iX35

For all you petrol heads out there, it's time for another road test.

The vehicle is an Hyundai ("an" necessary because of the aspirant "h") ix35, which has just been superseded by the weirdly named Tucson.

She That Must Be Obeyed (the fleet manager) had originally allocated me a Focus, but its transmission started hiccuping, so the ix35 was hurriedly substituted. This one was bright red, and was the two-wheel drive 2000cc version. They come in 4WD with a 2.4 litre motor as well, but this one pulled well and overtaking was a breeze. It averaged (according to the digital readout) 7.6lit/100km mostly cruising at 100kph on the flat.

I've driven plenty of Hyundais, from the Santa Fe diesel to the i30 and the i45 but this was the first time I've been on board the small SUV. It was, as befits a fleet car, the poverty pack version, called "Active". It had cloth upholstery, steel wheels, and no reversing camera or GPS.

It did, however, have a reasonable sound system together with reliable Bluetooth. Having said that the connection was reliable, I still have no idea how to set it up. I got it working, but have no idea what I did to make it talk to my phone. I never read the manuals - they just confuse me.

Apparently local Hyundais have a locally inspired suspension tuning. It certainly handled sweetly, but I found the ride a bit jittery. This seems to be an Hyundai characteristic, as it reminded me of the i45, which exhibited the same issues.

There was plenty of room, and the driving position was about right for me. The seats weren't wonderful (a bit hard), but I experienced no aches and pains after a couple of three hour stints. I do take a break every one and a half hours, however.

These things are well screwed together, but they smell like nothing I've ever encountered before. This particular example had less than 5000kms on the clock, so still smelt new, but it was not an agreeable pong. I think it was the glue used in interior trim.

If I owned one, I'd be putting a couple of saucers of kitty litter on the floor, and parking it in the sun for a while. This usually removes objectionable pongs.

So apart from the smell, it was an entirely pleasant machine. Hyundais are always good value for money, and there are some great runout deals around on this superseded model. If you're in the market for a handy and easy to drive SUV, check it out.

We Should Have Listened to Artie

Ruined bridge on the Song Rai - March 1970

Tuesday 18th is Vietnam Veterans' Day.

I'll be working west at that time, so will post this reflection on the Long Tan anniversary early.

I came across an article on Vietnam  by Hugh White the other day, which is well worth a read. In it, he refers to a speech Arthur Calwell, the then leader of the opposition, made to the House of Representatives on May 4, 1965. Calwell was responding to Menzies' announcement of the commitment of the 1st Battalion RAR to active service in Vietnam.

Reading Calwell's speech now, with the benefit of history, is absolutely astonishing. Perhaps old Arty had a crystal ball.

Some extracts -

Our present course is playing right into China’s hands, and our present policy will, if not changed, surely and inexorably lead to American humiliation in Asia.

It looks as if he got the bit about American humiliation right.

If the idea of military containment is unsuccessful, as I believe it will surely prove in the long term, as it has already in the short term, it will contribute to that spirit of defeatism and impotence in the face of Communism.

He was right about the unsuccessful end result, but probably would not have foreseen the divisions the commitment caused in both the USA and locally, and which still linger, so many years after what the Vietnamese call the "American" war.

He well understood the moral corruption that was conscription, and was prescient in warning that the involvement of conscripts would soon be involved.

How long will it be before we are drawing upon our conscript youth to service these growing and endless requirements? Does the Government now say that conscripts will not be sent? If so, has it completely forgotten what it said about conscription last year? The basis of that decision was that the new conscripts would be completely integrated in the Regular Army. The voluntary system was brought abruptly to an end.

He was not to know that conscription in peacetime issue that would divide Australians in a manner unseen since the first World War.

Towards the end of  his speech, Calwell says -

But I also offer you the sure and certain knowledge that we will be vindicated; that generations to come will record with gratitude that when a reckless Government wilfully endangered the security of this nation, the voice of the Australian Labour Party was heard, strong and clear, on the side of sanity and in the cause of humanity, and in the interests of Australia’s security.

He was indeed vindicated, although did not live to see it, (Calwell died in 1973, two years before the fall of Saigon) and as a great Australian, would not have rejoiced. The vindication came about with the withdrawal of Australian troops in 1972. but by that time, irrevocable damage had been done.

I, for one, am grateful to Calwell, even if I don't thank those who refused to listen to him, and by their support of the Coalition in a series of elections, sent a random selection of conscripts off to fight in an undeclared war which became, slowly but surely, a debacle.

These decisions were responsible for the deaths of about 500 young Australians, and the wounding and shattering of the lives of thousands more, many of whom continue to pay the price.

It's a great shame the majority of Australians fell for the "Reds under the bed" narrative instead of listening to him.

Fear usually trumps reason, and It's happening all over again.

This time the fear exploited is Islamic terrorism. Again, there is no existential threat. At least fifty years after this speech was made,  nineteen year old men aren't being conscripted as political collateral.

Perhaps Vietnam has taught us something.

Locusts - Update

Pics courtesy Weekend Australian

Regular readers will recall this post on 27th June.

The Weekend Australian cottoned on to the same issue I posted about back then, and did a feature story yesterday. It's tucked behind Rupert's firewall, but if you click on the link above, you can read the text.

They obviously spoke to the same people I did.

It's good to know they look to this humble blog for story tips.

Leyburn Sprints

The start line. There is no separation between spectators and vehicles in the marshalling areas.

It's the third weekend in August - Leyburn Sprints time.

I spent an hour or two there today, and as on previous visits, was amazed at the quality and variety of the cars competing and on display.

Leyburn has a great bush atmosphere, and when the weather's good - as it was today - is a lot of fun.

I'll post a few of the most unusual machines I came across.

From the sublime -

1963 Watson replica Indy roadster -  4 bolt 302 Chev small block Crower crank Dart alloy heads Schaffer aluminium flywheel 51/2" triple plate clutch 3 speed Chev gearbox

To the ridiculous -

1969 Fiat 500

And a blast from the past - (I used to watch this thing go around at Lakeside about fifty years ago).

1962 Centaur Waggott GT - powered by Holden grey motor with dual cam conversion.

There were also some rare and beautiful classics -

1954 Bristol 405

The Teaching of Reading

Again or still, the old chestnut about the use of phonics to teach reading is in the news.

I call it an "old chestnut" because it emerges with monotonous regularity. It provides politicians with a narrative which implies that they're "doing something about education".

The regular resurrection of this meme is strange. Anyone who walks into a junior school classroom in 2015 is confronted by a phonics chart (often, these days, the Jolly Phonics programme).

The use of phonics is nothing new and has been a feature of the teaching of reading since I've been in the business (from 1968).

When I started teaching, the reading scheme used was phonics based. After Vietnam, when I went back to the classroom in 1971, that had changed, and the reading schemes had adopted a whole word approach, but I was still using phonics. So were most other teachers. The phonics approach provided useful word attack skills.

The fact that I was teaching kids with Cerebral Palsy by this time, meant that I had to use a range of strategies to help them to learn to read, and phonics was one of them. Most teachers of my acquaintance did exactly the same.

Having said that, kids with Cerebral Palsy often have problems with sequencing, and that particular skill is important when blending phonemes to make whole words. For some of these students, phonics wasn't helpful.

What I'm saying, is that there is no magic bullet when it comes to the teaching of reading (except perhaps the creation of a supportive, organised, disciplined classroom environment). No child will learn anything much without this.

Perhaps if kids are having difficulty learning to read, it may have something to do with readiness. There is a phenomenon called "reading readiness". This means that children need to have mastered some basic competencies before they're ready to decode text.

These competencies include the capacity to recognize and discriminate two dimensional symbols, know what books are for, and hold a book right side up with the spine on the left, front cover showing, recognize that the progression of text is left to right, top to bottom, echo simple text that is read to them, understand that text holds meaning, and be able to tell a basic story.

They also have to have primary language. Reading is, after all, secondary language. No child is ready to learn to read without competence in these skills.

Perhaps these days, early exposure to screens, together with the tendency of parents to over protect by confining their kids to indoors where they don't interact with the physical environment is a factor contributing to motor incompetence, and general lack of perceptual readiness.

When I was a young teacher (back when Adam played second row for the Jerusalem  Knights), I did a post graduate special education course at what is now Griffith Uni. Part of that was a research project involving the development of a reading scheme. The scheme was based on this understanding of the use of primary language skills. The idea was that the text in the scheme would be comprised of the language that children at age six would use all the time.

We had to collect that language by attaching a portable tape recorder to a number of six year-olds for twenty four hours and collecting language samples. These samples were transcribed (a laborious job - kids talk a lot), and words and structures counted and analysed, These words and language structures were used to provide the text for the scheme.

From that, we went on to develop a thesis which later became the successful Mount Gravatt Reading Scheme.

The bottom line is that a variety of methods are needed to teach kids to read. No one method is the magic bullet. Most significantly, politicians should keep out of the issue - generally they have no idea what they're on about.

Would these same pollies dare to express an opinion on diagnostic or surgical techniques as applied to the medical profession?

Racism - a Family Perspective

The usual conflict entrepreneurs are exploiting the Adam Goodes controversy for all it's worth. They're driven by the adage - Never let an opportunity to sell a paper or attract a mouse click go by. There's a dollar in it, dontcha know........

The fact that there are real live human beings on the receiving end of it all - whether a thirteen year-old and her family, or a champion footballer; makes no difference.

They're simply expendable sacrifices on the altar of media banality.

The controversy made me consider my experiences of racism, as I've lived and worked in a wide range of communities in metropolitan, regional and remote Queensland.

I was brought up in North Queensland, and one of my earliest memories of my mother (a teacher) was when she donated a set of my clothing, including some treasured shoes, to an aboriginal lad in her class (at Carmila) who was doing it tough. He was about my size, and the clothes fitted him well, as did the shoes. Shoes were a big deal in those days, as we went to school barefoot, and the shoes were Sunday best. I was more than a little miffed.

Mum was colour blind. She saw only a small person who needed help.

Later, when I was a bit older, we moved a little closer to Mackay, to North Eton, where the school had a seven stone seven league team. I played wing - I wasn't able to do too much damage in that position. There were a mix of kids, at the school, including offspring of Maltese and Italians who had migrated to the area as cane cutters, worked hard, saved their earnings and bought cane farms.

There was also a scattering of kids of Islander and Torres Strait Aboriginal heritage, plus a few who were descendants of Pacific Islanders who were pressed ganged in the late nineteenth century to work on the cane. Back then they were called Kanakas, but that term can be offensive, so I'll refer to them as South Sea Islanders.

Some of the Aboriginal kids were good players, as were the South Sea Islanders, although the former usually played in the backs (they could run and kick like nobody's business) and the latter in the forwards (they were built like the proverbial brick outhouses).

Unfortunately for my team (called North Eton when we won and Eton when we lost) these Aboriginal and Islander kids generally played for Mirani, and they usually beat us. When this happened, there were always complaints directed at their racial origin. Many of these complaints were shouted at the player s in the form of abuse from the sidelines. The players were children aged from eleven to fourteen - and about the same age as the thirteen year-old who yelled abuse at Goodes.

I wonder whether we've actually made any progress. Back then, this abuse directed at kids whilst frowned upon, but tolerated. These days, when an Indigenous player calls a teenager out for vilification, he's condemned. Both are examples of racial abuse, and both are/were unacceptable. 

In the intervening decades (with the exception of my time in the army - more about that later) I had little to do with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people until I was appointed principal of a special school in Townsville. This school serviced a community of kids with severe disabilities who lived in a local nursing home. Over 40% of them came from the Torres Strait Islands, and once sent south to live in the nursing home rarely if ever returned to their communities. They were a unique group of "stolen children". The reasons they never went home (even during the long summer break) were complex, but in the end were down to the fact that their communities lacked the confidence and resources to get them home.

I see much of the same phenomenon now, in 2015, where children with disabilities in remote communities languish without proper treatment for similar reasons. At least now they're living with their families, rather than in sterile nursing homes. But I digress.

Back to the late nineties when I had a programme manager's job in Mt Isa, responsible for educational support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. There weren't too many Islanders (bluewater people) in the North-West, but lots of Murris (brownwater people) in the schools.

One of the issues we had to address was the suicide rate amongst Aboriginal teenagers in the area. The availability of firearms, and the lack of counselling support were contributing factors. We couldn't do much about the firearms (although the Port Arthur gun buy back that happened at that time may have helped a little), but we were able to improve the counselling support.

During this time, I was the guest of the Dajarra State School on their speech night. Dajarra was 90% Aboriginal enrolment - probably still is. I took my two sons with me to provide company for the long return road trip, and they had the experience of being in the minority - two of about four white faces in a school of Aboriginal kids. The conversation in the car on the way back to Mt Isa (when we weren't counting wallabies and roos) was interesting.

For the first time in their young lives my sons knew what it felt like to be in the minority. This is an experience that has been denied to many Australians, and given what we've observed around Adam Goodes, it partly explains the controversy. The bigots screaming abuse would not have a clue about how it feels to be racially vilified, as they've never been on the receiving end.

One of the few positives about the army (at least when I was a member) was its institutional colour blindness - an attitude not unlike my mother's. The only thing that mattered on active service was the way we looked after each other on operations. If your skin was going to be saved, its colour was irrelevant, as was the colour of the skin of the digger watching your back. 

My section had a West Indian Corporal - one of nature's gentlemen, and another member of my platoon was a Murri, one of the funniest men I've had the privilege of knowing. The other Aboriginal digger in my platoon from the Alice was badly wounded when we hit bunkers and returned to Australia in April 1970. Another, (in my company, not my platoon) committed suicide in 1979 when in custody.

I wonder how the likes of Bolt and Jones regard these men?

As far as the current controversy goes, and the hundreds of thousands of words written or spoken - I reckon Marcia Langdon sums it up pretty clearly -

I am sick of pig-ignorant bigots saying it (Goode's spear dance) means war. How dare they purport to represent our culture".

In reality, that's what gets the bigots wound up. They simply aren't prepared to concede indigenous people the power to own and interpret their own history and culture.

But as noted above, it sells lots of newspapers.

  

Submission to Brutality

So Labor has finally lined up with the Coalition in a craven act of bipartisan brutality.

Pragmatically, Labor didn't have much option, since that day of infamy, 29th August 2001, when a weak Prime Minister, sniffing the political wind with an election approaching (an election that he looked like losing) picked up the whiff of fear and loathing, and used it.

The politicisation of the issue, and exploitative refinements such as demonising vulnerable people and conflating fear of refugees with the great fear - terrorism, has fatally poisoned the debate.

Emotion has trumped reason, and any political party ignoring this situation is committing electoral suicide. Both major parties share blame. There is nothing that exposes their collective lack of leadership more starkly than this episode.

Amongst other historical absurdities such as excising our territory, our defence forces will continue to be misused doing the dirty work of the arch cowards in our political class. This political class puts expediency before humanity and has reduced itself to the level of the apparatchiks who were out and about in the days of the Third Reich.

Let's face it - a detention centre is a concentration camp under another name. About the only material difference is that Australian detention centres (they are Australian, whether in PNG or on Manus) don't have gas chambers attached.

The refugee debate post Tampa has become one of the most shameful episodes in Australian history. My country has gone from a point where it was a bastion of compassion and humanity to what is effectively a civil rights backwater in the short space of fourteen years.

It did not have to be so.

Wind the clock back to 1975, and the fall of Saigon. This event was the trigger for one of the greatest exodus of refugees in the history of our part of the world. Between 1978 and the late eighties, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese boat people arrived in refugee camps in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong.

The boat people comprised only part of the Vietnamese resettled abroad from 1975 until the end of the twentieth century. A total of more than 1.6 million Vietnamese were resettled between 1975 and 1997. Of that number more than 700,000 were boat people; the remaining 900,000 were resettled under the Orderly Departure Program or in China or Malaysia.

The Geneva Conference of June 1989 produced the Comprehensive Plan of Action, which, over time, saw the ordered settlement of the bulk of these refugees, many of whom went on to become valued citizens of their adopted countries. Australia took 130000. Countries involved included Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia.

This multinational conference was an example of international cooperation, free of the tyranny of national politics, driven only by compassion, and provides a template for the humane management of similar migrations since. It was people of the calibre of Sérgio Vieira de Mello (sadly assassinated in Iraq in 2003), who had the courage, drive and wisdom to pursue the international agreements.

Perhaps the absence of individuals with his vision and intellect in our national political scene  is responsible for the squalid mess that has become refugee policy in Australia.

Forty years ago, we had a bi-partisan approach to asylum seekers during which we settled Vietnamese here. Now we ship them back to be exposed to whatever tyranny awaits.

That's progress?