google search. This got me thinking.

I know of no history of child pornography in Australia. I suppose there is a problem here in a general sense because you have to access to sources to write a history, and I know of no sources in this area. Indeed, to write a history you would now have to download illegal material.

That said, I do not think that Australia can be said in any way to have a history of child pornography until very recently. It did not exist or, to the degree that it did exist, it involved smutty photos exchanged in private.

This is not to say that we did not have a paedophile problem however defined. We clearly did. But child pornography, again however defined, seems to be new.

Crocodiles, climate change and the pattern of adjustment

For the benefit of my international readers, there are two types of crocodiles in Australia - fresh and salt water. Males of the salt water variety can be seven metres long. Anybody who has seen them will tell you that they are not to be trifled with.

I have not written much about the current debate on climate change including the possible policy responses because I have little original to say. However, I have been musing over the outcomes of various scenarios. This includes questions like just how far south the salt water crocodiles might move as water temperatures increase.

I find with climate change that I simply cannot handle the very broad questions. They are just too abstract. However, I can understand and am interested in far more micro questions, like what it might mean for particular industries or areas. Here I feel that there is a major policy disconnect between the global and the Australian, a bigger one still between the Australian and regional or local.

Assume, for the moment, that something approaching the worst case occurs.

At present, Australia feeds somewhere between 70 and 100 million people. Our agricultural exports remain a major source of national wealth. If rainfall declines by 40%, will we still be able to do this? I am sure that we will still have enough food for ourselves, but our exports will decline in volume. Food prices will rise. The dollar value of our exports may even increase. But all Australians will pay a lot more for basic food stuffs.

Then we have the lakes at the bottom of the Murray. Can they survive, or should we be writing them off now? Can we afford the luxury of maintaining them when we need the food and cash? On the worst case climate change scenarios. I think that they will have to go.

The current problem with petrol prices provides a salutary reminder of our future worst case world.

Present petrol prices are a function of limited supply and rising demand. However, they provide a useful reminder of just what happens if transport costs rise. I have not done the maths, I do not have the information, but at eight dollars per litre for petrol or a petrol equivalent (and this is one projected price) our entire social and urban structure would have to be be reshaped.

How do you maintain our current distribution and service delivery systems if we can no longer afford them? As a simple but striking example, how do you justify a centralised base hospital if the cost of getting a patient there for a doctor's appointment exceeds the daily pay of a specialist?

Now we can debate the detail. But my point is that we are dealing with a totally new scenario.

As I write, water buffalo's are making a come-back in Thailand because they are presently better value than tractors. I can see this type of thing happening across the board.

I am not being negative in all this. I am simply saying that we might need to start thinking about things in new (and old) ways.

Canberra's changing life style - past and present

Photo: What is now Olims Hotel Canberra was the Hotel Ainslie. Designed by architect CFA Voysey in English deco style, it was opened in September 1927 (the year the Old Parliament House opened) to house member of Parliament and public servants.

Going back to a place where one has lived and worked for many years after a gap is always strange.

I worked in Canberra for just over twenty years. Later I visited often, but always going for business reasons. Then came a gap of several years. Over the weekend, Dee and I were there as visitors on holiday, finding old places and looking anew.

We decided to stay at the old Hotel Ainslie. When I came to Canberra, this was one of the city's very few pubs. Now run by Olims with an attractive central garden, it retains some of the old feel.

As we drove over the hill and saw the lights of Canberra before us I was struck by the city's increased size. Now obviously I knew that the city was bigger. After all, it's only three weeks since I flew in on a previous visit. However, I had not come in by road at night for many years.

I relied, successfully as it turned out, on my bump of direction to get to the hotel. In fact, I found that so long as I did not think too much about it, I could get anywhere I wanted to. If I did think, the doubts would set in.

I had a writer's diary with me and took notes of my impressions. I will write these up in various posts, for there was much of interest. Yet in all this, the thing that struck me most was just how run-down some of the original inner suburbs had become.

As we drove from place to place where we had both lived, we passed dry and unkempt gardens, with the winter leaves piled up everywhere. Many of the houses were neither large nor especially attractive, but they were set in attractive streetscapes. This seems to have gone under the pressure of water restrictions. There was also rubbish around in a way that I had not seen before.

I was also struck by the ugliness of some of the new buildings. The sheer physical beauty of Canberra's location remains, but the city has somehow lost the organic beauty associated with the original Burley Griffin design in later urban and monumental accretions.

Part of this is no doubt a function of increased size. But I was left with a strong impression of planning failure, of an ad-hoc urban dynamic that had somehow taken over from the previous coherent approach.

Don't get me wrong. Canberra is still very much worth a visit. I was just saddened at what appeared to me to be a failure of vision for the place.

Canberra Pause

For the benefit of my few regular readers, I will be in Canberra this weekend, so will miss at least my normal Saturday Morning Musings, possibly the Sunday post as well.

Modern Australia's obsession with sexuality

I am so tired with Australia's current obsession with sexuality. I find it tiring, depressing and, to a degree, confusing.

As I write, the case of Dennis Ferguson is much in the news.

Apparently a convicted pedophile, new charges against Mr Ferguson were thrown out on the grounds that media publicity meant that he could not get a fair trial.

Moved by police to one location, he was forced to move again by publicity. Moved to a second place on a country property where he was under supervision, local opposition including a public meeting attended by 1,000 people appeared to threaten his very life.

I saw the TV footage. I thought the blind outrage was at least as ugly as Mr Ferguson's alleged crimes. Now he is costing the tax payer an arm and a leg to protect him. Mr Ferguson may be a sick man in a moral sense, but the threat that he poses under supervision hardly warrants the outrage.

Again as I write, the single post I wrote on the Bill Henson matter (Bill Henson, art and child pornography) continues to get more hits than most other posts, ignited again by the rather silly decision of Art Monthly to put an art work of a six year old on its cover.

The art work itself is hardly prurient, although Mr Rudd as the leader of Australia's new Gen X moral majority was disgusted by the photo.

In the midst of all this, TV and on-line sites such as facebook carry images that would have been classified as as pornography twenty years ago. Some I just gulp at.

I have no desire to go back to the sexual confusions and mores that dominated Victorian Australia through to the sixties. I would never wish on my children or their children the internal confusions this created in me. On the other hand, I think that there is far too much explicit sexuality in material that is available to all, including children.

I suppose in all this there is a question of balance. While I could wish that there was less explicit sexuality around, I do not find the new puritans balanced, while their anger repulses me. It seems to me that Calvin is alive and well, living in Yarralumla.

Kondratiev cycles, innovation and over-regulation - a challenge from Bob Q

In a comment, Bob Quiggin challenged the arguments I put forward in Kondratiev cycles, innovation and over-regulation . I do like challenges because they force me to check and refine.

Bob began his comment:

Dear Jim,

Rubbish. :)

The reason you haven't heard of Kondratiev cycles since uni is because they lacked both provability, predictive force and explicative force (i.e. they stand as an article of faith).

Why? because the period of the cycle is defined post-hoc, which is why long term can mean anything from 30 years to 70 years or in some writers' belief 150 years. So much happens in such a cycle that to ascribe it to a single factor beggars belief.

Secondly, because the timing is post hoc, so is the explanation, which means that thirdly there is no predictive force.

Now here I think Bob is both right and wrong.

When I first came across Kondratiev cycles in economics, I was also studying history. Historiography is littered with examples of people attempting to define patterns that can then be used for explanatory or predictive purposes. The great British historian Arnold J. Toynbee is an example with his focus on comparative history.

As an aside, I did not know that Toybee was first married to Gilbert Murray's daughter. I wrote about the Murray family in Patrick Desmond Fitzgerald Murray 1900-1967. I am constantly struck with just how small a world the old British Empire and Commonwealth was, at least among the educated elites.

The problem with all these attempts at pattern definition is the risk of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, literally after this, therefore because (on account) of this. Just because a follows b does not, of itself, imply anything about causation.

Kondratiev cycles certainly suffers from this problem.

If I remember my history, Kondratiev himself was a marxist. Marxist theory suggested that capitalism must collapse under its own weight, yet this appeared to Kondratiev to be at odds with the historical evidence. He developed his cycle or wave concept to explain this, a theological sin for which he was to perish in Stalin's gulags. Kondratiev's work was then taken up and popularised by the great American economist Joseph Schumpeter in his explanations of economic development.

Yet while Kondratiev cycles do suffer from the problems as specified by Bob, I still find them useful because they challenge some of the implicit assumptions and world views embedded in modern economics.

Bob went on:

You blithely talk about the exhaustion of the ICT wave - I see terabyte desktop machines for less than $A1500, when Paxus (now extinct) had a 20 terabyte facility in Canberra that was the largest or second largest in the southern hemisphere less than 20 years ago.

IMHO Moore's law continues to operate but it allows rigidities like onerous record keeping and all the other up-the-down-escalator brakes on progress, some of which are justified and some of which are not.

Over-regulation is indeed a key problem, but its relationship to ICT of Kondratiev is about the same as mine to the consumption of Resch's Pilsener (a near zero correlation, which if anything is negative).

How is your silver bullet campaign going, BTW.

Bob, I fear that my silver bullet campaign is making slow progress, although I do now have a regular supply of Resch's Pilsener. As a consequence, my overall shopping at the nearby Woolies is down about sixty per cent because I tend to buy things at the IGA next door to the bottleshop!

My response to Bob's core comment is a simple one.

Concepts such as Kondratiev cycles force us to ask new questions of the evidence. Take the ICT revolution as an example. Yes, it is true that technological advance continues. But does that mean that the new developments will have the same impact? I think not.

The impact of the motor car in Australia is instructive in this context.

The really big impact came in the first twenty years when cars and lorries replaced horse drawn transport. In the ten years between 1919 and 1929 the new form of transport wiped out not just horses, but all the activities and industries linked to horse drawn transport. In doing so, it totally altered the structure of life, especially in regional Australia.

The next big impact came in the 1950s when growing wealth allowed mass ownership of cars. While this had a major impact on city structures, the trigger was wealth, not technology. The same thing holds today in India and China.

My point here is that the greatest impact of ICT lies, I think, in the past. Developments will continue, but now we are dealing with change at the margin. Greater processing power, greater storage capacity, greater bandwith will allow new things, but these are changes at the margin.

To my mind, the next big effect from the ICT revolution will, like the car before it, come not from technological development, but from diffusion associated in developing countries with growing wealth.

Kondratiev cycles, innovation and over-regulation

In my last post I mentioned Kondratiev cycles, long development waves linked to new innovations. I wondered whether we had come to the end of such a cycle.

Recently I was trying to explain to a colleague why I was so concerned about rigidity in our current systems, including the growing burden of compliance. I put it to him this way.

The growing proportion of resources tied up in monitoring, measuring and controlling reduces resources available for real investment. It also increases fixed costs. This reduces growth, while increasing economic vulnerability.

As an example, consider a firm with annual revenues of 100, fixed costs of 70 and a profit of 10. Assume that recession hits, leading to a drop in sales of 20%. Revenue is now 80, fixed costs are still 70, variable costs fall from 20 to 16. The previous $10 profit has been replaced by a $6 loss.

The Australian economy, indeed all western economies, is a bit like this firm.

Debt levels are high. That debt has to be serviced. As interest rates rise and the economy slows, the burden of debt increases. We respond by trying to save more, thus reducing demand.

The global asset bubble, the rise in price of assets such as shares and houses, has provided a buffer. We can spend because the overall value of our assets has been rising. The rise in asset prices stops or, worse, turns into decline. Again, we respond by reducing spending.

Economic growth slows and turns to recession.

Economic adjustment in these conditions can be slow and painful. This becomes worse if we are in fact at the end of a Kondratiev cycle.

The rise in global productivity has in part been underpinned by new computing and communications technology, while the technology has also opened new investment opportunities. All the easy fruit from the new technology has now been picked. Worse, we are left with the centralised organisational command and control structures and their associated rigidities and costs whose rise has been facilitated by the new technology.

End of a Kondratiev cycle?

Driving home from work I listened to an interview on ABC Counterpoint with Professor Wolfgang Kasper suggesting that the world might be coming to the end of the latest Kondratiev cycle. This really took me back.

All those years ago when I was doing undergraduate economics at the University of New England we looked at Kondratiev cycles as part of our studies on trade cycles. I have rarely heard the term mentioned since.

Now for the benefit of non-economists, much of macro economics focuses on short term fluctuations. By contrast, the term Kondratiev cycles is used to refer to long term growth waves - 30-70 years - associated with major technological change. Kondratiev supporters suggest that we are coming to end of the latest wave, the IT and communications wave.

Kondratiev waves are followed by Kondratiev winters, five plus years of economic stagnation, before the next wave gets underway. If Kondratiev supporters are right, and I think that they may well be, the global recession that we are now entering may prove to be a longish term economic winter.

The problem for the modern generation of economists in dealing with this type of problem is, I think, their very denial that it might exist. Most do not remember the seventies, the end of the last wave, when all our established nostrums failed to work.

Wikipedia Woes - and the challenges of the on-line world!

One of the key things to remember about history is that a thing does not exist if it is not recorded or written about in some way. It is also true that a thing can cease to exist if people stop writing about it. So to this degree history, perhaps more accurately the writing of history, is a creature of current fashion and interests.

I make this point because of my oft repeated complaint that parts of Australian history that are important to me in a personal sense have diminished, in some cases vanished as though they had never been.

The process can be a slow one and is often unseen.

The theses and journal articles that provide so much of the raw material stop. There are no new books. Those things that have been published go out of print. The topics vanish from school and university curricula. Finally, whole fields vanish or are, at best, relegated to footnotes.

I write in part to try to preserve and present elements of the past that I consider to be important. In doing so, I noticed that Wikipedia was very weak in my areas of interest.

Initially I ignored this. Then I picked up a Wikipedia talk page that mentioned two of my blogs, suggesting that while not suitable for direct citation, they did provide access to useful sources. This set me thinking.

Wikipedia has become a key information source, coming up first on most searches. Consequently, we all use it. This means in turn that if my blogs are not suitable as sources, then I have a major problem.

I need a new writing platform like I need a hole in the head. Still, if the blogs cannot be used as sources, then I really have no choice but to look at Wikipedia itself.

I began by putting up a short historical overview on the New England New State Movement, an overview that a fellow contributor kindly edited to put it in the proper format. In doing so, I struggled a bit with the Wikipedia rules. These preclude original research, limiting content essentially to published sources.

I can understand this. However, it does create a problem where so much of the historical material is simply not available in published form. I almost have to go back to writing for journal publication, meaning that I end up writing material for yet another format.

While thinking about this, I decided that what I could do was to correct some obvious gaps on Wikipedia. So this morning I added a few references to the stub on my grandfather, David Drummond. This one actually cites my original Australian Dictionary of Biography entry as the source!

I have a fair bit more to do on the Drummond article, but in the meantime, I decided to add a short article on a different topic to fill another gap. Now here I wrote the article and then lost the damn thing. Yes, I know that I should have written it in Word and then transferred it, but it was only meant to be a stub for later work.

On a somewhat related topic, Helen (eldest) is presently in Milan, travelling with friend Elise. Yesterday evening Dee and I went over to Elise's parents for a video skype link up with the girls in Milan. Somewhat clunky, but still interesting.

Coming back, I was thinking that I should put up a daily log on facebook to keep Helen up to date.

All this leaves me wondering just how to survive the on-line world. Yes, many aspects are great, but the time demands!

Saturday Morning Musings - round the traps

Photo: Gordon Smith, Khan's Mine Adit 1

It seemed a good idea to begin this blog round up with a photo from Gordon Smith, lookANDsee. This particular shows an adit, lower left, from one of the many old mines lying in the gorge country to the east of Armidale.

Gordon himself has been back in Sydney, something that I know he would prefer to avoid, so has continued his Sydney photo series.

As a photographer, Gordon roams. When in Armidale he roams the surrounding ranges. In Sydney, he roams the streets looking for shots. Do have a browse. In writing about one old building, Gordon says:

This grand old building, on the edge of the Eveleigh Railway Workshops, was formerly used by New South Wales Government Railways but has been left to grow into a state a disrepair - very sad.

I though that the comment could equally well apply to NSW itself. In disrepair, but still with faded signs of past glories.

Neil's template instability has continued! Leaving that aside, in Smart Art he carried some rather nice reproductions of the work of the Australian artist Jeffrey Smart. I like Smart's work, and enjoyed the paintings.

To me, Smart's work is very Australian. We live in a visual world surrounded by images and visual language. In all this, I find it remarkable how little exposure Australian art actually gets.

Still on art, it has been a little while since I visited Will Owen's Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American eye. I can only describe this as a serious error of judgment. Will has had so many good posts recently that I don't know where to begin in describing them. They really deserve a full essay in their own right.

I spoke of visual language in the context of Jeffrey Smart. As Thomas (still overseas) suggested in Tone, meaning, and socialisation, language has meaning because of the way we attach meaning to symbols, the words we use. The writer has one meaning in mind, the reader another. Communication depends upon shared meaning.

Something of the same thing holds for visual language.

All painters paints from their own context and experience. We can appreciate the painting as a work of art, attaching our reactions to it. We often appreciate it more when there is some linkage, a context if you like, between the painting and us.

Now take a look at Will's Warlayirti Artists, Balgo (Wirrimanu), WA. Here we have a juxtaposition between art works and photographs. Here if you look, you can see the linkage between art and landscape, the way in which varying colours and textures translate from one to the other.

I am not a desert person, although I do claim to be a country one, since I grew up in Australia's New England. This, the country of many of Gordon Smith's photos, can be rugged, but is less stark.

Yet while my own country is different, I can appreciate the colour and form in Will's photos and the link between this and the art. I have been imprinted with the visual images and the stories attached to them.

There can be no greater contrast between all this and the Virginia green Will reveals in Mr Kluge's Gift. This is an interesting story from an Australian perspective because I, for one, had not been aware of this US collection of Aboriginal art.

Mixed with the many posts on different aspects of Aboriginal art, many with stunning visuals, are a number of posts dealing with the Northern Territory intervention, triggered by its anniversary.

I did not write on this at the time, in part because I had nothing useful to say beyond a feel that the whole thing was being re-captured by the attitudes and policies that had so failed us in the past.

I cannot come at these things from the same perspective as some of my urban friends and colleagues. When I look at some of these communities, at things like the out-station movement, I do not see Aboriginal, I see country. In this sense, I am colour blind. I see no difference in problems in medical services or education between a small NSW country town and an NT community. The core difficulties are the same, accepting that there will always be local variations.

In My new book, Geoff Robinson reports on the forthcoming publication of When the Labor Party Dreams: class, politics and policy in New South Wales 1930-32. Congratulations, Geoff. I will read with interest. I reserve the right to be critical!

Marcellous's musical mania continues, an education in its own right, as does his interest in bike riding.

I don't know if I mentioned this, but David Maister (one of the management gurus within professional services) has suspended his blogging, at least for the present. I can understand. My two purely professional blogs are badly behind, and I need to do something about this. I hope that David returns re-charged in due course.

Good lord, look at the time. So much still to write, but I do need to stop.

A blessed sense of relief

Photo: Gordon Smith, Sydney Town Hall.

Yesterday as I walked through the city crowds I felt a blessed sense of relief. I had had to go into the city for a meeting, and then managed to squeeze in coffee with Noric. As I walked round looking at the people and buildings I gawked, just as I had all those years ago when Sydney was still fresh.

The relief came from the fact that I had resolved some things that had worried me. The renewed interest in things about me was linked to this, giving me a capacity to look at things anew.

Last week end I tried to explain to a friend why blogging could help him. I don't think I got the message across. But, to me, blogging has been a salvation.

Part of it is the discipline of writing. Since I started, I must have written a million words. Every day, every week, I try to write. I do not always succeed, but it builds up.

Noric, too, is an inveterate writer. We have worked on joint issues for many years since we first met at a Screen Production Association Conference. He uses his web site and blog to give him a major presence.

Over coffee, we talked about the ways we might use our growing content, given our very limited time. This is a recurring theme between us, one that will never be fully resolved simply because time is so short.

It was a little while since we had been able to get together, so I noticed the ways in which our respective positions had continued to evolve simply through the act of doing and then responding.

Today I was talking to Christine at work.

I had been talking to her about Australian food. She doubted that there was such a thing. To her mind, Australians cooked so many things from different places that we could not sensibly talk about Australian food.

I said that I was going to print off some of my posts in a special book just for her. She was chuffed. She is actually a very Australian girl, but she said that in Australia she lived Chinese, talked Chinese, ate Chinese, watched Chinese TV and went to a Chinese church. Anything that gave her a window into the culture of her new country (she came here as a child) would be great.

I came home from work and started to download posts broken up by themes - people, culture, life style, writers and writing etc. After about an hour, I had the skeleton of a new book.

Now I had actually been meaning to do something like this for a while, but Christine provided a reason and a focus. Knowing her quite well, what would she (and others like her) find interesting? What might give her the flavour, the variety, of Australia as I have known it?

Setting up the structure and indeed the content of such a book is not hard. This is simply a matter of selection and ordering among the hundreds of posts that I have written. The hard and time consuming part will be the editing and formatting.

Later I may try for proper publication. At this stage, I am simply aiming for something that looks okay and which can be photocopied both sides of the page and then bound. Once this is done, and if it is interesting to the reader, then I can think about further steps.