Southern Ocean

The last of of our seven seminar tour around Australia finished at 4.30 yesterday (evaluation). The videos seemed to make good sense to people. The cases of overlap-negotiation we'd selected from the film of Mayor Felicity Ann Lewis and CEO Mark Searle at Marion City Council went down particularly well, with practitioners' analyses adding to insights about the process of political-management leadership.

John and I went back to our hotel - The Chifley, Adelaide - showered and took a tram to the beach at Glenelg, met an old academic friend of John's - Chris Paris - drank good beer from bottles - Coopers sparkling ale - watched the sun set below the Southern Ocean and enjoyed a celebratory meal of champagne and a good Shiraz with perfectly cooked 500gr steaks at the Glenelg BBQ Inn in honour of scholarly work with practitioners. This Bond-ish product placement serves as a memo.

Within a drink of meeting Chris I'd learned not only that he's a keen fisherman. John had already told me and he'd chatted knowledgeably with an old bloke squidding on the pier - smears of black ink on the deck - who'd come from Essex, where I was born, but...but that he was a campaigner for the conservation of brown trout (most don't know the difference between them and the rainbow) and a keen dryfly fisherman who'd enjoyed my stepfather on TV - and remembered the shed. "So you're his stepson. Wow!" Well that got me more unearned beer and a reminder that there are still places in the world where you don't have to be rich to enjoy The way of a trout with the fly - one of Jack's favoured fishing books for all his rueful amusement at the bizarre earnestness of the Skues-Halford controversy.

What was so pleasing was Chris' optimism about the prospects for restoring the habitat of wild trout - my favourite fish and the first live fish that ever I saw while I was living at Bignell's Cottage in Itchen Abbas, still with the hush-mark on my upper lip trailing clouds of glory, staring down from a low footbridge over the Itchen by Grey's fishing hut, swimming with the water crowfoot, holding station above the golden gravel.

Bay, my sister, my mother Barbara, and my great grandmother, Lucy,at Itchen Abbas in 1945

We'd had a minor mishap the night before the Adelaide seminar. Sydney Airport had a computer hiccup at check-in; long queues and all luggage labels written in longhand at the desk with staff struggling with unfamiliar use of pens. At Adelaide I waited with growing anxiety by the emptying carousel. My bag had gone missing with my laptop charging cable and speakers - vital to our teaching. QUANTAS help-desk gave me a nightbag with tooth things and pyjams but I had to wear my shirt and underwear another day. In the morning John phone-found a local Apple dealer - Next Byte. While he and Julie Kerr, of the Local Government Association of South Australia, welcomed arriving participants, I taxi'd to Rundell Mall, got my cable and we were ready to roll at The Pavilion with seconds to spare; a local friend of John's having driven over with excellent speakers.

My bag was in my hotel by the end of the day. "You should never travel without cables in your hand luggage" said Lin in the kitchen in Handsworth as I chatted with her on Skype from Adelaide airport QUANTAS lounge. She brought Oscar dog to the screen camera but he's sees with his nose and doesn't do digital. Lin's email:

I'm not just a pretty face, you know!

In fact I'm not a pretty face at all at the moment - I'm ill with flu and I feel awful. Amy and Guy are both ill too, though I don't think it's the same bug. Kiz was ill last week and stayed here for 3 days - most of the time in bed in the spare room. She's home now, but has had to go to the doctor, who told her to expect the bug to last for 8 - 10 days. Richard says I've still got sickness to look forward to, if I've caught it from Kiz. I hope mine's a different bug!

Auntie Barbara's given us a goose for Xmas. Richard went to Mom and Dad's to fetch it this evening and it's now in Jo's freezer. Not sure where it was poached from. lol

Gosh, the time's gone quickly. Only just over a week till you come home! See you soon. L x

Down to the shore on the evening tram to Glenelg - every colour under the sun

* ** ** * A letter about the Victoria Jubilee Allotments dated 18/11/09 from Andrew Hogben, forwarded by John Tyrell in Handsworth after he'd received it from Cllr Martin Mullaney, Birmingham's Cabinet Member for Leisure Sport and Culture:

Dear Councillor Mullaney. I have spoken to the developer's representative today who confirms that although recent heavy rain has delayed the importation of the final loads of topsoil for the plots; this will be completed along with service connections to the building which is now in place, landscaping around the building; the ripping of the plot areas and provision of turf between plots, by Christmas. At the same time I am expecting a draft transfer plan today from Persimmon which I will forward to Education and our Survey section tomorrow for verification, prior to preparing the authority to transfer the various parcels of land to the Council i.e. the open space, playing fields and allotments. Persimmon have agreed that if necessary the Council could be licensed to occupy the allotments land early in the new year, if the transfer is delayed for any reason e.g. ordnance survey query proposed boundaries identified for the transfer. I'll keep you informed of progress. Regards, Andy Hogben, Principal Landscape Development Officer 0121 303 4764 andrew.hogben@birmingham.gov.uk

Adelaide: flying over Glenelg pier where we were the evening before

Adelaide Hills

Jack said to me long ago “when you visit a new land, be an unashamed tourist”. I’m sponging up places and thoughts. On Sunday John M drove us up the Adelaide Hills via tunnels named after the artist Hans Heysen, turning off the Crafers Freeway to Melbourne to view the vast panorama of the city and St.Vincents Gulf from Mount Lofty summit – spied by Matthew Flinders from his 340 ton sailing ship Investigator in 1802, as he circumnavigated the continent - giving it the name Terra Australis. Flinders sailed for home in 1803 - his survey done, but about 100 miles south-west of the Great Barrier Reef, off the coast of Queensland, two ships, Porpoise and Cato, one carrying Flinders, were wrecked with most of the crew from the Investigator. Flinders sailed 700 miles to Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) in his ship's cutter - renamed HMS Hope - with 13 others to get help. The survivors managed to salvage food and water for three months - long enough for Flinders to rescue them.
Last night I looked up from a stroll down Hindley Street and spied above us the Southern Cross – the constellation on Australia’s national flag.
The pleasure of sharing ideas and debating with another academic is unalloyed. We’ve discussed the economy of the world, the fate of the species, social security, public health and transport, history, biography, our journeys, our families and our decisions, our disasters, worries, crises, joys and successes – strolling, travelling, eating, drinking and teaching together. We have three workshops under our belts – all with more than satisfactory evaluations from those attending, and there’s a third and last to come in Perth. My mind is working delightfully collecting ideas in conversation with John and the people we teach.I’ve seen pictures of such beauty - this one of turtles by Jan Leon, she calls 'Reaching for above' - Tobwabba art. I viewed a limpid southern ocean lapping the shores of a terra now thoroughly cognita - though not to me. At Norton Summit, John showed me the bronze statue of an archetypal Australian – Sir Thomas Playford, South Australian premier from 1938 to 1965 and farmer - widely know as 'honest Tom' for his integrity in private and public life.
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In this part of the country corrugated iron is treated as a heritage material, part of the Australian landscape, and the character of place - to be used and if possible conserved. It makes me look at this roof beneath my Holiday Inn window in central Adelaide in a wholly different
and positive way.

'If you are an Australian, a 'Baby Boomer', grew up just about anywhere outside a large city, or even in one, or lived on 'the land', or worked in a 'shed', or in factory of some kind, the chances are that just about every roof that you've ever lived or worked under would have been corrugated iron. The water you drank as kid more than likely would have been collected on your roof and indeed you may well have been conceived under the the stuff. And, if you're were brought up as a Protestant Non-conformist there's a better than even chance that you've done some praying under corrugated iron ­ and just maybe you were married under it too. To just such an 'Aussie' the very idea that this stuff was invented in England is almost unbelievable. It's said that corrugated iron is "about as Australian as eucalyptus oil." Well, that's what they say! And, if they do, "it couldn't really be English ­ could it?" Antipodean disbelief might have something to do with Australia exporting corrugated iron to the UK from about WW2 on and it might also have something to do with the fact that corrugated iron is an omnipresent element in the landscapes of "home". Even if it's virtually invisible to unseeking eyes, corrugated iron gives Aussie places a vernacular placedness and that's an idea that's deeply embedded in the imagination of a great many Australians

....similarly, tho' not made in England, the surface of the ubiquitous gum tree - the eucalyptusI'm getting some good reading from Australian newspapers, thus, a piece by Henry Ergas called 'Kevin 24-7 or 7-11' in The Australian draws on international references to explore the tension between evidence-based policy (something for which I have a firm but conditional liking) driven by bureaucrats and policy wonks seeking to be rational researchers and policy-based evidence relied upon by political leaders under pressure, in connection with the PM's current difficulties over his FuelWatch Scheme:

If Australian public policy formulation is rarely a dignified process, the FuelWatch debate has plumbed new depths. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Graeme Samuel emerged as the white knight for the Government from which he is seeking reappointment, brandishing an econometric study that claimed to find support for the scheme. Seizing on the ACCC's support, Kevin Rudd - self-proclaimed economic conservative and champion of deregulation - resurfaced as the crudest of populists, casting the issue as a titanic battle against big oil. A bemused public would have been forgiven for thinking that never had so much been made of so little. This is all the more the case as it is a mystery worthy of the finest detective writers, if not a fitting subject for psychiatric investigation, that the ACCC study could have been given any weight, much less made the foundation on which one of Australia's largest industries would be subjected to costly, intrusive and internationally unprecedented regulation. In effect, the ACCC released virtually nothing: not the specifications it had used, nor the tests of statistical significance that routinely serve to assess the robustness of the results. Additionally and importantly, it refused to disclose the underlying data, making it impossible for others - including the Opposition - to actually assess the ACCC's approach, examine whether its claimed results could be replicated and test whether other explanations of the trends in that data might prove superior. That such scant information, selectively disclosed, would provide the basis for a massive expansion in regulation beggars the imagination. (continues)

It feels like Lord Butler's Review of WMD rewritten as farce - except that the hi-politics of energy, in this case petrol, are so serious.

On our last morning in Adelaide we went to a bookshop and I browsed the history books for young children. What contested stories do children get about their country? Like ours the books I saw were eclectic and ranging sets of notes interspersed with cartoon illustrations for discussion with the class - workbooks that cover the possibility of contested narratives about what it means to come from Australia or to be Australian. For grown-ups I was pointed - for starters - to Geoffrey Blainey's a shorter history of australia (the lower case fonts are his or his publisher's) - a scholar who's a contender in the predictable and welcome 'history wars' of the times.

Earlier in the week John stopped by a back road from Bendigo to show me my 'first' kangaroo. So now I've two more Australian icons - which, as Lin observed - not wholly originally - if they became a number, would produce a woolly jumper. The WiFi connection in the Virgin Club Lounge at Adelaide Airport is reluctant to let me Google this - especially the conception of a kangasheep.

Drought

ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece has failed to ensure it is ready for the forest fire season, a year after devastating wild fires killed 65 people, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Greece said on Tuesday. Last summer's fires, the worst in decades, also scorched thousands of hectares of forest and farmland, destroyed villages and threatened archaeological sites. "Despite the (government's) efforts there are still problems that, if not dealt with, will lead to the same problems as last year, or worse," Dimitris Karavellas, head of the Greek branch of the WWF, told a news conference. "I'm afraid we will have fires similar to last year's ... We must face the fact that our fire protection system is not efficient," Karavellas said. A dry winter followed by summer temperatures well above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) fanned the flames last year and meteorologists predict temperatures could hit 46 Celsius this summer.

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I’m having an engrossing time in Australia - not least for the proximity to a crisis induced by water scarcity. This is a problem we find difficult to understand in the UK - for the present. I went to John and Annie’s home in Bendigo at dusk on Thursday by car. We travelled there and back by train for a day workshop in Melbourne on Friday. Being driven the 100 miles to Melbourne airport to go to Adelaide by plane on Sunday, I gazed on wasting trees, dehydrated grassland, barely puddled creeks and the dried shorelines of lakes. Rain is not predicted though it falls in showers near the coast. Life continues as normal on the surface and even rather luxuriously with easy air travel, busy but uncrowded highways. I've enjoyed fine food and plenty of showers, and - encouraged by a four minute egg timer - observing invocations to be sparing with water. I've had clothes washed, slept well and travelled easily, in the generous company of my host John Martin, who, when I've not noticed them, points out the effects of the long drought afflicting all but the northern monsoon belts of the Australian continent. Even there rainfall is reduced.
Signs spread the message to steward water; farmers are leaving the land as banks foreclose on failed harvests. Some optimists are planting, though John tells me, seeds too often fail to germinate. Dew provides some relief. The water table sinks making wells unreliable. At the Local Government Managers (Australia) conference in Gold Coast last week, talk seldom strayed from the sustainability agenda, and the need to target 2020 as a year to achieve carbon-neutrality. I’m armed with arguments only an ostrich could refute. There are plenty of them.

The other evening I listened – via YouTube – to one of the best of speeches - Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia, saying “sorry” to the descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia – her indigenous people and the traditional owners of her land - a speech made earlier in the year.

Right now Rudd’s going through a tricky patch, reflecting all I know and have yet to learn about the tensions between politics, management and professionalism – in this case between evidence-based policy and political expediency. A fine piece by the journalist Lenore Taylor in the Inquirer section of The Weekend Australian (31 May-1 June 08) expounds this theme – a piece called 'Wandering off message' which I will certainly keep for future reference:

In the short term, the important reform debates that the Government could use to get back on the front foot will be a challenge to control and are likely to raise the same old questions about evidence-based policy-making and the demands of political expediency.