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.