Lindos Beach

The beach stretches round in a small semi-circle, then there is a small headline and the main Lindos town beach.

From on high, each beach is marked by rows of sun umbrellas beneath which perch sun lounges. The tourists cluster round their lounges; some are stretched out sun-baking; others have towels draped over their heads, exposing the rest of their bodies.

Just to the left of me is the official control desk: a sun-shade, a water container, a book of tickets. There are two controllers. From time to time, one collects his tickets and goes out on patrol in case someone is occupying a sun lounge without paying. The first controller leaves, then a mobile rings. The second controller springs to his feet. Perhaps there is a breach, a tourist has not paid.

We are picnicking in the shade, attracting strange glances. In the cafe behind us, the sound system seems stuck on a Caribean version of the Sound of Music. Repitition six of Get Me to the Church on Time has just started. Initially attractive, the beat version has now become unbearable.

It must be the end of the official day. The remaining beach controller has just picked up his water, his tickets and strolled away. We leave too. 

Note from Rhodes

The sense of history in Rhodes is almost over-powering. Age after age overlaps. Very difficult to write about properly. Very difficult, too, to find computer access for any length of time!

Note from Mykonos

As I write, the noise from the children playing at the nearby school fills the air. A din perhaps, but one I like.

I am not much into shopping. Partly lack of money, more that shopping is a female sport. Travelling with four women means that I spend a lot of time outside shops! I wile away the hours watching the passing parade.

I have written before about the differences between rules based and principle based approaches. Greece seems to be a principle based society, one where rules can be neglected. By contrast, modern Australia is increasingly a rules based society. I prefer the first. It is far more interesting, flexible, relaxed.

Of course, these things are never black or white. All societies have rules.

That said, rules based societies tend to be more efficient, Singapore is an example, until the social and economic costs of the rules outweigh any gains achieved. NSW rather falls in this second case. By contrast, principle based societies are more chaotic, less effective. Still, I do prefer them

Given my interest in tourism, I have been taking notes as to the lessons from Greece for tourism in the areas that I am interested in. I guess that I will bore you with this in due course!

Problems with electric jugs

One of the things that makes Australian travel civilised is the presence of tea and coffee making facilities in rooms. Europe generally does not have this.

In Europe last time we brought an electric kettle and then carried it with us, leaving it behind at the end. This time we decided not too, and it was a mistake.

It sounds such a little thing, making a cup of tea or coffee in the room in the early morning or at night after getting back. Yet it really adds to comfort.

It is also a lot cheaper than either buying though room service if that is available, or at a cafe. Those three Euros a pop really add up after a while!

Belshaw's Best 7: Judith Wright's "For a Pastoral Family" - and "Skins"

I write a fair bit about my own area of Australia because I am so attached to it. I know it well; it's landscape and people are sunk deep into my soul.

Judith Wright is one of New England's best known writers. Judith Wright's "For a Pastoral Family" - and "Skins" deals with two of her poems, trying to set them in a context.  

Santorini

The view from our balcony is really quite breathtaking. The room itself, while pretty, is very small; the balcony is pocket hankerchief in size, requiring me to sit sideways; however, the view makes up for it.

As I high on the cliff-top, the sea below is absolutely still. A handful of boats marks the only movement. The light has been muted to a pastel shade by a light cloud cover. Just in front of me are the islands of Thirassia, Nea Kameni and Palia Kameni. Looking up to my right, I can see Thira town crowded along the top of the cliff, running down a little towards the sea where the buildings, like our own hotel are built into the cliffs.

This is my first visit to Greece and I have been taking notes as I go along for stories to link to photos. Just as well; you know how quickly travel blurs impressions.

Most of my posts will have to wait until I get back. Insufficient time, and I cannot upload the photos at this point. Posting from internet cafes is also quite expensive. There are computers with wireless connections in the party, but for a number of reasons these are generally tied up by owner's wife and daughter. So I can't get the type of time required for posting.

Still, most of the stuff I want to write and post is not time sensitive, simply my personal reactions.

All for now.  

Belshaw's Best 6: the colours of New England

Some of my favourite posts are somewhat experimental posts where I have tried to capture some element of the texture of life in areas that interest me. The colours of New England is one such post, an attempt to combine the visual and the written to bring an area alive. 

Saturday Morning Musings - time for a break

By the time you read this, I will be on my way to Greece and the Greek islands. No, I am not following those Australian writers who have gone there to write; it's just a break.

I haven't been to Greece before, so it's a chance to see a new place, one whose history I know. Now I will be able to match sight, sound and smell to previous knowledge.

I do not expect to be able to post while I am away. However, I don't want you to forget me! So I have a few posts coming up in my absence.

I do hope to be able to respond to comments. However, there may well be a few lags in responses.    

Problems with Pandora

For the benefit of readers who do not know what Pandora is, it is Australia's National Library archive of internet material, including blogs.

Some time ago, I emailed them several times suggesting that some of my blogs might be included, but without response. I accept that the things I write about are either not of national significance or, perhaps, not sufficiently representative to warrant inclusion. However, this did get me thinking.

As someone who monitors the blogosphere on a daily basis, it must be very hard for librarians and/or archivists sitting there in Canberra to form a view, to decide what to include, from a world that constantly shifts and is so ephemeral.

Some of the group blogs like Club Troppo make fairly logical candidates. Even then, there can be an issue as to how often to update. The practice seems to be to update on an annual basis.

Pandora does have guidelines as to what night be included. These state in part:

PANDORA is a selective archive. The National Library and its partners do not attempt to collect all Australian online publications and web sites, but select those that they consider are of significance and to have long-term research value.

The problem, as I see it, lies in determining what is significant, what has longer term research value. After all, this can only be determined later. If we look at the national Library's own selection criteria (other participating agencies have their own criteria), we find the following priority definitions:
  
Archiving will focus on the following categories:

(i) Commonwealth and ACT government publications (State government publications will be left to the State libraries)
(ii) Publications of tertiary education institutions
(iii) Conference proceedings
(iv) E-journals
(v) Items referred by indexing and abstracting agencies (which frequently are from the first three categories but also include items with print versions)
(vi) Topical sites:

(a) Sites in nominated subject areas (see Appendix 2) that would be collected on a rolling three year basis; and
(b) Sites documenting key issues of current social or political interest, such as election sites, Sydney Olympics, Bali bombing

More specific selection guidelines for each of these categories are detailed in Section 5.
3.6 This approach will not preclude us from collecting any site of a high standard and long-term research value, regardless of subject, format, or publication type. But we will give priority to the categories listed above and subjects detailed in Section 5. This means that some categories currently being collected will not be given priority but will be collected only as resources allow.

We also find the following exclusions:

The following categories will generally not be collected, though exceptions may be made.

• Cams (web sites employing a web camera that uploads digital images for broadcast)
• Datasets (5)
• Discussion lists, chat rooms, bulletin boards and news groups
• Drafts and works in progress, even if they otherwise meet the selection guidelines
• Games
• Individual articles and papers
• News sites
• Online daily newspapers for which print versions exist
• Organisational records
• Portals and other sites that serve the sole purpose of organising Internet information
• Promotional sites and advertising
• Sites that are compilations of information from other sources and are not original in content
• Theses (the responsibility of universities and the Australian Digital Theses Project) .

Now I'm simply not sure of this categorisation. I'm not saying it's wrong, simply that I'm not sure.
Let me take an example. News sites are not included. Who, then, is responsible for archiving these? Increasingly, the on-line sites include comments sections that actually (and I am speaking wearing my historian's hat) provide a useful snapshot of views. You obviously don't get these in the archived print version.

A second example: how does one define long term research value?

Research interests vary. The things that I am interested in, for example, were quite popular forty years ago and may now even be coming back into partial vogue. In the meantime, few people were interested. I doubt that any of the Pandora crew would pick the things that I write about in their long term category.
 
So all this leads me to a question to my fellow bloggers. What do you think that Pandora should preserve?

Left vs right

I see that Legal Eagle has been wrestling with questions of left and right in Never the twain shall meet?. When I first became involved in politics, I struggled with the politically devout of all sides. I say all sides because I was Country Party. Having grown up on the stories of the early days of the Party, of the True Blues and the fights for country recognition, I didn't see politics in simple left-right terms; it was far more complicated than that. 

To my mind at the time, those on the left opposed the capitalist system, believed to greater or lesser extent in the primacy of the working class and in the class struggle, in socialism and considered capitalist imperialism to be the world's over-riding evil. Obviously there were many shadings of views, from the devout marxist who then still believed that the Soviet Union provided the light, through multiple shadings of socialist belief, to the sold Labor person who considered that trade unions and collective organisation by workers were necessary to protect workers and address social evils.

In the world in which I lived, my introduction to left wing views came not so much from the official Labor Party as from politically devout academics at the University of New England who both espoused a range of theoretical left wing views and also carried the Labor flag in a sometimes hostile local environment. Since this often drew them to oppose causes that I supported, I acquired a negative view.

A more positive view of the left came from history at school and from my own family on my father's side.

The first may sound odd, given that I went to a private school still run on English lines. Certainly, many local academics regarded the school as non-academic, a bastion of conservatism and the local class structure. Robert Barnard's crime novel Death of an Old Goat provides a very unsympathetic view of that school and indeed of Armidale at the time. Yet despite this, the English biased modern history that I did dealt with things such as the fight for suffrage and electoral reform, the rise of the union movement; the early fights for union recognition. I might have disagreed with Labor and the union movement on aspects, but I never doubted their legitimacy.

My father and his family provided an introduction to what we might think of as "soft-left" views. The Belshaws are working class English from Wigan. My grandfather was one of the first Labour councillors in England. At my father's funeral, his old friend marxist economic historian Professor Ron Nehl, described him as UNE's only truly working class professor.

There was some truth in that. However, my father and his siblings all broke out through education into the broader academic world. In doing so, they never forgot their working class roots, campaigning for things such as economic development and social justice, campaigning against prejudice. I heard these stories too.

I could never be a supporter of the left because I rejected so many of their views: I did not regard the capitalist system as evil in itself, although I thought that it had evil aspects; I thought arguments about class warfare were irrelevant to the Australian situation and indeed ethos; while I found some of the arguments about socialism incomprehensible.

On the other hand, this did not make me a supporter of the Liberal Party, nor of the right. In fact, I never used the word right. I thought that "right" meant fascist, extreme right.

It may sound hard to believe, but I was sixteen before I even met an avowed Liberal Party supporter outside a few Liberal Party parliamentarians. To me, the metro based Liberal Party in its various guises was the natural enemy. Politics dictated coalition, but I never forgot that politics also dictated that the Party was the real enemy when it came to expanding Country Party representation.

People often speak of tribalism and tribal dislikes in a Labor context. I grew up with a deep visceral distrust of the Liberal Party. Even today, I struggle to vote Liberal first preference. I can't help myself. I don't think that the Party represents the things that I stand for. I listen to Malcolm Turnbull or Tony Abbott espousing Liberal views, and I say that's not me. But then, neither is the ALP. I also struggle to vote Labor.

From time to time on this blog, I have tried to explain my political values and views set within a framework of what I have come to call New England populism. I have also tried to explain why New England populism is a distinct stream, neither left nor right.

Reading Legal Eagle's post which in some ways is set in a conventional left/right frame, I wondered how could I illustrate this. Let me try to explain with a story.

Grandfather Drummond became ward of the state at twelve: family conditions were very difficult, he was in some ways an uncontrollable child, and finally his step-mother had had enough. Despite this break, his brothers retained contact with him. Brother Will in particular used to send him books because, despite his limited formal education, the boy was an dedicated reader.

When I was a kid, my grandfather followed the same course with me. One day, he gave me a paper back. This, he said, shows the importance of cooperation and of cooperatives.

It was a good yarn. A benefactor purchased a tramp steamer and gave it to a cooperative to run. The book told the story of the steamer and its crew as it sailed round the world. It was partly the story of the voyages, partly the story of the success of the cooperative. My grandfather intended me to absorb the idea of cooperation and cooperatives as a vehicle, and indeed I did.

How does this fit in? Well, the idea of cooperatives and cooperation is neither left nor right. Both may try to claim it, but it actually has very little to do with the way the formal left-right constructs are presented. Indeed, and I accept that this a gross simplification, the story is antipathetical to both left and right.

To the left, the idea that social change can be brought about in ways other than Government action does not easily fit. I don't want to overstate this. Of course, the left accepts that individual and collective action outside state action can bring change, yet the focus is generally on the state.

To the right who believes (sometimes) that markets and individual action are central, I guess that that success of the cooperative simply sets up something for sale!  

I say sometimes, for one feature of the hard right is actually a collectivist ethos. Just look at what fascism actually means. The equation between the right, Hayek, markets and individualism is, what, less than sixty years old?

Time to stop here.

Postscript

Reading this post later, I am still thinking through the arguments involved.

As LE suggested, we use labels to categorise people along the spectrum. On the conventional tests, I appear centre left, yet in terms of labels many of the things that I express support for would be categorised as right.

I have tried to explain in the post that the apparent mix in my views is linked to my very specific experience.

Interestingly, Paul Barratt who shared similar experiences to me displays the same apparent spectrum confusion. If you look at Paul's posts, you could conclude that he is left of centre, and indeed he is on some issues. Yet he also talks about issues from new states to the Country Party to the New England independents in the same way I do.

Hardly surprising, in fact. Like me, Paul grew up in Armidale. Like me, Paul was a townie whose father was an academic at UNE. We went to the same schools from the Misses Cooper kindergarten to the University of New England, if a little apart. We both worked in the Commonwealth Public Service for many years.

Our views on many issues are not the same, yet many of our core values are. They do not fit the Australian conventional left-right spectrum because our experiences dictated otherwise.

I am not saying that Paul and I are unique, although aspects of our shared history places us outside the some of the conventional matrices. Rather, I think that I would challenge the value of the very concept of left and right unless carefully defined. They are labels that tend to obscure rather than clarify.                

Second Gillard ministry

This post is just for reference purposes. It shows the second Gillard ministry as sworn in taken from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and web site. 

The administrative arrangements are to long to replicate here. However, they are also on the PM&C web site.

For the benefit of international readers, the administrative arrangements are a formal order signed by the Governor General setting out who is responsible for what. As such, they lie at the heart of administrative structures so far as the Commonwealth is concerned.  

Ministers for bits and pieces

Quite early on in the Rudd ministry I suggested that there was a danger of that government being New South Walesed. By this I meant simply a form of government in which process, style and box ticking overtook substance.

One feature of the NSW approach has been to have a minister for absolutely everything, or at least everything perceived as requiring a public tick. This leads to multi-barrel ministerial titles. 

In the first Full Gillard ministry list, no less than 72 overlapping subject areas were listed. This type of approach creates problems.

It makes it difficult to work out who is responsible for what.  Further, once you start listing so many things, the non-inclusion of others becomes far more important. Governments may argue that that this is not important, but practical experience suggests otherwise.

We have seen both problems at work here in the reactions and responses to the initial Gillard ministry. First. people had to try to work out what fitted where. Then, that done, objections arose to the non-inclusion of certain things. This forced the Government to add indigenous health to Warren Snowdon's title as well as adding tertiary education to Chris Evan's title. In addition, it appears that the term "Regional Queensland" has been added to Jan McLucas's parliamentary secretary's role.

You see what I mean when I say that it all gets very messy.