just how Alexander Downer thought that his comments on Fran Kelly’s breakfast program last week were going to improve the asylum seeker problem. The previous government had a solution- undertaken “sotto vocce” and it “hasn’t generated much publicity lately in Australia”:
We used to get the navy not to guide the boats into the Australian shoreline, what we did (laugh) was we got the navy to tow the boats back to the Indonesian Territorial Waters, left the boats with enough fuel, food and so on to get to a port in Indonesia, guided them to where to go and then left them- obviously monitored to make sure that the boat was safe, but disappeared over the horizon…. We didn’t run around boasting that we were doing this because we knew the Indonesians accepted these people back through gritted teeth.
My wordy, that’s a refugee policy to be proud of, and one we’d endorse heartily if the boats were sailing in the other direction, wouldn’t we. Ah yes, we can hold our heads high.
…whether we really need ARMED security guards at railway stations? Bailleiu seems to have picked a winner as an election policy. But two ARMED security guards down at the little station in Macleod? Every night? I don’t think so.
…if the American private security firm Blackwater changed its name to “Xe” so that people would stop talking about it because no-one could pronounce the name?
The Unknown As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
Oh, the horror, the horror as gobbledegook (albeit true, but gobbledegook nonetheless) best left in the M.B.A. seminar room escapes out into the real world!
As for me, I’ll go with Mark Twain (or IS it Mark Twain? I don’t know for sure….)
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
A good little aphorism for life in general, and especially for historians, I reckon.
Saturday’s Age had a feature about the rising anxiety over the State Government’s proposal to move the city’s urban limits out further, and the opposing anxiety over high-density living and local amenity. It pointed out a number of inner-city sites that had been left vacant for many years where high-density development could add to the city’s housing stock without moving further into semi-rural areas.
One of the aerial shots accompanying the article showed a large expanse of land near North Melbourne station that has lain vacant since Solomon Lew purchased it 17 years ago. What struck me was the huge FCUK sign draped across the deserted factory building on the site. Unfortunately the Age online article doesn’t show the photograph, but you can see the building I am talking about here. You might also want to consider the vacuous, clinical approach that the advertisers have taken in this “project”.
I also don’t want to post the picture here because I find it crass and offensive. I’m well aware of the smarty-pants, smirking, superior marketing decision behind the choice of the FCUK brand. But why shouldn‘t people find it offensive? Why should an obscenity suggested on a billboard impose itself so insistently and aggressively onto the public consciousness? The brand proprietors can take the high moral ground and protest that the word in itself is not obscene, but these four letters have not been chosen randomly: they know full well that the cognitive pathways of a population literate in English will automatically read the word differently.
This is swaggering, arrogant visual pollution, and I resent having it forced upon me.
Should Melbourne University should be known as “The White Knight for Struggling Arts/Music Institutions” or as “The Institution That Ate Its Competitors”? The Victorian College of the Arts amalgamated with Melbourne University as the “Faculty of VCA and music”, and last year the Australian National Academy of Music, based at the South Melbourne Town Hall, also fell under the auspices of the University of Melbourne when the Federal Government withdrew its funding. So much for choice.
Enter the new Dean, Professor Sharman Pretty. Employed as a “change agent”, she is charged with restructuring the VCA’s six schools into three, shaving $11 million dollars from the budget and fitting the schools’ offerings into the Melbourne Model. And so we see the music theatre course, which started this year with 32 students accepted from 370 applicants, suspended from 2010- but “Professor Pretty says it will return if it can be made to fit the model“. Yes, that’s the way- fit the course to the curriculum model- not to the students, not to the work environment, not to the demands of the genre itself.
I’ve done my time observing the nursery of music theatre from the outside: the tap-dance lessons, the end of year dancing school concerts, the examinations, the auditions, the hair rollers, the tap-shoes, the false eyelashes. Consider the mainstay of musical theatre today, the franchised musical, shipped into a capital city for a financially-lucrative, solidly-marketed period with its authorized sets and carefully mandated cookie-cutter characters. Is this really post-graduate study???
But Professor Pretty knows how to play the market game.
Benchmarks?? Internationally competitive?? Sheesh. I don’t really understand what drives the artistic character, but I strongly suspect that it has nothing to do with academic excellence, grade point averages and assessment tasks, and an awful lot to do with dreams, drive and ambition. I wonder if we can “benchmark” them?
I will mandate that car horns be modified to the highest standards of emotional intelligence. There will be a friendly little toot for “Hey, the red light’s changed!” or “I’m here- don’t back your car into me!”.
There’ll be a happy little wave for “Hello! Haven’t seen you for ages!” and a cheery call of “Hey, I’m here in the driveway waiting for you!” when you pick someone up from their house.
There’ll be a slightly more impatient “Come ON, I can’t wait all day!” and a derisive “Get off your mobile phone, you wanker!”.
And of course, there’ll still be the loud, strident “IDIOT!!!!!!”
Say it is isn’t so. The Sydney Lord Mayor, it seems, has banned Tim Tams in case the chocolate is produced using child labour. Not only Tim Tams, but also bottled water, fat-rich cakes, dairy desserts and “bad” fish species. That’s it- no more Sydney Town Council functions for me.
But where to get a good nosh-up at a function these days? Some ten years ago, in a dual-sector university where I worked, Arnott’s Cream Assorted were loftily derided by higher-ed staff as “TAFE biscuits”. Nothing but danish pastries and blueberry mini muffins would do. Now we all pounce avidly upon the Monte Carlo and- even better still- the Kingston with servile gratitude at such bounty.
Mind you, in my day ANY sort of chocolate biscuit was luxury, child labour or not. I come from good home-cooking stock and can rustle up chocolate chip biscuits, chocolate brownies, date loaf and my special lemon slice with nary a thought. In fact, I am becoming increasingly aware, faced with tables of ‘bring a plate’ suppers all bearing their Coles labels, that home cooked biscuits and cakes are becoming quite endangered.
I have breathed Melbourne air for over fifty years and have never yet done a Tim Tam dunk.
At my age, I think it would be rather undignified.
“examine and critically assess the value of available primary and secondary sources, study human motivation, develop an understanding of viewpoints held by the people of the past, and recognize causal relationships between events and draw conclusions about their historical investigations”.
Have the stages of conceptual development suddenly been thrown out the window?? What happened to my good friend Piaget?? The last time I spoke to an 8-12 year old (which, admittedly, has not occurred recently), I was not particularly struck with their insight into human motivation.
And to be honest, I’m still grappling with these core components with historical understanding today. Perhaps I need to find a 9 year old to show me how.
