Self-Pic

 I've been blogging for years, now but have never posted a current pic.

To please the lurkers, I'll remedy this today.

Only complimentary comments will be posted.

Inspirational People (2) - Dr Geoffrey Swan OAM

 

Image courtesy Northern Star

This tribute is to Geoffrey Swan. 

Geoff had a distinguished career in Special Education, and I was one of many whom he inspired to make a career of this work.

He was truly a pioneer in the field, and pre-eminent in the education of children with cerebral palsy in Australia. He was awarded an OAM in 1987 for services to children with special needs.

My parents knew Geoff before I did. He was appointed (from Teachers' College, I think), to the small school at Carmila West in Central Queensland in the early fifties. Geoff was a young single man living in fairly isolated circumstances, so my parents, both teachers at Carmila about 7 kilometres to the East, took a supportive interest in him. Geoff at that time had no car (and could not drive).

He was a frequent guest on Sunday evening dinners at our place, and my father would collect him from his lodgings (he boarded with a woman he called "the merry widow") and return him, down a very rough gravel road in our Austin A40, at the end of the evening.

Apparently, he used to put me on his shoulders and carry me around, but at age three or four at the time, I have no memory of this. 

My first memory of Geoff is of a visit I made as a student teacher in the late sixties to what was then called the State School for Spastic Children at New Farm Brisbane. Our visit coincided with Geoff's return to the school as principal from a visit to the UK as part of his award of a Churchill fellowship. Our bus pulled up just as he arrived, and every single child who could (many were in wheelchairs) rushed to greet him. He was obviously loved and respected by the children, and this memory has stayed with me.

In the ten months I spent in Vietnam in 1970, my father used to mail me copies of the Education Office Gazette, which contained notices of vacancies in various schools all over Queensland. In December, I saw an advertisement for teachers in special education and I made a general application. My motive was not driven by any interest in teaching children with disabilities, but by an understanding that special schools were generally located in the cities, and I did not want to follow my father's career path which had seen him transferred all over the backblocks of Queensland before he became senior enough to land a big school in an urban environment.

Whilst it never became explicit, I'm pretty sure that my appointment as a teacher to the State School for Spastic Children was largely on a recommendation from Geoff. Apparently, there was a shortage of males in the field at that time.

I was thrown in at the deep end of teaching students with disabilities, but Geoff was an enormously supportive principal. I remember not receiving a paycheck after the first two weeks in the job, which put me in a spot of bother. The department had somehow mislaid my file during my two years in the army. I had bought a car, placed a bond on a flat, and bought clothes, etc to set myself up for my new career. I was broke.

Geoff hounded pay section in George Street, which led to a payroll clerk driving from the Treasury building to the school at New Farm, and presenting me with a manual cheque, something unheard of at the time. Geoff had the happy knack of bulldozing bureaucracy.

He used this knack to improve the quality of life, initially of the children at his school, and later as an Inspector working statewide with students with disabilities. The school at New Farm had toilets on the verandahs which resembled refrigerators in the colder months. Geoff had, for some time, unsuccessfully pestered the then Public Works Department to install wall heaters in the cubicles. Eventually, he became so exasperated on a particularly cold day in August when the westerlies were blowing, that he invited the local works superintendent to the school. This bloke was surprised to be invited to remove his trousers and sit on one of the toilet pedestals for ten minutes. The heaters were installed the following week.

As I moved around the state as a principal, Geoff was always there in his role as Inspector. He showed no fear nor favour, and if I stuffed up, he would tell me in no uncertain terms. In discussion with my colleagues through the years, I learned that he operated this way with everyone.

He retired in 1987 but continued to maintain a strong interest in the field, completing his PhD on the history of Special Education in Queensland (from Segregation to Integration) in 1996.

A few years before he died, the local Special Education Association held an annual dinner. As a previous office-bearer in the association, I suggested to the organisers that we invite Geoff to the dinner as a guest speaker. Unbeknownst to me, the comedian Jamie Dunn was engaged to provide light relief.

I collected Geoff from his home in Bardon and drove him to the dinner. Jamie Dunn did his gig, and shortly after Geoff rose to speak. He had everybody in stitches by the end of his address. He got more laughs than Jamie Dunn, who is a very funny man.

Geoff died a few years ago, predeceased by his wife Doris, who was one of the most charming and gentle people I have ever known. As my mother used to say "As God made them He matched them".

Geoff Swan made a tremendous contribution to the lives of children with disabilities in Queensland, and he was an enormously positive influence in my life. Thousands of other young and now not-so-young teachers would say the same.

He was indeed inspirational.

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Inspirational People (1)

 

Another inspirational person - Malala Yousafzai. Image courtesy Time.

This post is the first of a series about inspirational people I have encountered. There will be more.

Because this is a public blog the privacy of these people will be protected, but they are all real people with whom I spent time.

Back in the late seventies, I was a Teacher-in-Charge of a unit in a Brisbane high school for students with physical impairments. There were about thirty of them, a mixture of teenagers with congenital impairments (spina bifida, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy) and spinal injuries causing paraplegia.

Most were wheelchair-bound, and the accessibility of the school had been enhanced with three separate ramps to make almost all classrooms available to people in wheelchairs. The classroom housing the unit was on the ground floor.

With that number of students enrolled I had my hands full, as I was teaching, running the unit, and liaising with the school staff of a couple of hundred teachers. I had been nagging the regional administration for some time to provide a second teacher, although the numbers were enough only for a fraction of a teacher allocation. Like most staffing allocations, the assignment depended on a mathematic entitlement which was calculated to the smallest fraction.

One Monday I had a phone call from the Inspector of Special Schools in the region, asking me to remind him how many ramps were installed at the school, and where the wheelchair-accessible female toilets were located in reference to the unit. I told him, and in the next breath, he broke the good news that a teacher would visit at a convenient time during the week, to see if she would like to be appointed to my staff. Almost as an afterthought, he added that the teacher was in a wheelchair.

The next morning Jeanne* turned up. She arrived in a Holden Monaro which had the advantage of two long doors rather than four short ones, as was more commonplace for Holdens of the era. She reached around behind the driver's seat, where her wheelchair was stored, transferred herself out of the car onto the chair, and wheeled over to the unit from the staff car park. The long doors made entry and egress easier, and allowed stowage of the chair. General Motors had designed the car with fashion in mind, but Jeanne had sussed out its functionality.

I learned as I got to know her, that she was a genius at working out ways of using what was available to improve her physical function. She passed this attitude on to the students in the unit as time went on.

It turned out that shortly after her graduation as a teacher the previous year, she had a serious motor accident causing a spinal injury that resulted in paraplegia. That was in the days of "bonding", which meant that she was obliged under contract to work for three years in the state system to discharge the financial obligation of her training programme.

Education Queensland (or the Department of Education as it was called then) didn't know what to do with her, so they encouraged her to get medical advice that she was physically incapable of working and to be superannuated out of the system. Jeanne was indignant and told them in no uncertain terms that she was physically independent, a qualified teacher who wanted to teach, and she would be taking the department to the Industrial Commission if they forced her to resign.

Hence the questions about accessibility. They were looking for somewhere to put her and the enrolment numbers were not an issue.

Thus began for me and the students in the unit, a very profitable association. She was smart, resourceful, and had a sense of humour that was capable of overcoming almost anything. The added bonus for me was that she was much more successful at encouraging the students to achieve than I was. Her credibility as a person who knew what she was talking about through bitter experience was much greater than mine.

She also got a very clear message to all teaching staff that a disability was not necessarily a handicap and that the young people with disabilities that they were teaching were capable of great things. There had been a tendency for some teachers to have a lower set of expectations for this group than for able-bodied students.

Jeanne had become interested in sport as part of her rehabilitation and was a budding wheelchair basketballer. She would encourage the kids to shoot baskets from their wheelchairs during the lunch break, and some of them began to demonstrate talent. These sessions also had the payoff of breaking up a ghetto situation where some of the kids would socialise only with their disabled peers. The able-bodied kids began to join in the basketball sessions.

From this, Jeanne got a team together, and challenged the able-bods to a game one Friday afternoon. The challenge was issued via a school assembly in front of the assembled nine hundred students and was something of a big deal. The "Wheelies" as they became to be called, wiped the floor with the able-bods, who were made up of sporting stars from the student body in wheelchairs borrowed for the occasion. The whole school watched the match and barracked for the Wheelies.

Then followed a series of matches organised in a similar manner with neighbouring high schools. The Wheelies won them all and morphed very quickly from "The Wheelies" to "Our Wheelies".

The only time I saw Jeanne lose her sense of humour was one day when she was late back from lunch. She'd forgotten to pack a lunch and had driven to a nearby cafe to buy some tucker. When she had returned to her car after the lunch purchase, she found that someone had parked so close to the Monaro that she couldn't get in the door. Apparently, she gave him the rounds of the kitchen when he returned to the car half an hour later. I would have liked to have witnessed that conversation.

Jeanne was still at the unit when I was sent off to do an in-service post-graduate course full time the year after her arrival.  I never returned to the unit, as I then went to North Queensland on my first principal's appointment. Jeanne married a Chilean refuge bloke who was a paraplegic and had escaped from Chile during the Pinochet era. I remember her proudly showing me the plans for the innovative accessible house they were building.

I lost track of her over forty years ago because I have forgotten her married name, but I trust she is living her best life, and continuing to inspire those around her as she inspired me all those years ago.

*Not her real name.

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Aged "Care" in Australia

Image courtesy Urbandeveloper

In witnessing the ongoing catastrophe that is Australia's aged care system, I'm reminded of my own experience in special education during the last 50 years. 

When I began working in disabilities in the school sector in 1971, post-Vietnam and discharge, the world inhabited by this particularly vulnerable group was very different from the current situation. Whilst there are still areas in special education requiring further reform, the following improvements have been made -

Staff are for the most part trained for their specialty and receive the specialist support they need. This support includes occupational and physiotherapy. 

The staff-student ratio is generally set at a standard that facilitates needs-based support. 

There are the same numbers of professional staff as paraprofessional staff. In most special schools, a group of five or six children will have one professional and one paraprofessional available at all times.

The paraprofessional staff (teacher aides) work to an award that brings their remuneration to a point well above the minimum wage.

None of these factors featured in the sector when I began working in it, but were introduced progressively as time went along, much of the improvements coming on the back of the Whitlam money which began to appear, based on human rights legislation, in the mid-seventies. 

This financial support was transformational.

And there lies the rub, of course. Nothing will improve for this vulnerable aged care sector until the money provided by the taxpayer supports care, rather than private profit.

I am reminded of this every time I drive past the very large aged care facility near my home run by one of the country’s largest private providers. The sight of the CEO's late-model Maserati in the staff car park is instructive.

Howard’s deregulation of the sector in the mid-nineties is largely responsible for the sad and sorry state it is in now. Once it became a licence to print money for investors, profit was all that mattered. 

The only sure-fire way of increasing profits (and pushing up the share price) is to cut staffing to the bone. Hence situations where there is one registered nurse on the floor for over one hundred residents.

There are three institutional sectors housing and supporting vulnerable people which should never be privatised for profit. They include prisons, special schools, and aged care facilities.

There is a stark need for a non-profit clause. This means that profits in the sector can only be derived from non-care aspects of the activity.

I won’t hold my breath waiting for this given the moral standing of the current federal administration.

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Some Reflections on Quarantine

 

Medical staff in Surry Hills, NSW, 1919. Pic courtesy NSW Archives

By now, every state in the commonwealth, with the exception of the Northern Territory has had to resort to at least one snap lockdown because of failures in the hotel quarantine system.

This system works most of the time, but when it breaks down, the results are not pretty, from the point of view of both health and economic outcomes.

Quarantine was used extensively in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, and to a large extent, it did help Australia to get through the episode with a much lower infection rate than many other countries at the time.

Historical accounts describe two different programmes, one maritime and the other land, the first apparently much more successful than the second. The land quarantine camps (as they were called) were set up adjacent to state borders, whereas the maritime stations were set up near embarkation points in the major cities.

All states had quarantine stations (North Head in New South Wales, Port Nepean in Victoria, Bruny Island in Tasmania, Torrens Island in South Australia, Woodman Point in Western Australia, and Lytton in Brisbane) but many more were planned in case numbers overwhelmed their capacity. In due course, temporary quarantine stations and influenza hospitals were set up to handle the increasing volume of affected Australians.1

The maritime stations were apparently relatively effective, but the state border stations were not. People frequently bought their way out or escaped because it was easy to do so. The maritime stations were often set up offshore or in inaccessible locations, so escape was often impossible. These places weren't remote, but they were designed in 1918 to be inaccessible.

Perhaps we can learn from history. Scattered throughout the country are a number of mothballed commonwealth owned and run facilities, mostly detention centres. they include Baxter IRPC* (Cultana SA), Christmas Island IRPC, Curtin IRPC (Curtin WA), Howard Springs Quarantine Facility (NT), Inverbrackie APD# (Woodside SA), and Leonora APD (WA). There are also facilities at Port Augusta and Port Hedland.

What they have in common with the quarantine centres used in 1916 is their inaccessibility.

Christmas Island (which cost the Australian taxpayer $180 million to be reopened when the medical evacuation legislation was passed by parliament) is almost empty. Currently, it houses a family of four from Sri Lanka, although was used briefly to quarantine repatriated Australians last year.  

Most of these facilities use pre-fabricated structures and resemble mining camps in that they consist of separate buildings that don't share ventilation and air-conditioning systems, unlike hotel accommodation currently used for quarantine in our state capitals. Virologists are telling us that self-contained and spread accommodation is much better at preventing the spread of virus than your typical multi-storeyed city hotel. 

Most are located close to airbases with runways of sufficient length to cater for international flights. All are self-contained with catering and laundry facilities attached.

The ADF has currently a strength of just over 85000 full-time personnel and active reservists across the three services. 

Combining personnel, these locations, and a realistic allocation from the defence budget, a number of these centres could be set up as quarantine facilities. They could be staffed with soldiers, sailors and airmen/women, who might be happy to work a FIFO stint for a limited specified period. Infantry soldiers (for example) might be grateful for beds and air-conditioning. Who knows - down the track, personnel who served in these locations could be rewarded with a special Covid medal, similar to that awarded to peacekeepers. I'm only half-joking.

The risk of staff working multiple jobs and locations would be eliminated, and the possibly infected travellers would be housed a long way from major population centres, not smack in the middle of them as currently arranged.

Those in quarantine would probably prefer a self-contained demountable to stuffy hotel rooms with balcony and corridor access off-limits. After all, if you're going to be stuck in quarantine for a fortnight, whether you're in a metropolitan hotel, or a donga in the bush is neither here nor there.

And breaches of security protocols amongst staff (the major cause of the transmitted infections) are probably a bit more unlikely in a military environment than a civilian one. There's always the threat of an A4.

This notion has already taken wings with a couple of entrepreneurs (Wagner in Toowoomba, and Fox at Tullamarine) which strongly suggests that it's feasible.

Strangely, immigration and quarantine are commonwealth responsibilities, but they have been duck-shoved, on this occasion, to the states. Using commonwealth facilities and personnel would put this process in the hands of the level of government responsible.

Anything has to be an improvement on lightning lockdowns.

*Immigration Reception and Processing Centre

#Alternative Place of Detention

1. The Navy and the 1918-19 Flu Epidemic, by Greg Swinden

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"Democracy" Saved

Image courtesy New Yorker magazine.

 This comprehensively researched article from Time magazine makes chilling reading.

It describes in detail how a loose coalition of concerned individuals saved the USA from what could have been the greatest threat to democracy across the Pacific since the Civil War.

It reminds me of Abraham Lincoln's prediction in his Lyceum address in 1838. 

Lincoln said -

"At what point is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freeman, we must live for all time, or die by suicide".

The "danger amongst us" was Trump's campaign to win at all costs, aided and abetted by a cluster of violent extremists who were prepared to stop at nothing. The closest historical equivalent were groups like the Blackshirts in Italy in the thirties.

The article begins by explaining why there was comparatively little reaction to Biden's win, except for the assault on the Capitol by the very extremists who were Trump's acolytes. That reaction turned out to be seriously counterproductive for the Republicans.

"A weird thing happened right after the Nov 3 election: nothing.

The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before election day, 75% of Americans voiced concerns about violence.

instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused to concede, the reaction was not mass action, but crickets. When media organisations called the race for Jow Biden on November 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the US to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump's ouster".

It describes how efforts to suppress votes, inject doubt into institutional trust, and use misinformation to muddy the waters, was countered by quiet and consistent work at street level by this informal, bi-partisan campaign.

Read the whole thing. 

It is, at the same time comforting, and chilling.

The USA has dodged a bullet. 

By the way, the quotation marks in the title are a reminder that, as any knowledgeable American will tell you, the USA is a constitutional republic, not a democracy.

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Published

 

Ever since I began reading motor magazines I've always wanted to be a motoring journalist.

Another calling emerged, and except for an interruption when the government decided to send me off to a foreign country in peacetime to help convince the locals that we knew what was good for them, it was a fulfilling and satisfying career. 

My second attempt at retirement (after failing the first one and working as an advisor for ten years) has provided me with time to try my hand at writing about cars.

You can check out my attempts, gentle reader, here.

One online car magazine runs owner reviews, so I submitted one.

They published it, although I'm not sure who is responsible for one piece of poor sentence construction. See if you can find it. I reckon it's their poor editing.

Anyhow, let me know what you think.

In the meantime, I'll add some pics to this post to make it slightly less featureless.

This is a very rare coupe, sold only in Japan

This was my first NB with hardtop fitted and matched.

This was the second NB on the day I sold it.