Yes Minister or Yes Mate?

Two telling pieces from the this week's news. First to the Parliament House in Canberra, where I spent much of last week, the flagpole of which you can see here. I've noted before that it's a very informal place, where Ministers expect to be called by their first names when they drop into the staff canteen, so it came as a surprise when security staff were told in a memo that they should no longer use the word "mate" as a form of address. Even a newcomer like me was shocked. The word is ubiquitous, a form of male bonding and the last thing that anyone would take offence to.

Predictably, the media denounced it as "un-Australian", which is the most damning indictment you could possibly use here; the Prime Minister, no less, said it was absurd and looked disgusted; and mate-ship was resumed at the security desks within 24 hours.

The other item has a less happy ending. Further north, in Queensland, the state that is home to all things crawly and poisonous and vicious, a husband and wife were fishing from a boat in one of their favourite water-holes when he was taken by a crocodile. She made it to the shore and raised the alarm but there was no sign of her husband. That's horrific, but what was interesting was the reaction.

It's been illegal to shot wild crocodiles since 1972 and there were calls for culling to be restarted. I thought this was ridiculous. There are parts of this wonderful country where very wild animals live and humans really shouldn't venture, unless, to put it bluntly, they want to become part of the food chain. If you do venture into that territory, then I reckon you go at your own risk.

And that is exactly what the man's widow said. She objected to the shooting of the crocodile thought to have taken her husband and said no others should be killed. That was not what her husband would have wanted, she said. Clearly a woman of some character.

Neighbours

Been a weekend for meeting more neighbours, or at least finding out more about the people you wave at when you see them on the street. This came about about because Carmen, next door on one side, had a small party on Friday, and because my new two-stroke whipper-snipper wouldn't start on Saturday.

Carmen is the owner of Stolly, the large Russian Blue cat who spends some time sleeping at our place and her house has many large fish tanks, housing local fish she and her parents have caught while diving nearby. They're quite intrepid, I think. Not sure fish tanks go with having a large, confident tom-cat but apparently they live in harmony.

Greg and Linda, on the other side have two children, two cats and a husky. Greg does a lot of fishing when he gets the chance. He has a ferocious four-stroke whipper-snipper but he wasn't around yesterday. Phil and Tracy live across the street with their children - Phil used to drive a wrecking truck in Sydney but prefers it here. We first met Phil when the people who sold us this house failed to provide us with any means of getting in. At least, we had remotes for the garage but they'd locked the interior door. He was very helpful and calm.

Liz and John live behind us. She's a lawyer working from home and John runs his own smallgoods supply business and he's surfed since he was five, but not in the winter. He dreams of buying some land and living off it, which seems to be a recurring theme here. Having met them once, it'll be shame if they move.

Lee, directly across the road I'd met with her Jack Russell on one of my morning runs. She was trying to take a photo of the moon just as the sun was coming up over the ocean. Partner Peter I met when I was about to dislocate my shoulder trying to start our new whipper-snipper. He's originally from Germany and they actually do have a small farm, inland from here. He kindly confirmed that the failure to start was not due to my incompetence (that must be a first)and then kindly dealt with the offending grass with his own four-stroke. Oh yes, and as I mentioned previously, Anne from Bethesda lives round the corner. That's all for the moment.

Meeting and Sleeping

The beach is a great meeting place, I suppose for no other reason that people spend so much time there. Marcus, the estate agent who sold us this house, told me he often did deals "out the back" ie bobbing up and down beyond the wave-break on his surf board. And Luke, the MP for whom I work, often gets harangued about everything from the Pacific Highway to industrial relations when he dons his boardies and wanders down to Diggers, where we used to live.

My own meetings are simpler, I'm glad to say. Among the regulars on the dawn shift at Sandy Beach is Ann, a colleague of Sara's whose terrier sometimes licks the salt off my legs when I've been running. Actually, it's not quite so simple, because Ann comes from Bethesda, so there's an element of coincidence. But it's very simple for the dog.

On Saturday, I was wandering along, sizing up the surf, when I saw a familiar figure in T-shirt and boardies, board under his arm, clearly making his way back into the village. I see him often but don't know his name. Had he been in, I asked? No, he replied. "I came down early but then I fell asleep and now the wind's come up. Tomorrow morning about 7.30 to eight. I'll give it another go then." I went home, changed and surfed despite the wind.

Come 8.30 on Sunday, I was in the water and noticed the same bloke - same T-shirt, boardies and board - and watched him make his way down to the end of the beach, put down his board on the little dunes, lie face down in the sand, and evidently fall fast asleep. He was still there when I left, desperate for breakfast, some time later.

I suppose there's simplicity in the fact that, if you don't feel like doing anything, you can just lie down on the beach in the middle of winter and fall asleep, but I can't help feeling there are one or two questions hanging in the air as well.

Round Trip

We’re both on leave this week and so decided to go for a drive, just to remind ourselves how big this place this. We went north up the highway to Grafton, turned inland across the hills to Glen Innes, home of a Celtic festival and some faux standing stones, along the New England Highway to the small university town of Armidale, and then completed the circle by returning through Ebor, Dorrigo, Bellingen and Coffs. It was about 600km, I guess.

It was a day of broken cloud, and we’d had some rain, so the light was spectacular, navy blue clouds lurking over the still-parched inland fields. For the most part, the countryside looked empty, with just post-boxes hinting of a farm or homestead down the end of a dirt track. It reminded us of Mid Wales, only much more lonely. Although the road signs are in English, of course, it still feels foreign.


Caution - Quoll

You wouldn’t see “CAUTION - QUOLLS” in the UK, would you? And here, CATTLE AHEAD doesn’t mean that, occasionally, some cows will cross the road, it means that there’s a herd apparently living beside and on the road.

Every watercourse is named - Bullock Creek, Boggy Creek, Boundary Creek and Skeleton Creek - I guess because water’s so important but also to try to confer some ownership, some sense of security or continuity. Then it strikes you that for centuries before the Europeans appeared, all these places had other names, all foreign to us and with their own stories. At the end of the day, it’s just the kind of countryside to see ghosts.

I Agree....

Required reading for all podcasters......

Last Plane to Jakarta: Memo

Red Hot Chilli Peppers

To the Sawtell Chilli Festival this weekend. I have to say that the only chilli-based activity was a capsicum juggling competition, several stalls selling fiery chutneys and mustards, and one selling pepper plants, but the atmosphere was good. We bought these, and then went for a coffee and listened to a rather good Latin Jazz band. I never thought I'd have a garden with chillies growing in it.

Pirates to Pods...

There are many people, not least "the enigmatic RS" (see Real Reviews for his lighter work), who spend a lot of time pondering what's going on with blogs and podcasts and what it all means for the traditional media. There are also a lot of people pondering whether it's ever going to be possible to make a good living out of it.

One person who should know is Adam Curry, long-time broadcaster and podcast pioneer, and he's just devoted one of his Daily Source Code programmes (23 June) to a personal survey of how we got where we are and where we're likely to be going. It's a good listen, a fresh, largely unedited stream of consciousness by someone who's actually got something to say, taking you from the days of pirate radio, through do-it-yourself modems, to the current explosion in podcasts. I'll give you just one detail - you really should hear it for yourselves - but, bearing in mind he's probably one of the most successful podcasters, with 100,000 downloads per programme, it still costs him $350 an edition.

What he doesn't say is whether he's made any great efforts to commercialise it, either through advertising or subscription. I guess we're all used to having radio for free so any thought of subscription services probably won't get very far.

But then, that's not the point. The point is that, as long as you've got the patience of a saint to grapple with the technology, you can do it yourself and hopefully produce some content that's entertaining or useful to someone somewhere. It's a form of play (and, oh yes, I nearly forgot, and of communication) and not a means of making money. All of which tends to get lost in the debate, I think.

Just Warming Up.....

Gather the UK's having a spot of good weather. I know because most nights we watch the news on what we call the immigrants' channel or, to give it its proper title, the Special Broadcasting Service, which always ends with a global weather report, so you can see what the weather's doing where you used to live and decide whether it was a good idea to move or not.

It always starts in Australia, of course, then the globe swings east to New Zealand, and moves across Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America and finishes in North America. It also makes you realise how far away you are from home. The news reader, often Lee Lin Chin, with a staggeringly funky line in specs and hairdo's, picks out a few cities (somehow Asuncion always gets a mention, whoever's presenting). On the night that the outline of the UK was almost covered (it is very small) by the figure 32, Lee Lin dismissively intoned: "London - warm." If only she knew.

Anyway, I've also seem all the dire warnings about skin cancer, so remember what the kids are taught here: "slip, slop, slap - slip on your sunglasses, slop on the suncream, slap on a hat." Take care out there.

PS ...and just to show how different things are here...just watched the SBS evening news and the coverage of the elections in the Northern Territory. The Country Liberal Party did very badly and part of the blame is falling on their plan to hook the territory's electricity supply up to the national grid, a policy described by SBS's sound and sober political correspondent as "wacky."

Wrecks and Roos

It's a public holiday, so this morning we set out for a walk along Sandy Beach, over Bare Bluff, along Sandy Back Beach, Fiddeman's Beach, Emerald Beach and up on to Look At Me Now Point. The scenery becomes increasingly like Pembrokeshire, apart from the plaques commemorating shipwrecks, with considerable loss of life, and the colony of kangaroos on the point. It's the depths of winter, so shorts and t-shirt are fine.

Somehow, the thought of the trip to Canberra doesn't appeal after that. Although the clamour about Schapelle Corby (see below) seems to have died down, Parliament House seem to have almost daily deliveries of white powder, causing secuity alerts, presumably as some kind of reaction to the package that was sent to the Indonesian embassy. You'll be glad to hear that the loading bay staff who discover this stuff are offered counselling. It's not quite the image I had of Australians, I must admit.

Beauty and The Beast

I expect it’s hardly raised a ripple in the UK but down here, the country’s been convulsed by the case of Schapelle Corby. You don’t know who she is, do you? Well, she’s a young, beautiful (by common consent) beauty student who has just started a 20-year jail sentence in Bali after being found guilty of trying to smuggle 4.1kg of cannabis in her body-board bag.


Schapelle Corby

So much is fact. Nothing else is. The reaction to the sentence was in some cases hysterical and there have calls for a boycott of Bali as a holiday destination (Bali is to Australia what Majorca is to the UK), attempts to claw back donations to the tsunami relief fund, and suspicious white powder was sent to the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra, setting off a major security alert.

Why so much fuss? Well, the pictures have been riveting. The attractive Aussie girl next door in a scrum of Indonesian policemen, or weeping in the courtroom, pressing her hand to her forehead in her shock and grief etc etc. It’s hard to see anyone making such a meal of it if the defendant had been a middle aged man and, indeed, no one is making the slightest fuss about the 40-odd other Australians facing drugs charges elsewhere in South East Asia.

There’s also (and this is an opinion frequently expressed by Australians) latent racism. Turn a place into a holiday destination and it loses some of its foreign-ness, it’s colonised, and you can forget that you're abroad where different attitudes and customs apply. Until something like this happens. Then it’s foreign again and corrupt and contemptible.

There’s been much confusion about how the Australians could react so generously to the tsunami appeal and then react so extremely to this trial and verdict. The easy answer is that the people who donated their money to the Boxing Day victims are not the same people who calling for boycotts etc now. Well, the ones who want their money back clearly are the same, but you know what I mean. The fact is that many have clearly decided that she’s innocent and a victim of a corrupt and inadequate judicial system.

Anyway, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, it’s rare that one sees the Prime Minister, John Howard, looking rattled but he certainly did last night when the Indonesian Embassy was being evacuated. And his line of not interfering in the judicial system of another country clearly doesn’t stand up for many weighed against the weeping beauty student in the hands of foreign devils.

And I’m sure it’s not the same people castigating John Howard for not doing enough that are currently on holiday in Bali and taking photographs of the jail where she is held or writing the spoof adverts mentioned in the Daily Telegraph, one of her main supporters, for the Schapelle Lawn Mower (holds 4.1kg of grass) or the Schapelle Beauty Treatment (takes twenty years off your life).

The Drug Dogs Don't Work

Funny old weekend. Started off by recovering from the drugs the dental surgeon administered so he could take a tooth out through the side of my gum (don't ask). If anyone offers you "twilight sedation", take it. It's great at the time. Then we made our way to the garden centre to start our project to soften the stark outlines of 15 Ti-Tree Road. Now I can look out my study window and see a Lady Palm, two Sago Palms and a Milky Way. Looks good.

Sunday has so far seen a short but somewhat volatile surfing session. No one told me there were so many different kinds of waves. And as I'm flying off to Canberra (not jetting off, you'll note; the plane has propellors) I read with interest about the airport sniffer dogs who have to be retrained because the cocaine they were given by the police to practise on turned out to be talcum powder. I wonder how many old woman and babies they arrested before they sorted that one out.

Corridors of Power

Been working in Canberra this week. Don’t ask me what the city is like because although I was there all week, all I saw was the road from the apartments where we stayed and Parliament House. On a rare daylight trip, I did notice that the leaves had turned brown, a welcome reminder of autumn back in the UK - we don’t really get seasons in Coffs.

Parliament House is a fine building, though suffering at the moment from work to install concrete barriers against car bombers. It was built in the eighties and fine wood and Australian art are much in evidence. Stand in central, enclosed courtyard and look up and you’ll see the vast Australian flag flying against a perfect blue sky through the glass roof.

It’s confusing, though, as most of the corridors look exactly the same and much of the prowling the corridors of power is because the prowler is lost, at least in my case and I gather that’s common. But I have the route between our office and Aussie’s Coffee Bar pretty well mapped. I even know the short cut that runs through one of the many open courtyards, still warm enough to sit in with a sandwich and a book in a rare break.

I guess most Westminster MPs would die for offices like these. Two large working rooms, an anteroom, bathroom and kitchen. You’ve probably gathered from anything you may have seen about proceedings in the House of Representatives that things are somewhat less formal. Electorate Officers like me are the lowest form of life but that didn’t stop the Deputy Speaker joining three of us for breakfast.

G'day, Minister...

Spent Friday roaming around Coffs Harbour with a visiting Government Minister. It was very different from what used to happen in my Welsh Office days. For one thing, I can't recall any British Minister greeting people with a cheery "hi, guys". Also, I never worked for a Minister who used to be a shearers' cook, even in Wales, or who held a pilot's licence. It was rather refreshing.

One thing was familiar. Her staff seemed to be just as firmly glued to their mobiles and just as harassed as I remember being so I must have made some progress. On the other hand, later this evening I will carefully pack five shirts, five pairs of pants and five pairs of socks (and a few other things of course)in preparation to spend next week in Canberra, a process that does seems horribly familiar even after all this time. It's Budget Day on Tuesday, against the background of a leadership dispute between the Treasurer and the Prime Minister. Funny, but that's ringing bells, too...

Still, I don't have to go every week and I consoled myself this afternoon by registering the domain for the forthcoming podcast. Watch this space.

Here, There and Everywhere

I'm not sure what to make of this.

I'm working on a podcast in Sandy Beach, NSW, that will emanate from a server in Pontypool, Gwent.

I hope the site will be designed by a Dutchman, also in NSW, who employs someone in India to market his work and a Ukrainian to write his code.

A record company in New York contacts me about a track I played on a radio programme only broadcast in Coffs Harbour.

I listen to a podcast by an American, recorded in Guildford, praising Peter Day, a BBC broadcaster I used to listen to in the UK.

Two people have lunch in London and a blog prepared again in Sandy Beach is mentioned in a blog prepared in the UK. People from all over the place then log on to the Sandy Beach blog.

I don't know what it means but it's a shame we never see each other.

B and B....and P

Just back from a weekend away in the area around a small "heritage" town called Bangalow, about two-and-a-half hours' drive to the north. Bangalow, while pretty, seems in danger of stifling under the weight of its own pretentions, a strange mixture of designer capitalism to cater for the well-to-do Sydneysiders who holiday there and equally well-organised hippy capitalism. Actually, now I think about it, there's no real difference between the two but, somehow, you'd hope there would be. Anyway, we were lucky to get out without having our chakras realigned and our wallets emptied.

We stayed outside the town in a bed and breakfast in hilly countryside that was strangely like mid and west Wales. Though the wildlife wasn't. A carpet python emerged to sun itself at breakfast each day; a slimy-looking tree frog watched us as we sat on our verandah in the evenings; and there was a possum fight in the palm tree opposite, after which one of the possums floundered on to the nearby roof and waddled off with its tail in the air.

We also found a picnic shelter and water tank in the middle of nowhere which was being decorated with coloured glass and mirrors. Don't know why but it restored my faith after Bangalow.....

Long Ago and Far Away

They say the internet has made the world a smaller place and, in many ways, that’s true. But, in many ways, we just haven’t caught up. Living here, for example, is quite deceptive. We have all the benefits and disbenefits of civilisation and you certainly don’t feel as though you’re out on a limb when you go about your everyday business. And, of course, we also have the internet which brings a cornucopia of goods and services from all over the world to our doorstep. Only slowly.

Seeing all that stuff on your screen that you can order at the touch of a button is deceptive. Order something from Amazon and, unless you pay shipping fees sufficient to deliver the contents of a small home, your order will take weeks to arrive. Try something nearer home, in a fit of Antipodean loyalty, thinking it must arrive more quickly, and you’re likely to be disappointed.

I ordered couple of books from Sydney more than two weeks ago. I’ve just received an email to say they’re finally on their way but it’ll take them a few days at least to struggle up the coast from the capital. I decided to try Smoke CDs for some music. It’s a perky New Zealand outfit with a fine range of cds but, again after far more time than I’m used to waiting, my order still hasn’t even left the Land of the Long White Cloud.

I think one reason may be that there’s not many of us down here. So there’s less money to be made, less money to pay people to do the work and less people to find to do the work. For instance, yesterday a Qantas flight from Sydney to Wellington had to be diverted when Wellington airport was closed because “an air controller was sick.” Now you can’t imagine Heathrow running short of an air controller or two and having to shut but I guess there’s not that many of them in Wellington. Possibly just two, taking it in turns.

So slowly it dawns on you that, despite appearances, you really are on the edge of things and that perhaps getting what you want, exactly when you want it, isn’t that important after all.

Rubbing It In

Been pondering the unemployed/employed interface a bit for obvious reasons, and the loss of most of my time. All I can say is the Australians certainly rub these things in.

We were on a constituency outreach visit the other day at a beautiful place on the coast to the south called South West Rocks. It was a splendid day and we'd parked the car outside the tourist information centre, a wooden cottage overlooking some dunes and a beach. Luke, my boss and MP, had gone to buy us some coffee after being berated by a passer-by about the Tampa and the "children overboard" fiasco (which was nothing to do with him but that's grass-roots politics for you) leaving me to watch the shop, which meant standing in the sun next to the sandwich board which we'd erected, announcing our presence.

I was gazing longingly down on the beach when a short-clad bloke marched purposefully into the garden of the information centre centre, went inside and then emerged in the garden with an Australian flag which he proceeded to run up a flag pole. I thought how splendid the blue and red and the stars looked in the sunshine. Nearly all flags do, I find.

"That your first job of the day?" I asked.

"Mate," he replied with relish, "it's my only job."

Off Air

I've given up my programme on CHYFM. I'd always wanted the chance to present some music but, when it came to it, I didn't enjoy it as much as thought I would. For one thing, it was rather lonely.

There was never anyone else at the station when I was on air and the frequent lack of light bulbs late on a Friday night, coupled with the slightly damaged sound-proofing on the walls, the teenage carvings on the desk-top, and the generally down-at-heel air had a lowering effect. So did the phone calls, always requesting Britney or Kylie. "Why don't you play some new stuff?" one asked. Well, I was playing new stuff. It just wasn't Britney or Kiley. I found that very depressing. I preferred the drunks, on the whole. Lack of any sense whatsoever is easier to handle then lack of appreciation. One of them did say: "I don't like any of the stuff you're playing. What about Midnight Oil?" I rest my case.

Then I realised that I didn't know one person who listened to the programme. A new colleague of Sara's tuned in one night by mistake, I think, and her verdict was something like this: "We heard one long, boring track, then Richard's voice. he's got a very good voice. Then we turned off." (If that was a Jim White track, I'm hurt, deeply hurt). So now that I'm working full-time, I can see no point in continuing to devote a minimum of three nights a week to it, including preparation time.

I'm thinking of turning to that vast, warm, welcoming home of all lost causes and personal enthusiasms - the web. What interest there was came from the playlists I posted each week. I even had a New York record company emailing me, offering me an album. That was some weeks ago and nothing's arrived yet but, hey, that's rock n roll and, in any case, you get my point. It's the thought, or the email, that counts. In due course, no doubt after a titanic battle with technology, something will emanate from Sandy Beach to the handful of faithful scattered across the world. And, yes, there will be no Kiley. Or Midnight Oil.

Wedding Day

On Saturday, March 26, Sara and I were married on Sandy Beach. We had a splendid day.

Trims and Tides

A week to go to our wedding. Iwan has just jetted in and was whisked straight from Coffs International Airport to Stuart and Glen's digital telly where we could watch the Wales-Ireland game. It would be unseemly to gloat here, so I'll do it elsewhere instead.

Yesterday, Sara went off to a rehearsal at the hairdresser's. The idea of a rehearsal for a haircut was new to me, I must admit. I've been banned from visiting my barber between now and the ceremony on the grounds that I might end up looking like a convict, as usual. I went surfing instead (nasty southerlies whipped up a viscous sweep. Very tricky). However, I did check the tides for next Saturday. As we're getting married on the beach, this seemed like a good move, though possibly I've left it a bit late. Nearly everyone can swim, or at least float, and we'll have a surf board on hand for signing the register, so I think we'll be fine. Could give new meaning to the phrase "the sea of matrimony." On the other hand, as they say here, "she'll be right, mate."