One for the Monarchists

This might stir up a few monarchists.

It's an amalgam of our current flag with the flag of the San Patricios battalion who fought against the USA in the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848. Most of the battalion's members had defected from the U.S. Army.

The battalion was made up of Catholics of Canadian, English, French, Italian, Polish, Scottish, Spanish, Swiss and Mexican heritage.

To my way of thinking, it's much more representative of my Irish Catholic heritage than the current flag, which displays the flag of a country which prohibits someone of my faith becoming the monarch.

One of my daughters did the imaging - I reckon she did a pretty good job.

Clunkblunk

That’s the noise it made.

“It” being the brand new Hyundai Santa Fe that I was supposed to be driving to St George and points west next week.

The agency has leased three more of these things this year. Generally, they’re a good vehicle, basic, but built like a brick dunny and very capable on the roads I drive.

This one is obviously the exception that proves the rule. When I picked it up late yesterday (after the office closed and the fleet manager had knocked off for the weekend) my plan was an early start Monday morning. By early I mean first light.

It is almost new, having covered about 1500 km since delivery to the fleet, but it is marking pretty horrendous noises. It sounded like there was a whole platoon of little men with hammers hitting the transmission housing from the inside.

I dragged out the “Instructions to the driver” pamphlet in the glove box which told me that I should phone the RACQ.

I did, the techie turned up and I took him for a drive so he could diagnose (and perhaps fix) the problem..

He looked a bit startled when he heard the noises it was making, and suggested – strongly – that I stop.

He jacked up both ends of the vehicle (one end at a time – you understand), wiggled each road wheel in turn, checked under the bonnet and under the chassis.

He emerged, scratching his head and muttering something about “no oil in the trannie”.

You can’t actually check the transmission oil in these things – they’re sealed for life.

I was told in no uncertain terms not to drive it, and it is being towed off to a holding yard for the weekend. On Monday it will be dropped off at the Hyundai dealer, when the workshop opens.

Wish me luck in getting another vehicle at short notice on Monday morning. Maybe I'll have to use the MX5.

I wonder whether it was worked on by an apprentice who was distracted by the weekend at its 1000 km service on Friday. Perhaps the minor detail of refilling the trannie was overlooked.

Update: -

Turns out that the previous driver had a puncture in a rear tyre, changed the wheel, but didn't tighten the wheel nuts properly. For some reason he returned the vehicle in this state. The noise was the wheel oscillating on the studs. The RACQ bloke and I both overlooked this.

Wouldn't have been pretty if the wheel had departed at 110km somewhere west of Roma.

Beatup

The controversy about Abbott’s “Shit happens” remark is a beatup, although his weird reaction to it is probably newsworthy.

Frankly, the way the media handles politicians visiting war zones is a complete nonsense.

I remember a visit from Vince Gair in SVN when I was in 7 RAR. Apart from the sight of an overweight and pudgy gentleman wandering around our lines followed by (I think) one cameraman, it was a non event.

I remember thinking “What on earth is he doing here?”, and from memory, most of us shared the same thoughts. We generally thought the whole thing was, to put it crudely, a bit of a wank.

I vaguely remember Malcolm Fraser visiting as Minister for Defence, but I may be wrong.

Nothing seems to have changed, except the degree of hype involved.

I don’t doubt the good intentions of the politicians (of all stripes) concerned in showing support for the diggers, but if it’s the diggers they want to support, why do they need to have an army of hangers on making sure they’re seen in the best light back home?

The answer is of course, wrapped up in promoting a political image, but the sad thing about it is the way in which the diggers are used as fodder in this enterprise.

I have a raw spot about this, given the way our service was treated when it was no longer politically popular. This treatment was across the board when I got home, irrespective of party politics. Nobody in politics wanted to know us.

Here’s a thought.

How about banning the media from travelling with politicians visiting soldiers on operational duty?

The diggers would feel supported and valued, and the politicians would be freer to be themselves, and in a better position to learn something without media minders.

What do you reckon?

Calendars

I have two of these 2011 calendars to give away to the first two readers who email me on 1735099@gmail.com.

They're collectors items if you live interstate. They're also good quality.

Don't be shy. Your address will not appear on this blog.

Hindsight

It came as a bit of a shock the other day to realise I've been working in the education of kids with disabilities for 40 years.

The realisation came about during an activity during the Pupil Free Days, when the group of about one hundred teachers I was with were asked to arrange themselves in an auditorium in order of years teaching.

I was at the end of the line, hopefully metaphorically only. The next person had been in the job for thirty-five years, and because it was a Western school rich in beginning teachers, most were concentrated at the front of the group. The biggest single cohort was graduates in their first year of teaching.

The gender balance was appalling - less than 10% were male.

It made me think about all sorts of things. What has changed? Do I have any regrets? Why am I still working in this field?

Plenty has changed - the above mentioned gender balance for a start. Back in 1971, there were many more men in the profession. There has been a steady decline which developed a real head of steam in the nineties. There are a number of reasons for this, mostly as a consequence of changing social values. It's a shame, because boys need men, and there are a large group of boys growing up in single parent families with no male models. These boys typically find their models in the wrong places - often on the street in gangs.

Some things have improved. Kids are encouraged to think, to be more questioning and evaluative, and unlike many of my generation I have no problem with this. Respect for authority (in the shape of teachers) should be earned rather than based on hierarchies. Having said this, some of the basic expectations of civility have gone, and that is a loss.

Politics is  increasingly intruding into the daily business of teaching and learning.  This has become a major issue since the media has realised that they can sell lots of newspapers by writing shock/horror stories about teachers.

I had a media management strategy when a principal which worked well. I would refuse to talk to a reporter unless his/her newspaper was prepared to make a donation to the school P & C. My argument was simple. I worked for the school, and unless my time with the reporter was going to benefit the school, it was better being spent on more productive tasks. Many media people took a very dim view of this.

These days, principals follow a protocol where all media enquiries are passed to a trained spin doctor in regional office.

Some things haven't changed. The majority of teachers are in the business because they enjoy it, and believe they are making a positive difference. The majority of parents value the work of teachers and support them strongly. The majority of kids love school, and enjoy learning. Schools, on the whole, tend to be supportive and nurturing repositories of sanity where kids can be kids.

Unfortunately the world outside the school gates is increasingly exploitative, materialistic and greed-driven. Part of a teacher's job is to keep this stuff outside where it belongs.

I certainly have no regrets about those forty years. I certainly will regret getting too old and doddery to continue to do this work when that inevitability occurs.

It's easy to find reasons to continue. The kids keep me honest. Their parents are a constant source of inspiration.

Watching an eight year-old with a deformed leg walking to school, with a big grin on his face, a cello almost as big as he is strapped to his back and a heavy bag in his hand, is inspirational. He wears a heavy piece of orthopaedic kit on the short leg, and the idea of strapping the cello to his back was his own. He refuses to ask someone else to carry it for him.

Reading an insightful little handbook about her daughter that a mum had written for her teacher was inspirational. The little girl is totally dependent and tube fed, but she goes to school daily with her friends. Mum's handbook is quite simply an act of love. Reading it reveals just what is involved in the care of this child, but parents of kids with disabilities are universally experts at loving and caring.

I'm also lucky enough to do a job which is intrinisically enjoyable. There is no typical day - I get to meet and work with a wide range of kids teachers and parents, and the part of the world in which I work is IMHO God's own country.

Yep as I write this - no regrets.........

I'll see how I feel when I get to 65.

The Biological Imperative

Australia Day always brings with it the annual debate about the flag and the republic.

Quite frankly I don't understand why there is any need for a debate.

Adopting a new flag and moving to a republic are simply inevitable milestones along the road of our growth as a nation. Change, after all, is a fact of life.

Any study of either the science of biology or social anthropology makes this abundantly clear. A central organizing concept in biology is that life changes and develops through evolution. The only organism that doesn't change is dead.

So even if you ignore the fact that these two symbols of national life are inappropriate, they will change as a matter of national development in any case.

Putting this inevitability aside for a moment, there are other very good reasons for change.

Let's look at the flag. It has, of course, the flag of the colonial power superimposed. This is simply an anachronism.

If it were not so, the flag of the USA, Canada and India would still have the Union flag in the corner. I'd wager you'd find very few Yanks, Canucks or Indians who would tolerate this. Yet we continue to do so. Are we less proud and independent than these other nations?

As for the need to have a non-Catholic English man or woman as our "sovereign" - that is so bizarre that it beggars description. Imagine trying to explain the rationale for this to an extra-terrestrial.

My ancestors came to this country in the 1860s as displaced people through English colonial policy in Ireland. The English have no place of honour in my heritage - just the opposite.

Yet we continue to have to put up with the nostalgic bleatings of the conservatives who fear the future instead of working towards building it.

This will change - I hope I live to see it.

My kids will. 

Olfactory Memory

During the last few days, I've had occasion to note the very direct and immediate connection between the olfactory sense and human memory.

Plenty of research has shown that odour is the most powerful triggering sense when it comes to human memory or recall. The reason for this is physiological. There is a direct link between the olfactory cortex, in which higher-level processing of olfactory information takes place, the amygdala and the hippocampus.

The origins of these phenomena also lie, no doubt, in the DNA that kept our ancestors alive when they were hunting woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers. Years ago, I used odours as a calming influence on children with severe autism when a teacher. It didn't work with all kids, but with some it made a real difference.

In the 1974 Brisbane floods, the date of school resumption was put back a week. At the time I was a young teacher appointed to a special school at Xavier hospital on the southern side of the river.

I was left with a week to fill in, so along with my brother (who was 15 at the time) volunteered with a local church group to help clean up some properties in St Lucia. The smell of the area was unmistakable and unforgettable, and triggered a whole bunch of memories when I was in the flood-affected parts of Fairfield and Yeronga last week helping my kids shift their belongings into storage.

Many of the details had been forgotten - like for example, that my brother was involved, and that I ended up snagging my leg in something sharp and getting a tetanus shot for my troubles.

Then yesterday, driving back from Roma, I was stopped in traffic very close to the operating base of the EMQ helicopter in Toowoomba. The chopper was preparing to take off, and the wind was in exactly the right quarter for the unmistakable whiff of avtur combined with the whump-whump of the rotors to instantly transport me back to Phuoc Tuy in 1970.

Many years ago when we lived in Townsville, I had taken my bride and the two kids we had at the time to Paluma, a mountain village to the North of Townsville. We did a bit of bushwalking, and at one stage trudged through a jungle swamp where there was a unique smell of rotting vegetation.

This instantly brought back some disturbing memories of the aftermath of an encounter with a bunker system in April 1970 when we took casualties. At the time, I found myself a bit overwhelmed and it took a while before I could try to explain what had made me stop and sit down. It's a very difficult thing to rationalise, especially when the flashback is triggered by something as apparently innocuous as an odour.

I was doing some voluntary counselling with Vietnam Vets at the time, and quite frequently, they'd describe odours or smells as triggers for flashbacks.

Age seems to make no difference - it must be the only sense that doesn't fade with time.