Salmagundi

Now there’s a word to look up! It describes this entry perfectly.

Shire nostalgia

On Occasional rambles of a retired teacher, that excellent new blog of mine on Blogspot on the old Floating Life address which more of you should visit, I am about to write* the next in the inspiring teachers series based on Teachers Who Change Lives by Andrew Metcalfe and Ann Game. That took me back to Sutherland fifty-three years ago, and I am sorry to report that memory does tend to fade after all. Odd things stay sharp though.

Forty years ago my mother wrote down some memories of her own — yes, they are on this site now — and I am truly amazed by their detail and by her style. She used under stress to dream about her New England, Braefield, and sometimes about life on the Hawkesbury before that. To her that was back in time about the same as Sutherland is to me. Incredible — to me, that is. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled… Denys will get that one.

Bitter irony department

Our experienced government (you know that one, of course) knows what to do with people attempting to flee Burma. Because they didn’t go through channels and choose to rot in one of the overcrowded refugee camps on the Burmese border, but were silly enough to try to come to Australia, you may well ask, “What happened to them?” You guessed it. Nauru:

THE Immigration Department has revived using Nauru Island for its Pacific Solution policy by transferring seven Burmese refugees there.

The seven had been held on Christmas Island, but were moved to Nauru on Sunday, the Immigration Department said yesterday. An eighth Burmese refugee who has been detained on Christmas Island remained behind because he is in hospital, but would be sent to Nauru later, a spokesman said.

“It is longstanding government policy that anyone arriving on an excised place will be sent to Nauru,” he said.

The Burmese group were transferred to Nauru, even though two other asylum seekers, who have been detained longer, were not moved.

The other two asylum seekers, a Palestinian and an East Timorese man were also caught outside Australia’s migration zone. But the spokesman said it had not been “worthwhile” to reopen Nauru for one or two people. The Burmese group would now be denied access to Australia’s legal system as a result of being outside Australia’s jurisdiction, he said.

Members of Burma’s Rohingya ethnic minority, they include one asylum seeker who has told of being jailed for more than a year for opposing his nation’s military junta.

Nauru had agreed to accept them, and had issued them special visas while their refugee claim is processed — either by the department or by the International Organisation for Migration, which runs the Nauru detention camp on behalf of the Australian Government. The spokesman confirmed that the camp’s new occupants would be locked up for the time being.

I’ll watch this with interest

Jim Belshaw has more blogs than I do, I think…

This one he made “absent-mindedly” back in August with a “call for volunteers”. He has now found a rather interesting one with impeccable Surry Hills connections. Perhaps I should join, but I am not sure what I would do. If anything, it would be very occasional…

Seeking spirit or scepticism?

Seeking Spirit is into “loving nature, silence, spaces, and images of life and Light.” I have found some good things there. The author introduces herself thus: “wife, grandma, mother, friend, therapist, writer, photographer (most of the pictures on the blog are mine), musician, gardener, thinker, quaker, episcopalian, boater, southern marylander, seeker, listener, lover of silence and natural places.”

In contrast, Bruce has introduced another WordPress blog, Skeptics – South Australia. “This blog will probably consist of the rantings of the President based on issues of a skeptical nature occuring in South Australia, and elsewhere in quiet times.”

Take your pick, or better — in a spirit of pluralism — visit both.

Friday Australian poem #8: Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971)

Reading aloud this moving elegy on a dead friend and colleague of Slessor — Joe Lynch, who fell or jumped into Sydney Harbour from a ferry while drunk — became one of my better party tricks in senior poetry classes. It reads aloud beautifully.

But it isn’t just sound. I can’t stand beside Sydney Harbour without images from this poem eventually coming to mind. The art work by John Olsen is available from The Art Gallery of NSW.

Visual

I saw this on Far Beyond Capturing The Moment on Creative Spark. I like it, so I thought I would share it. Visit Creative Spark to learn more about it and to see others.

Burma/Myanmar — in support

A 25-year-old in Myanmar has posted this footage of the protests in that country on 24 September.

In the next video:

Jim Carrey calls for people to support the world’s only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi. He also decries Burma’s military regime for recruiting more child soldiers than any other country in the world, destroying 3,000 villages in eastern Burma, and forcing 1.5 million refugees to flee. He appeals to viewers to join two organizations:

Goodness shines on my new blog!

So there you go. I have tried The Gematriculator on a few blogs on my blog roll, I have to say, and find one is 78% EVIL! I won’t say which one… (That was an error: it turns out to be “43% evil, 57% good.”)

The novel Andrew Bolt hates and Zadie Smith’s 21st century classic

 Underground by Andrew McGahan (2006): Andrew Bolt hated it! Now there’s a literary critic to take notice of, eh! It must be a good book… Andrew Bolt concludes:

It is said that a mark of the great artists is to see us as we really are. If McGahan is a winner of our top literary prize we must conclude this country has no great novelists at all. Truly, ideology does not just blind a writer but strangles his art. How many more examples must Australia endure?

In all honesty I have to say that Underground is not nearly as good as the same author’s The White Earth, but even that novel did not impress me as much as some others:

So much happening

For starters you will see the urge to transform the new blog took hold. I do like Trebuchet as a font. I also edited it in SeaMonkey which I downloaded today. It looks good in that, but even stronger in IE7 and Avant.

Back again

I was hardly away long enough for anyone to miss me, was I?

Over at the “new” blog, which now features evil ads from which I plan to make my fortune, I have just been having a lovely template fiddle, settling on the one I began with.

This penchant of mine for rearranging things ought not to be mistaken for some stereotype you have in mind. Like Marcel I am a hopeless case when it comes to domesticity, unlike M I should add. My reluctance to rearrange my humble Surry Hills palace is almost pathological…

Speaking of Marcel… His latest entry recounts yet another concert — I am just jealous — but makes this interesting point: 

Midnight tonight

That’s when my download allowance is renewed and I can resume my ranting. Meantime, I notice I promised to reflect on blogging but instead have given you yet another blog! In fact it is my old Blogspot number revived with a niche purpose that would be swamped here, yet does not quite belong on English/ESL either.

And those promised reflections? Well, just this: a blog is what it will be. Mine is a 21st century commonplace book, no more and no less. No other purpose. Just a voice, a collection, a series of letters to whom they may concern. What more do you want?

Surprise!

New old blog: Occasional rambles of a retired teacher. Welcome it. It will be different from this one. It may even include, once I have bedded it down, some evil commercialism. We shall see.

Not a hypertext

While I carefully husband my remaining megabytes (renewed 24 September) I will be writing entries that are not hypertexts. My typical entry has been a hypertext, and that I think is fair enough. After all, I am writing in a hypertextual medium, even if few take advantage of that hypertextuality by following the links. You may get a bit of reflection in the next few days about blogging, none of which will pretend to any authority, though I have been nattering on the Net for a while now.

Last entry I was astounded myself by that figure of 2000+ posts, even if they are spread across three blogs and represent over two years — longer, in fact, for some entries on the English/ESL blog and the Big Archive. Still, that is two or three — sometimes more — posts a day. Many of the posts are short, of course, often no more than a link to something that took my fancy and a quick comment. Other posts, the ones I once called “Topsy posts”, have just grown and grown, sometimes quarelling with feedback, sometimes quarelling with myself, sometimes refining and expanding, and sometimes going way past what is reasonable for my very patient readers.

So that is what you can expect: a few almost link-free entries, all composed offline on Windows Live Writer, which I thoroughly recommend you try — it’s free — then quickly spurted up to the blog.

This rather eclipses my gong…

… with no disrespect whatsoever to Kanani Fong’s welcome endorsement of my, um, fecundity — or lack of a life…

Pia Savage’s New York blog Courting Destiny, linked to that screen shot, really is quite remarkable. In this entry she quotes a “Courting classic”, which at least encourages me when I feel a recycle coming on: My Long Island Press Cover Story.

Blogging 101

A blog is, in effect, an online diary, or in Pia Savage’s case, an extended memoir. The term blog is a blend of web and log: web log, weblog, blog. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called blogging. Individual articles on a blog are called blog posts, posts or entries. A person who posts these entries is called a blogger. The term “weblog” was coined by veteran blogger Jorn Barger on Dec. 17, 1997 and the short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, a former anthropologist and current blogger, in 1999.

Indigenous update

Courtesy of Journeyman Pictures, a wonderful source of documentaries — “London’s leading independent distributor of topical news features, documentaries and footage” — I preface this with David Bradbury’s Jabiluka: The Aboriginal Swindle (1997). You must visit the video here, as embedding is disallowed.

The lure of Uranium has proved irresistible to successive Australian governments and Australia’s Environment Minister has dismissed the Mirrar people’s objections to the Jabiluka mine. This lucrative project could sever the Mirrar people’s spiritual links with the earth and the sights of sacred significance throughout the valley. “I was born in the bush” Yvonne Margarula tells us, “sleeping on the ground with the fire”. Twice Academy Award nominated director, David Bradbury, explores the effects of this cultural devastation on the lives of a people and a land inextricably joined.

Rare archive footage shows how Yvonne’s father and his people were bullied into giving their legal consent to a lease over Jabiluka. The traditional landowners were encouraged to consider not just their own wishes but that of Australian progress as a whole. But they thought they were negotiating for a land claim, not another uranium mine. Yvonne’s father Toby was weakened by stress and spent most of the fateful meeting lying down. His sigh “I’m tired now, I can’t fight any more” was taken as all the consent needed for the mine to go ahead. He received a silver plated pen for his trouble…

Ten years on we have had the Howard government’s intervention, which I have treated with a degree of caution and doubt: Some thoughts on the events of June 2007, and recent posts tagged Indigenous Australians here.