Looked just now at the stats for the month to date. You too may now see what I saw, and what has prompted this post.
Yes, there we are behind the curtain you usually see, where such magic as may be happens. (Speaking of which Games 1 and 2 of the “Magic Round” have gone my way in the Footy Tipping!) You will note 75 have now viewed the main 65th Reunion post, and yesterday’s post is doing fine. And even though Daniil in Russia recently assured us that nothing bad has happened to him, that question we asked still must pop up very high in searches, because my little post has had over 200 views in the past 17 days.
I also note a few liked the May 2014 retro post, so here I am taking another dive into the second year of this blog’s history and my fourth year back in The Gong.
The view from my window changed in 2014
Before that the view was dominated by a very old coral tree.
These are not that one:
They were planted all over the Illawarra and Kiama districts last century mainly, I suspect, to provide shade for cows in the summer months. But nowadays, as this item from Brisbane shows, they are regarded as a pest. They are thorny. They shed branches easily.
A broadly spreading tree growing up to 6 m or more tall. Its stems are sparsely covered in sharp thorns. Its leaves are divided into three elongated leaflets. Its scarlet red to dark red pea-shaped flowers are borne in large elongated clusters at the tips of the branches. Its elongated, dark brown, pods are slightly constricted between each of the shiny mottled seeds. A hybrid of horticultural origin, that was probably developed in Australia or New Zealand.
So in May 2014 the neighbours removed the coral tree.
Ten years on and I again have a tree at my window, as a previously unnoticed rival has grown to replace the departed glory of the tree so loved by rainbow lorikeets — though this one does tend to attract the odd black cockatoo.
Of course the idea it should be is an inappropriate legacy from the Northern Hemisphere, though the changing weather pattern we appear to have experienced – in retrospect in twenty years or so we will know for sure that it was indeed part of climate change – has been confusing our flowers into thinking autumn is spring, or it is still summer, or something. “Sydney’s remarkable spell of warm weather has been so prolonged that any reversion to long-term averages will feel almost chilly.”
Yes, it is the month that saw the passing of my last surviving uncle, though that was balanced by it occasioning a meeting with some of the generation now in their 20s – and that I found encouraging. Took me back to Sutherland too, and that I did rather enjoy in itself.
M, whom I have visited several times in Surry Hills of late, is off to the Northern Hemisphere next week – very far north, in due course. And speaking of M – those who know us will get the connection – do watch Foreign Correspondent in the coming week.
They had front row seats to one of the most shocking, violent and oppressive dramas to unfold in modern China. The Tiananmen Square massacre. They were the men and women stationed at Australia’s embassy in Beijing. Over the space of weeks then days, they saw the very best and the very worst of human behaviour. Now, 25 years on and for the first time, Australia’s eye-witnesses to that dark chapter tell how they hid from gunfire, harboured and helped key targets and focussed wider attention on the outrage by smuggling defining image out and into the global spotlight. A Foreign Correspondent exclusive.
Nicholas Jose features in that.
Last week’s episode, Pakistan – The Polio Emergency, was sad and brilliant. It also reminded me of how short-sighted it is for the current crackpots in Canberra to be divesting themselves of our international television presence in the region, more than likely in deference to the pockets of Rupert Murdoch. Programs such as this are much more likely to be made by the ABC or SBS, and that they should be made available in South, South-East and East Asia through the Australia Network is absolutely brilliant. But not to be for much longer, it appears.
Then we have The Pyne’s latest curious lack of conservatism: I say that because I would have thought conservatism involved the preservation of all that has painfully evolved in society and proven of worth, rather than taking the axe or the bulldozer to everything in sight. Well, having it appears been rebuked on the question of pursuing student loans beyond the grave, he has stuck his little cockscomb up again…
…During the week I had an email from a student I taught at Wollongong High in 1975, now a mathematician at the University of Oxford. I was pleased to note his contempt for C Pyne and all his works: “How is it possible that this irrational, babbling idiot is the Federal Minister for Education?”He has followed up recently:
Your classes, however long ago, are difficult to forget.
I am unsure why, except 1975 was a productive year, marked among other things by that quite wonderful residential conference at Katoomba. In 2007 I wrote:
Thirty-two years ago The Poet and I both attended not a Summer School but an Easter School, residential, at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba, and it was intense, brilliant, and also fun. We had local and UK leaders in our field running the thing, and it was government funded. Teachers from state and private schools were there, notably Paul Brock, then a Marist Brother. No $5000 carrot was dangled in front of us. We were there because we cared about English teaching.
Well, Jeff of 4E4 1975, it turns out I still have a book in which I pasted now fading photocopies of student work from that time, including from your class!
Today’s email delivered this from the University of Oxford:
I think you taught me English in 4th form at WHS in 1975; a long time has passed and all I remember about those lessons is Evelyn Waugh’s ‘The Loved One’, a book which I didn’t much like at the time and still haven’t read properly to this day. You did, however, encourage me to read books by serious authors and for that I’m very grateful; since then I’ve read many; Aldous Huxley’s are still my favourites.
I went on to do PhD in Maths, in Australia, take a post doc position in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford and then a lectureship there. I’m still at the University of Oxford.
How did I find your blog? It turned up after a Google search for Christopher Pyne; I regard Christopher Pyne with complete and utter contempt and I’m *very* angry about what he’s doing!!!
For example and for heaven’s sake, how can someone come out with “If an elderly person passes away with a HECS debt, they wouldn’t be able to say to the bank, ‘we’re not paying back our mortgage’” and expect to be taken seriously! Dead people can’t talk and what has a mortgage got to do with HECS? Beyond belief.
I will forgive him about Evelyn Waugh: Year 10 may have been too soon for that, but it being 1975 and my first year at Wollongong High I may have drawn the short straw in the textbook room!
So long ago!
Wollongong baths 1975
My last Uncle
I was drawn back to Sutherland by a solemn occasion in May 2014.
That may seem flippant, but it is not at all. I have just got off the phone from my brother Ian in Tasmania, having let him know – thanks, Russell Christison — that our Uncle Neil passed away this morning.
This morning in fact I had spent an hour or so checking stories about him.
Neil Christison 1924 – 2014
RAAF
During 1944 I was a member of an Airforce Signals Unit. In April of that year my signals unit did a landing in Aitape, New Guinea. We were the communication unit for the airfield construction squadron who repaired airstrips and built new ones. The same operation occurred on Morotai Islands. On Morotai Islands I shared a tent with a Fellow NCO. His name was CPL Jim Christensen from Queensland and I was CPL Neil Christison NSW and this was somewhat of a novelty because of our surnames.
To our great joy another esteemed gentlemen by the name of L.C. Faulkner spent his time with our unit in our tent. He was a very interesting person. During 1944 censorship was very strict and as you read his article published in the local paper he could not mention my location. Because of my constant movements my parents often did not hear from me for some time but when this came out in the paper they kept the article. Also we had another distinguished guest in our tent, an official air force photographer. Early one morning he was in one of our planes, which had been shot down by the Japanese and he and the pilot were rescued by one of our PT Boats. The Halmahbar Islands, not far from Morotai, were occupied by the Japs and they used to occasionally pay us visits with bombing raids. When this photographer returned to our tent he was covered in dye but still smiling and he returned back to Australia shortly after.
With the passing of time over the last 66 years sadly I lost his name because since I married in 1950 we have moved several times. My darling wife is now in an aged care facility as a result of Parkinson’s disease and on the 8th of July 2010 we celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary.*
So I had lunch at the Sutherland United Services Club in East Parade, pretty much just around the corner from Vermont Street where I lived 1952 – 1955 and again around 1963-64. Oddly, this was the first time I had been inside the club, though my brother Ian, born 1935 and now living in Tasmania, recently told me he used to drink there at one time with the late Reg Gasnier (1939-2014) of Rugby League fame. (I have been trying to work out when exactly this was…*)
I made a point of ringing my brother to tell him where I was – his heart was very much with yesterday’s real mission. And of course I rested and read a while, and had a red wine – a concept my Uncle Neil would surely have endorsed, if not the particular wine which was a touch ordinary…
My cousin Lloyd did a masterly summary of his father’s life and achievements yesterday. It drew me back in mind to Auburn Street, which I didn’t revisit yesterday as I had on a previous gathering of the clan when my Uncle Roy died.
The house in Auburn Street. I lived there 1943 to 1952, and we shared with Neil and Fay in the early 1950s. For years I was called “Neil James” to distinguish me from the uncle whose name I shared – though it appears – so his daughter Janine told me yesterday – that he remained “really” Nelson all his life. I knew he had been named Nelson, but preferred “Neil”, and I was told he changed his name by deed poll when he enlisted in the RAAF. I see he was “Nelson” officially at Sutherland Intermediate High in 1940. But apparently he never completed the process.
So am I really Nelson Whitfield? Well, obviously not…
* Ian rang me while I was writing this post so I now have some idea – and a few other names well known in Rugby League in the 50s and early 60s were also mentioned. It was indeed Reg Gasnier.
08 MAY — The May South Sydney Herald is out. Nothing by me in it, but I have just been playing boy reporter for the next one – among my activities that curtailed blogging a bit in the past two days. (Other things included seeing Dr C, helping M, and tutoring plus some additions to my students’ pages.)
First the boy reporting gig. I attended a rather interesting Community Consultation meeting organised by the Redfern Legal Centre at Redfern Town Hall last night. The object of the meeting was to prepare community and individual submissions to the National Human Rights Consultation where public submissions are being accepted until 15 June.
The Consultation is a chance to hear people’s ideas about human rights and talk about ways to protect and promote human rights in the future.
Key Consultation Questions
Which human rights and responsibilities should be protected and promoted?
Are human rights sufficiently protected and promoted?
How could Australia better protect and promote human rights?
One thing that emerged for me is that it isn’t a simple matter. Several speakers drew attention to the big difference between legislating rights, or enshrining them in a “Bill of Rights”, and the actual situation in practice and in hearts and minds. We had a range of people including a former asylum seeker who had been in immigration detention for seventeen months but finally made it; interestingly he didn’t see his treatment (he was from Bangladesh) as having been racially motivated, though he did have quite a lot to offer about the system. There were speakers also from the Indigenous community, GLBT, disabilities and multicultural agencies. The chair – and he did an excellent job – was Professor Stuart Rees from the Sydney Peace Foundation.
From last night.
(Dorothy just interrupted this post dropping off my bundles of South Sydney Heralds so later I will “do my rounds”.)
Second, another South Sydney matter that doesn’t concern me immediately: The Ravens. Andrew from South Sydney Uniting Church along with several others is running in the Sydney Morning HeraldHalf Marathon on 17 May, raising money for Breast Cancer Network Australia. Support the Ravens here.
The new library will span two levels – the ground floor and the lower ground floor, and will be linked by a glazed atrium filled with plants. It will feature an expanded collection, dedicated children’s area and local studies area, more computers, a large magazine and periodicals area.
The neighbourhood centre will be located on the first floor and will provide flexible meeting rooms as well as a large public meeting room for up to 125 people. The community centre will also feature dedicated facilities for cooking classes and computer training.
A new child care facility will occupy the entire top floor, providing children with a large, safe, shaded play space open to the sky. There will be places for 26 children and the facility will be fully compliant with all current child care regulations.
The new centre sets a benchmark in environmentally sustainable design. To reduce reliance on air-conditioning an open-air atrium and rooftop plants will naturally filter the air, solar cells will provide power and tanks will collect rain water.
— Sydney City Council.
In the time it took me to take out my new books and DVDs around seven people joined the Library. Apparently there is a rush of new members.
Apparently the new Community Centre and Library opened yesterday.
Certainly Siddon Rock has many fine moments and does evoke a rural setting and its period (the 1940s) very well, even if Persia is referred to as Iran and Pakistan, then non-existent, mentioned. Perhaps too I am tiring of magic realism, or, in our Australian context, the Wintonesque; when people wander around with blue spots floating above their heads I tend to turn off. Nonetheless, the novel is well worth reading.
Cut Her Dead is an effective crime fiction, but the best of this lot is the witty T is for Trespass.
In a field where pseudohistory is rampant – think Da Vinci Code – this intelligent, well-written introduction is a must read. It is so refreshingly no-nonsense.
Excerpt:
Introduction: Recouping Our Losses
It may be difficult to imagine a religious phenomenon more diverse than modern-day Christianity. There are Catholic missionaries in developing countries who devote themselves to voluntary poverty for the sake of others, and evangelical televangelists who run twelve-step programs to ensure financial success. There are New England Presbyterians and Appalachian snake handlers. There are Greek Orthodox priests committed to the liturgical service of God, replete with set prayers, incantations, and incense, and fundamentalist preachers who view high-church liturgy as a demonic invention. There are liberal Methodist political activists intent on transforming society, and Pentecostals who think that society will soon come to a crashing halt with the return of Jesus. And there are the followers of David Koresh — still today — who think the world has already started to end, beginning with the events at Waco, a fulfillment of prophecies from Revelation. Many of these Christian groups, of course, refuse to consider other such groups Christian.
All this diversity of belief and practice, and the intolerance that occasionally results, makes it difficult to know whether we should think of Christianity as one thing or lots of things, whether we should speak of Christianity or Christianities.
What could be more diverse than this variegated phenomenon, Christianity in the modern world? In fact, there may be an answer: Christianity in the ancient world. As historians have come to realize, during the first three Christian centuries, the practices and beliefs found among people who called themselves Christian were so varied that the differences between Roman Catholics, Primitive Baptists, and Seventh-Day Adventists pale by comparison.
Most of these ancient forms of Christianity are unknown to people in the world today, since they eventually came to be reformed or stamped out. As a result, the sacred texts that some ancient Christians used to support their religious perspectives came to be proscribed, destroyed, or forgotten — in one way or another lost. Many of these texts claimed to be written by Jesus’ closest followers. Opponents of these texts claimed they had been forged.
This book is about these texts and the lost forms of Christianity they tried to authorize…
It is worth the price of admission for Chapter 4 alone, on Morton Smith and the “Secret Gospel of Mark”. Is it a forgery, and if so, whodunnit? Fascinating, whatever your own religious views. Ehrman delivers an open verdict.
See also Gospel Secrets: The Biblical Controversies of Morton Smith by Anthony Grafton in The Nation January 7, 2009. “The sexual undertones of the document have led some to suggest, explicitly or by innuendo, that Smith, a gay man, forged the text for personal reasons…”. From Grafton’s article:
In 1973, Morton Smith, professor of ancient history at Columbia University, shook the world–or at least the world of scholars who work on early Christianity. Fifteen years before, Smith had found an unknown document in the Mar Saba Greek Orthodox monastery, fifteen kilometers southeast of Jerusalem–an ancient Christian text that no one before him had ever mentioned. A letter in Greek, originally composed in the second century by a church father, Clement of Alexandria, and addressed to one Theodore, it was handwritten in ink, in an eighteenth-century hand, on the blank end pages of a seventeenth-century printed book. Less than a thousand words long but rich in detail, the text attacked one of the wonderfully named sects that made the early centuries of Christianity so complex–the followers of Carpocrates, or Carpocratians. These heretics, as Clement and Theodore saw them, claimed that they possessed a secret version of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus, they believed, had taught his followers that they were freed from the law and could do whatever they wanted without sinning. According to one of their Christian critics, Irenaeus, they actually thought they earned salvation by “doing all those things which we dare not either speak or hear of, nay, which we must not even conceive in our thoughts.”
Clement assured Theodore that he had been right to silence these “unspeakable teachings.” But he also admitted that there was a secret version of Mark’s Gospel–a version that the Church of Alexandria made available only to initiates. In a passage that Clement quoted, Jesus raised a rich young man from the dead in Bethany. “And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan”–a passage that suggests a libertine interpretation of its own, at least to the twenty-first-century reader. At the same time, Clement denied that an inflammatory phrase, “naked man with naked man,” which the Carpocratians had cited, came from the true secret Gospel. The evil Carpocrates had obtained a copy of the text and “polluted” it with lies.
#Strongwomen. "I write about the power of trying, because I want to be okay with failing. I write about generosity because I battle selfishness. I write about joy because I know sorrow. I write about faith because I almost lost mine, and I know what it is to be broken and in need of redemption. I write about gratitude because I am thankful - for all of it." Kristin Armstrong
All abandoned: Chernobyl / Pripyat, Nara Dreamland, Anti-Zombie Fortress, Japanese Sex Museum - and many, many more! Plus: North Korea Special - 2 trips, 16 days / 14 nights! As seen on CNN...
Glenda Guest, 
Neil's Commonplace Book 