Bertie and the Echidna

Echidnas are cute but, until now, I didn't know just how cute. I saw one near the house once. It must have been young and confused because it was quite small and trying hard to be invisible when Bertie (the dog) trapped it in a corner. (For those who don't live in Australia or New Guinea, an echidna is a monotreme - an egg-laying mammal - which resembles a large, variegated, long-spined hedge-hog, or smallish, short-spined porcupine.)

I suppose Autumn must be a busy time for echidnas because Bertie seems to be finding them everywhere these days and is developing a bit of an obsession with them (although not as bad as the obsession he has with the feral cat he chased up a tree a few days ago!) Today he found the specimen below in our little orchard.


To help you make sense of this picture, this is a full-grown echidna - maybe 30cm long (that's a foot in old money) - desperately trying to bury itself in the ground. The little group of spines on the right is the echidna's tail. It's head is well buried.

It was still digging when I shot this picture - and slowly disappearing. I imagine this is a fairly good defence. It certainly had the dog flummoxed as all the poor little dimwit could get to were spines. It was pretty creepy too. It looked like some kind of evil cactus, pulsating as it slowly sank into the soil, probably digesting the last dog foolish enough to put its snout too close.


And, in honour of Bertie's first birthday (which was two days ago) here's a shot of him looking into our current echidna problem.

Death and Suffering in Australia

At the time of writing, the bush-fires that are still burning in south-eastern Australia have claimed 173 lives, with hundreds more injured and almost a thousand homes burnt down. It is Australia's largest natural disaster ever. Whole towns have been wiped out. Whole families.

Up in the north-east, there are record floods. Some towns have been cut off for weeks. Several people have died, several more are missing. Homes have been wrecked, businesses devastated, crops are standing under water, choked with mud.

I've got no point to make, no axe to grind. I just want to acknowledge this terrible moment of suffering and grief, this horror, literally all around me.

Snow!

It's snowing!

Big white flakes of wonderful snow are drifting down out of the sky. It is something I haven't seen for twelve years, not since I lived in Switzerland.

Snow isn't completely unknown in Australia - they even have skiing here on the high ground around Canberra - but it's quite rare in Queensland. In fact, it's only because I live at 1,000 metres in the most southerly part of this enormous state that there is any chance of it at all. Even then, snow is a moderately rare phenomenon and can't be relied on most years.

Yet here it is, drifting down among the gum trees, settling on the backs of disgruntled lorikeets and cockatoos, falling on my little cactus garden. It's a miracle. No, a blessing. A kindness. Yet another way to experience the beauty of this amazing place in which I live.

I suppose I ought to stop gushing and get back to work but Oh Lord! it was wonderful.

There's More To Life Than You Can Imagine

David Attenborough is someone I admire immensely. I saw an episode of his latest series Life in Cold Blood the other day and I was impressed all over again by the incredible complexity, diversity and beauty of Life. It's enough to make you feel sorry for those poor people who believe in gods.

There was a frog in the episode. The male, who looks about a quarter of the size of the female, is too small to get his arms around his mate's body, so he can't hang on while they have sex. So the little guy exudes glue from his belly and sticks himself to the female's back! What's more, these frogs live in a hostile, arid environment and they need to be underground sheltering from the heat rather than frolicking on the surface like moonstruck calves. So the female frog digs a burrow, with her prospective mate still glued to her back, and they mate underground.

Now this isn't the weirdest thing in Nature. Not by a long chalk. But who could have imagined such a way of life? Not us, for sure. Our imaginations are just not that good. Which is why I feel sorry for the poor god worshippers. Since none of their beliefs about the universe are real, they are limited to what people can imagine. Worse, they are limited to what people once imagined at the time their sacred texts were written, and are now fixed (barring a little embellishment by theologians from time to time). Of course, the old fantasists certainly had their moments – the world on the back of a turtle, twenty-seven virgins for every martyr, the creation of the world happening just a few thousand years ago – but mostly it is all stultifyingly dull and simplistic. Childish, actually.

When you compare these ancient yarns with what Nature shows us, there really is no comparison. Consider the fractal beauty of a tree, the bizarre but elegant 'standard model' of quantum mechanics, the existence of shrimps that pick up grains of sand and drop them into holes in their heads to use as ballast, the grand, swirling ballet of stars, dust and gasses in a galaxy, the deep mystery of electromagnetic fields, the way the brain uses cilia in a spiral cochlear to sense different frequencies of sound, the many kinds of blood chemistry that exist for the transport of oxygen around so many different kinds of bodies, the existence of quarks, the sheer number of things – atoms, stars, brain cells, species of nematode worm – and the incredible sizes of things – the distance from here to the Oort cloud, the spacing of molecules in a quartz crystal, the 'walls' of galaxies that span the universe, the nano-fibres on a butterfly's wing that give it such iridescent colours.

It is all so breathtaking and astonishing and none of it, none of it at all, was dreamed of by the people who fantasised about gods instead of looking with open minds and receptive hearts at what is really out there in the world.

And the little guys in the picture above are pine processionary caterpillars - 16 of them - photographed by me this morning. They walk around in nose-to-tail processions like this at this time of year, looking for a good place to pupate. Now which religious text ever imagined anything like that!

So now I'm a writer. Maybe.

Thing is, I write all the time. I write this stuff. I write stories. I write books. Trouble is, I'm a disillusioned, cynical writer who feels that getting anything published is such a lottery that it isn't worth even trying. I don't buy lottery tickets, or scratchies, or raffle tickets, and I don't submit my writing to publishers for the same reason - the odds are too long.

So how come I'm here at a 'writer's retreat' on beautiful Bribie Island off the Queensland coast? Well, it's a long story - which I won't bore you with - but, basically, I won the lottery (a writing competition) and the prize was this.

And for the first time in my life I have spoken to a publisher, a very charming lady called Bernadette Foley at Orbit (the speculative fiction bit of Hatchette Livre in Australia). Not only did I speak to her but we spoke about my latest manuscript - a novel called Time and Tyde - which she'd read! What's more, she had read it carefully and said such flattering things about it that she's achieved the unthinkable and given me hope. Of course, I may live to curse her for toying with my emotions like this, but right now I'm thinking 'Well, maybe I should give this publication thing another go.'

And what does that mean in practical terms? Have I rushed out and stuffed a dozen envelopes with short stories and novels and cast them on the winds of chance? Not a bit of it. What I've actually done is to start another blog (how many is that now?) This one, called 'Graham Storrs' (that's me, by the way) is intended to chart my progress as I try to get Time and Tyde published and to talk about my other literary endeavours.

It seems us writers need to market ourselves. Our names must become a brand. Our work must generate 'buzz'. So I thought I'd start with a bit of a blog, just to get the ball rolling. Later - probably if the book is published - I might start a whole website. But let's not go mad, eh?

So, if you'd like to follow the ups and downs of my budding literary career, you might like to click your way across to Graham Storrs: The Blog and scratch your itch. And, for the dedicated reader of Waving Not Drowning (that's this blog for those who don't read banners) don't worry. All the juicy stuff in my life will still be here.

Change Of Life

So, here I am in my new home in the country – or the bush, as we learn to call it here. My life is in flux. For the first time, Wifie and I have moved away from the cities we have always been forced to live near and have taken up residence far, far from the madding crowd. So far, in fact, that we don't have mains water, or sewerage, or even a telephone line. The postie drops our mail half a kilometre away at the bottom of our 'drive' (a dirt track that is all but impassable in the wet). If it wasn't for that lonely pair of wires bringing electricity up here, we might be living a very much more primitive life. The nearest shop is twelve kilometres away, the nearest small town, twenty.

We live at the top of a thousand-metre-high hill and the forested valleys and hills of Queensland's Granite Belt sweep away below me in all directions (see above). Forty-six acres of those forests and hills belong to Wifie and me. It doesn't sound like a lot but, in several exploratory walks, we have not yet found all the boundaries and we still make amazing discoveries whenever we go wandering – granite bluffs, huge meadows, boulders as big houses, gorgeous, exotic plants (including three species of wild orchid so far) and beautiful forest glades. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen – and I live there! The more gaudy bird-life includes crimson rosellas, king parrots, yellow-tailed black cockatoos, and eastern rosellas, and there are often wallabies in the 'garden' as well as feral pigs (not yet seen bet heard snuffling and grunting in the dark), lizards and snakes (including a gorgeous red-bellied black snake we found near the house the other day - see below). We've seen wild cats, a fox, rabbits and, in early Spring, the roads are full of long-necked turtles crossing at their leisure. The air is full of the sound of cicadas chirruping and, in the evenings, the frogs join in the song.

The ground immediately around the house has been cleared but nothing has been done with it so Wifie and I spend our time making plans for a garden. We've already planted a few fruit trees and we've put in some of the prettier native shrubs (grevilleas, bottle-brushes, banksias) but there is lots to do. Even this 'garden' is huge and we have to adjust to the idea that 'gardening' here will involve earth-movers and lorry-loads of materials. Our days of picking up a bag of gravel or mulch from the garden centre are over. Such things now need to be ordered by the cubic metre, delivered in trucks and spread by bobcat. Even the 'ordinary' garden tools are different now. Strimmers, mowers, weed-sprays and so on, that used to be adequate for a suburban home, we are replacing with heavyweight industrial equivalents. And, for the first time in my life, I own a chain saw and an axe. I got them so I could cut up wood for the wood-burning stove but now I see many other uses. A recent storm, which brought a small tree down across the drive a couple of weeks ago made me realise that a chain saw is an essential part of my new life. Without the means of clearing a fallen tree off your drive, you could be stranded up here!

And at night, when the skies are clear and the Moon is new, the Milky Way is a river of light that runs from horizon to horizon, turgid with stars - more stars than I have seen in my life before, more stars than I even knew were there. It is breathtaking. Astonishing. The glory of the Universe revealed just for the effort of lifting up your eyes! I watch satellites amble past, meteorites zip by, and whole galazies - the Large and Small Megallenic clouds - hanging like misty islands above me. And if you think I'm waxing a bit poetical here, all I can say is, you should see it and then we'll see who's totally blown away.

It's exciting, scary, humbling, and uplifting. It's a wonderful adventure and a dream come true. I am an immensely lucky person.

Do Not Use A. F. Palmer For Your Removal

I recently moved house. I bitterly regret that I used the dreadful removalist A. F. Palmer. I have lots of experience moving house, including two international moves and one interstate move and I've used many different removalists but the worst by far was A. F. Palmer.

Astonishingly, A. F. Palmer failed to deliver a single item of my belongings to my new home! They almost made it once but - in a series of clownish errors of judgement that would have been funny if it wasn't so awful - they had to turn around and take everything away again. Thanks to the disgraceful lack of care, professionalism and service shown by A. F. Palmer, my wife and I ended up staying in a motel rather than sleeping in our new house. In fact, we spent a week in that motel - at our own expense - before we got the abysmal A. F. Palmer to deliver our furninture into a storage facility 20km from the new house. For which kindness, the money-grubbing A. F. Palmer charged us a further $1,200!! Then I hired a van (again at our expense) and my wife and I (retirees, you may recall) moved the contents of our home ourselves in a series of a dozen separate trips which took us another week to accomplish. During this enormous effort, we discovered that almost every stick of furniture we own - new stuff as well as cherished and well-cared-for old items - had been scratched, dented, broken or parts of it lost by that pathetic excuse for a removalist, A. F. Palmer.

Meanwhile, not a word of apology from the useless A. F. Palmer. Not a hint from them that they felt the slightest guilt or shame at what they had put us through. They took their money and ran like the scumbags they are.

Now that this terrible experience is behind us, I just feel it is my duty to tell everyone who might be considering a move; do not use A. F. Palmer. Tell your friends and relatives. Make sure everyone knows. Avoid A. F. Palmer like the plague. They showed no respect for my home or my property. They behaved in a completely unprofessional manner from beginning to end. And when things started to go wrong, A. F. Palmer became uncooperative, unhelpful, and even made things worse though their complete lack of care and judgement. A. F. Palmer battered my furniture, failed to deliver it and charged me more money for the privilige of getting it out of their hands so we could finish the job we paid them to do!

Nobody ever should use A. F. Palmer for a removal. A. F. Palmer is by far the worst removalist I have ever had the bad luck to encounter.

Moving House? How Did That Happen?

What's the collective noun for a group of estate agents? Well, whatever it is, I just had one tramping through my house.

Yes, after seven years in Karana Downs – the forgotten suburb of western Brisbane – I'm selling up and moving on. At least, I think I am. There is so much uncertainty about how much to ask, whether anyone will make an offer, whether the people I want to buy from will accept my offer, whether the timing will be right, and so on, that it seems just as likely to me that I'll still be here next year as that I'll actually sell up and move. Which could be OK because the last three times I moved house, Ivowed never to do it again.

So, if I seem a little distracted over the next few weeks, it could be because I'm juggling the 8,000 things I need to do with my obligations to you, dear Reader.

Y'know, it funny. Ten days ago I didn't know I'd be moving soon. Wifie and I have vaguely thought about it – especially since I retired and I'm no longer tied to the city for work. We've even started browsing estate agents' windows when we go travelling, to see what might be on offer wherever we happen to be. Which is how we came across a particular property while we were down south last week, popped out to have a look at it, and thought 'What the hey? Let's go live there.'

It's a nice house. Nothing fancy. But it is set 1,000 metres up in the granite hills of the New England Table Land and the views are spectacular. It also has 46 acres of unspoilt forest and is surrounded on three sides by State Forest with a gigantic fruit farm on the fourth. It's the kind of place where a man could grow old watching the sun set over the distant mountains, keep himself active walking in the forests and chopping wood for the stove, and watch the wallabies and parrots outside his office window whilst writing his blog. (That is, I'd be writing the blog, of course, the wallabies would be, well, bouncing and stuff. Honest. This is really written by me. No wallabies are involved at all, except, perhaps, in an entertainment capacity, if the buying and selling thing works out.)

Another thing about living at 1,000 m is that you get real seasons. Sometimes, it even snows up there! That'll be nice.

Meanwhile, I'm in a sort of daze. The decision to go just sort of made itself and, having kicked the machinery into action, I'm now being carried along by it from one hugely expensive activity to another – and I probably will be for the next few months, until the wheels stop spinning and I find myself sitting in a house full of boxes at the top of a granite hill, blinking at Wifie in amazement.

Buy The Farm And Keep The View

I live in a city of about two million people that is growing at the rate of 1,500 people per week. Our here in the outer suburbs, the growth rate is faster than the average and this can be seen in the very large housing estates that are being built all around this area and the way that arterial roads between here and the CBD, which used to be clear ten years ago, are now slow-moving traffic jams at almost all times of the day. Of course, people like me live out here to be away from the high-density housing, the noise of traffic, and the misery of too many neighbours. Also for the views across open farmland which I now enjoy.

Unfortunately, the farmer opposite has sold part of his farm to a developer and there is a new housing estate being built a little way up the river from me. It won't spoil the views much but it is bound to increase the noise levels and wreck the peace of the place. I don't mind it too much (although we'll probably sell up and move on sooner or later) and you've got to put 1,500 people a week somewhere. You can't blame the farer either. The piece of land he's sold (maybe a third of his farm) will probably end up with 400 houses on it and, at local land prices, I reckon he must have got $4 million for it. It's just too tempting for a struggling farmer to resist. But it did start me wondering if there might not be a better way.

I would guess that there could be 20 houses whose views will be spoilt by this new estate and probably all of them will suffer a significant drop in the values of their own homes. (They'll also have to suffer at least 400 more cars on the road to the city each morning.) So what if they had bought the land from the farmer instead?

They would each have needed to raise a mortgage of $200,000 to equal the developer's offer and that might seem a bit too steep for some (although I'd say the folk around here are good for it – and, God knows, land in Brisbane is a very good investment, as you can imagine.) But what if they only had to raise, say, a quarter of that, or a tenth even, to keep the farmer happy? An infusion of about half a million into the farmer's bank account might be all he really needed – especially if he still retains a controlling interest in the land and the right to continue to farm it – while costing the 20 home-owners just $25,000 each. In fact, through a series of deals like this over the next couple of decades, the people surrounding the farm could end up owning it, the farmer could still end up farming it, and the views would be preserved. Or, if the farmer decides to take the money and run, they'd end up owning a farm they could let to tenants, or leave to go wild, or convert into a local, private leisure amenity.

Why has no-one put together the legal and financial packaging for this kind of deal? Are there any lawyers or bankers out there who want to start a business in setting up neighbourhood open land preservation deals? It could be a winner.

Save The Wesley Hydrotherapy Pool

Hi y'all. My regular reader is probably wondering why this has been such a bad month for blog postings. Well, my pathetic excuse is that I've been busy. I've recently become caught up in the campaign to save the Wesley Hospital Hydrotherapy Pool. You may have seen one or two recent postings on the subject. My wife is a user of the pool and one of the thousands of people who will suffer when the Uniting Church (which owns the Wesley Hospital) closes the pool in July. I know some of the people who are being abandoned by the church (whose advertising 'tag line' is “Helping with heart and soul” - if you can believe the hypocrisy in that – they're closing the pool to make more room for high-paying acute patient care that will increase the hospital's earnings by tens of millions each year) so I know what a terrible blow the closure of this facility will be to all of them. The Brisbane City Council is pretending that scrapping vital healthcare infrastructure has nothing to do with them but they're happy enough to give planning permission with no strings attached (like continuity of service until an alternative facility can be built, for example.) One campaigner who tried to speak to the Mayor was told that he was "too busy" to concern himself with such matters. Nice guy, huh?

Anyway, I've written the campaign a website and attended meetings and so on and it's all kept me rather busy. So, I will just point you to a couple of places to go for further information and then I'll shut up about it. Firstly, you should look at the blog of the campaign: http://savethewesleypool.blogspot.com which is full of harrowing stories by bereft pool users. Then you should go to the website: http://www.savethewesleypool.org.au which doesn't have much content yet but which contains a form for you to sign up and show your support.

Personally, I am disgusted that people who desperately need the physiotherapy they get at the pool in order to maintain their mobility in the teeth of degenerative diseases like arthritis and cerebral palsy, are simply being dumped by the Uniting Church. It is an appalling way to treat people who are working hard to avoid becoming (worse) invalids and to maintain some independence and dignity. The Uniting Church, the Brisbane City Council and the Wesley Hospital management have shown a callous indifference to the plight of thousands of needy people and their families.

'Nuff said.

Chronically Ill Patients Don't Really Need Wesley Hospital Hydrotherapy Pool

A private hospital is a complicated beast - a lot like a hotel. People are checking in and out all the time. They need beds and food, car parking and clean laundry. The buildings need to be heated or cooled, cleaned and maintained. Stocks and equipment need to be bought and distributed, the grounds need to be maintained, services need to be advertised, payments need to be received and expenses accounted for, franchises need to be managed, and vehicles need to be bought and operated. It all takes a large staff and a lot of money. This in turn means a lot of managers up to their eyeballs in mundane trivia.

It is no wonder then that they sometimes lose sight of what they are there for and make mistakes. Take the Wesley Hospital in Brisbane. The management there came up with a strategy for redeveloping the hospital to meet future acute care demands but somehow completely forgot to include any chronic care in their plan. In particular, the new plan completely neglected the facft that they already ran the region's leading hydrotherapy pool, a first-class facility, with a first-class physiotherapy team, that has been serving chronically ill patients over a huge geographical area for almost two decades. The new plan would demolish this local centre of excellence and would not replace it, leaving hundreds and hundreds of patients without any form of treatment.

Oops.

You'd think that, faced with a planning catasrophe like this, the hospital management - or perhaps the Uniting Church, which owns it - would stop what they are doing and make a better plan. You'd be wrong. The hospital management, although embarrassed by the furore that has arisen, is pressing ahead with this terrible decision as fast as they can push it through. I've been trying to understand why this would be.

One obvious reqason is that the management cannot bear to admit they have made a very stupid mistake. Rather than say that their ineptitude is responsible for casting hundreds of extremely needy people to the wolves, they want to argue that they were right really and that a change of strategy (from caring for people to dumping them like garbage, it seems) is what the region needs. A less obvious reason but one which came out at a recent public information meeting (from which the management had excluded the press, by the way) is that the hospital general manager seems to believe that most of the patients who use the pool don't really need it. They just go there because they like to exercise in warm water, he told us. Of the several thousand people who use the pool each year, he believes that 'about a hundred' are really in need of it. The rest, I suppose, must be lying malingerers who have persuaded their gullible doctors and specialists into believing that their arthritis, or cerebral palsy, or knee operation, or loss of function following brain surgery, is far mor serious than it really is.

The general manager is not a medical man, nor has he even spent any time at the pool observing the treatments going on there. Yet he has this bizarre prejudice and no doubt it is behind his belief that it is alright to shut down this wonderful facility that has helped so many people.

Uniting Church Throws Chronically Ill People Out On Their Ear

The Uniting Church in Australia runs a hospital in Brisbane, Queensland: the Wesley Hospital. In this hospital, is a hydrotherapy pool. The pool treats about five hundred patients a week, thousands of patients each year. And the Uniting Church is about to close this pool, throwing all those patients out. They made the announcement a couple of weeks ago that the pool will close sometime between July and September this year. Unfortunately, there are almost no other hydrotherapy pools in Brisbane, none in the local area, and those that there are, are already fully utilised.

Some of the people who use the Wesley Hospital pool are patients of the hospital who need it as part of their post-operative, acute care, or who have just suffered a stroke or hip or knee operation. The great majority (85% to 90%) are chronic sufferers with problems like cerebral palsy, arthritis, or scoliosis. The main reason they need physiotherapy in a pool, rather than on dry land, is because their particular problems mean that they cannot do the exercises that will improve their mobility without the support that buoyancy provides – it is simply too painful or damaging to exercise outside the pool.

Hospital doctors and physiotherapists, other referring consultants and local GPs, all agree that the hydrotherapy pool provides a vital service which is essential not only to short term recovery but also to the long-term mobility, pain management and quality of life of thousands of people. So why is the Uniting Church throwing all these desperately needy patients out? Well, the strategy of the hospital seems to have changed. They want to concentrate more on acute patients than on chronic ones. So they are going to build a new building to put lots more acute beds in and for this, they need the site that the hydrotherapy pool now occupies.

Seems odd that a church would show so little compassion. Since there are, effectively, no alternative facilities for these patients, they all face a future in which their mobility will quickly decline and their level of chronic pain will rapidly increase. Some face a return to the wheelchairs they have struggled to get out of. Some may even face amputations if they don't keep their limbs mobile. I was at a public meeting this evening where a packed auditorium was 'informed' by the church of its plans to dump them. It was an incredibly moving event as people stood up and told their stories – a man who feared for his paraplegic son, a woman who knew she could not go on working without the mobility the pool gave her, a woman who was desperately frightened that she might lose her arm, a man with cerebral palsy who was scared that all the work he had put into being able to sit up in his wheelchair would be undone without the pool.

Through it all, the hospital managers and other bureaucrats from the church sat stony-faced and unmoved, repeating over and over their jargon-filled 'explanations' for why they planned to ruin all these lives, which amounted to this: they had to provide more private beds for acute care to compete in the modern private health market, they hadn't been aware of any real need for a hydrotherapy pool, and it was now too late to change their plans.

Nice to know the Uniting Church cares so much about people, isn't it?

Cat Seeks Attention, Gets Affinity

I looked at my cat this morning – that's him on the left – and felt a sudden affinity with him. Now, I've got to say, this doesn't happen very often: especially not of late. He looks so sweet that you probably can't imagine how anyone could feel anything but kindness towards him. But looks can deceive. Under all that soft fur and behind those ingratiating ways, all cats are self-obsessed little killing machines. It's true that most of them tend to save that side of their nature for the quiet moments when they are alone with something much smaller than themselves. To us, they show another face: an innocent, round-eyed, beseeching face, that pretty much gets them whatever they want.

So there I was, lying in bed, slowly coming round to full consciousness and reading a novel. Outside, the butcher birds were tooting and the ravens were bellowing. The sun was already high and bright (we're not too far from the Tropic of Capricorn and the sun goes up and down much more and much more quickly here than it does in places closer to the poles.) Yuli (we named him after a character in a science fiction novel) trotted into the bedroom and hopped up onto my side of the bed. Then he made his way up towards my chest – a spot he finds convenient for being stroked and petted.

So I gave him a few cursory passes of the hand. This usually suffices and he either moves on to Wifie – who is much more enthusiastic about pleasuring the little chap – or settles down for one of the many naps he needs to squeeze into the day. Today, however, he walked up onto my chest, effectively stopping me reading and ensuring that he had my fullest attention.

With his head just inches from mine, the moment of affinity suddenly struck.

Here was a fellow traveller, another life-form, stuck here on planet Earth for his allotted span, doing whatever it took to get him through the days, surviving, the way the rest of us survive, the only way he knew how, getting pleasure where he could find it, staying out of harm's way when he could, and seeking out the comfort that creatures like us find in the company of others.

Recycled Water - Suck It Up Queensland!

If there is one thing the people of Queensland have got to do, it is to drink recycled water. There is just no other option for them. Not enough rain is falling here. People are moving into the State at the rate of 1500 per week. The Brisbane reservoirs are down to 20% capacity and still falling. Watch my lips, Queensland, there is no more water. You’ve drunk it all! You’ve poured it on your fields, you’ve boiled it in your power-plants, and you’ve sloshed it through your mines and smelters. You’ve washed your four-wheel drives with it, you’ve filled up your swimming pools with it, and you’ve even washed the leaves off your drives with it. And now there is none left. It has gone and there isn't enough coming to replace it.

The time has come to stop being so precious about drinking recycled effluent and accept reality. Squeamish idiots running scare campaigns against the idea are a complete irrelevance. There is just no alternative. If you want to live here, you have to stop squandering your water. And that means recycling it.

Full stop.

Driving in Queensland - Part 2

Yesterday, I explained how the Rules of the Road for driving in Brisbane were not quite as the Queensland Government tells it. After years of observation, I have pieced together the real rules for driving in this lovely city. I have already covered the topics of lane discipline and signalling. Today, I conclude with a discussion on Positioning your vehicle on the road.

Positioning

Coming up to a junction, you might be tempted to position yourself to the right if you are turning right and to the left if you are turning left. In Brisbane exactly the opposite is the rule. As you approach a junction, keep your speed up, keep your eyes away from your mirrors, then, at the last moment, brake hard, swing your vehicle in the opposite direction to the one in which you intend to go (ensuring that at least two wheels cross any white lines on that side), then swing back hard and make your turn. Don’t forget to flick your indicator as you go round the corner.
Even if you have to stop, at a T junction for instance, be sure to position yourself on the left if you are turning right, and on the right if you are turning left. This will make it easier to turn the corner sharply, cutting across any white lines you may need to cross. (Remember: do not signal until you start moving.)

Because of the mandatory lane-changing rules, positioning on ordinary roads and motorways has very little relevance for Brisbane drivers. The important rule of thumb seems to be that, if you have a turning coming up, it is better to swerve suddenly across three busy lanes of traffic when you get there, than to position yourself in the correct lane well ahead of the turn. This way you do not risk staying in one lane too long and maximise the number of white lines you cross.
A corollary to this rule is that if you see a ‘left lane must turn’ sign but you wish to go straight ahead or turn right, you must enter the left lane, drive as fast as you can and then swing back into the lane to your right at the very last minute. Flicking your indicator as you re-enter the traffic is not mandatory as other drivers are obliged to brake or swerve to avoid you anyway.

Concluding Remarks

Once you get the basics down, the rest is really quite easy. The fuss that other states and countries make over road markings and signage is really quite foreign to the Brisbane driver and almost everything can be safely ignored. In fact, ignoring things is at the heart of the Brisbane driving regime. If I have learned one thing from these years of patient observation, it is this. The golden rule is to behave as if you are the only person on the road. Forget about all those other road users. Just put them right out of your mind.

Remember, Queensland is the Smart State, so they’re bound to have a great hospital system if things go wrong. Right?

Driving in Queensland - Part 1

Like many Brisbane drivers, I moved here from another state. In my early ‘culture shock’ at the curious style of driving here, I obtained a copy of the 'Rules of The Road' to see what it was all about. However, this book is clearly a joke, or some kind of spoof, as it bears no relation to what is really going on out there. But, like all those other suckers, I fell for it!

Since there doesn’t seem to be a serious publication of this type, I decided to observe actual Brisbane drivers in action and deduce for myself what the real rules must be. It has taken a few years to work it out but here are my main conclusions, set out as a guide for other incomers. This is part one of a two-part guide (more tomorrow). We'll start with the basics.

Lane Discipline

Whatever they might mean elsewhere in Australia – or the world for that matter – in Brisbane, solid white lines on the road are intended to be driven across. It is actually mandatory to cross solid white lines as often as you can. When following a road, for example, a certain amount of weaving across the lines on both sides of the lane is required. If the road bends to the left and a solid white line marks a shoulder, the driver must cut across the line, preferably with all four wheels, before returning to the lane once the bend has been negotiated. On a right-hand bend, only two wheels need cross the line.

Switching lanes is compulsory every 500 metres (or every five minutes in slow-moving traffic). To change lanes in Brisbane, the driver must wait until they feel in the mood, then swing out into the other lane, flicking on the appropriate indicator only after the manoeuvre has started. Checking your mirrors, or signalling ahead of the manoeuvre is strictly forbidden.

Changing lanes whilst on a roundabout is strongly encouraged in Brisbane and is considered good style. In fact, the rule is that you should always enter the roundabout in the wrong lane for your exit and then change lanes at your leisure, preferably without signalling.

The only time sudden and arbitrary lane changing in heavy traffic is forbidden, is if you are travelling below the current speed limit in the outside lane of a freeway or motorway. If you find yourself in this situation, you must stay in your lane, no matter what, and start making mobile phone calls to all your friends.

Signalling

Many newcomers to Brisbane are confused by the rules about signalling. If you have been taught that signalling is to let other road users know what you intend to do well before you do it, you might find the switch to ‘just too late’ signalling a little difficult. Essentially, the rule is this: Signalling on Brisbane roads is strictly forbidden except during a manoeuvre when you may signal as a warning to other road users to slam on their brakes and get out of your way. Also known as ‘why bother’ signalling, the practiced driver can keep the number of times their indicator flashes to just once or twice as they execute a right-hand turn or change lanes. For those of us new to the practice, it is best to remember these simple rules: never signal before you brake and, when in doubt, don’t signal at all.

It should be obvious from this that, if your vehicle is stationary, you must not signal for any reason. So, standing at a junction, waiting for the lights to change, you must cancel your indicator if for some odd reason it happens to be on. Similarly, on pulling away from the kerb, you may not signal until the vehicle is safely in motion.

The rules about signalling on roundabouts are particularly complicated. The fundamental rule is: always signal right, no matter where you are going. However, if there is a full moon, or during Hindu religious holidays, you are allowed not to signal at all, or to signal at random. I know this is hard but I have observed that the police have no interest at all in such transgressions, preferring to make their money from speed traps, so do not worry. If you make sure that, as you leave the roundabout, you are either signalling right, or not signalling at all, you should be OK.

So far so good. If you are still alive tomorrow, I will be covering 'Positioning'.

Telstra NextG Broadband Problems

It’s a pity that the only way to get broadband in my Brisbane suburb is by 3G wireless from Telstra. I say that because the Telstra service is two or three times as expensive as an ADSL (1) equivalent and has several other major disadvantages. These include:

• Extremely low download limits. The package I have has a 1 gigabyte limit and costs as much as a 20 gigabyte ADSL package. The biggest package they offer is 3 GB and costs about $150 per month! That means if you wanted to download films or TV shows, you would almost instantly exceed your limit.
• Very low speeds. The package I have is the fastest they offer and it is alleged to ‘average’ between 500 Kbps and 1.5 mbps. I have never had a connection that runs faster than 500 Mbps and it often runs slower. Today, for example, I am getting just over 250 Kbps – at 10am on a Tuesday with ‘excellent’ signal strength, you would think that Telstra could do a lot better than this.
• Badly-written software. My Telstra Connection Manager (CM) software crashes about twice a day. It used to bring down my whole operating system with it but I discovered that this was an incompatibility with my graphics card driver. I downloaded and installed a new driver (41.5 Mb of download allowance used up just for this) and now the CM only crashes itself. Even the CM installer package is dodgy, installing all kinds of programs it shouldn’t which then have to be deleted by hand!
• Incompatibilities with common software I have installed. It is hard to believe but the Telstra software does not work with Norton Anti-Virus (NAV). I actually broke out laughing when the Telstra ‘technical support’ drone told me this. As a result, I could not send emails because the NAV outgoing email scan was failing. I’ve disabled this in NAV now and my email works again but not properly. I still have problems because the Telstra software doesn’t work with Outlook 2003 either! Apparently, it is only guaranteed to work with Outlook Express.
• Minimal modem functionality. Telstra only supplies one kind of modem and it is a very simple affair (and very expensive for what it is). What I actually want is a modem and wireless router unit so I can have other computers in my home connected to the Internet too. Modem/routers like this are available off-the-shelf from several manufacturers for ADSL but not for the Telstra 3G network.
• Having to deal with Big Pond. Big Pond is the Telstra ISP that provides the broadband service. I have now spent many hours working through my many problems with seven different Big Pond ‘technical support’ drones. Some of these were absolutely useless. The rest were mostly useless. Between them all, I managed to identify one or two causes of my problems and fix them (about as many as I identified for myself and fixed). As for the remaining issues, they ‘escalated’ the problem 8 days ago and I have yet to hear anything more from them.

I could go on but you get the picture. I am paying almost $1,000 a year for this rubbish and you can imagine how much I resent it. If there was another supplier of broadband to this suburb, I would switch like a shot! Why isn't the government doing anything?

Give Me Hope, Goanna

Sometimes days just go well.

There was no particular reason why this one should have been special but it was. I set out with Wifie to do some shopping. We had breakfast at the mall, had the usual brain-in-neutral trip round the supermarket and headed home. Wifie suggested we stop off at the Mount Coot’tha Botanical Gardens on the way back since we hadn’t been there for a while and I readily agreed since it is a wonderful place. It’s huge and it hardly has anyone in it (especially on a week-day) and it has a great collection of succulents. I snapped the picture on the right with my cell-phone when we were in the succulent garden. The thing that looks like a space-ship on the right is the geodesic dome of the greenhouse.

We took a stroll round the lake (all the water-lilies were in bloom and it was a blaze of colour) then through the succulents, then the cactus house (which also has bromeliads and orchids) and then to the café where we bought macadamia nut ice-cream cones and went back to the lake to watch the ibises fossicking for insects. It was a beautiful day – so sunny and bright. Too warm to sit in the sun but not unpleasantly hot.

We came home feeling we’d had a nice time and I went off to do some work. About ten minutes later, Wifie called me down again to see something. So I grabbed the camera and hurried and was just in time to see a metre-long lace monitor walk off our terrace and into the garden. I followed it for a while and got a couple of snaps. Watching this beautiful lizard (right) was such a treat and we both felt elated at having had the privilege.

I came back to my office feeling happy only to hear Wifie calling yet again. This time the lace monitor had come right up to the house, tried the door and was wandering around on the veranda. Seen close up in all its splendour, the lace monitor really is a very beautiful animal. I assume it was the lacy patterns hat cover it from head to tail that gave it its name. They are reasonably common in this area and you sometimes see them in picnic areas, especially in the bush – although in nearly ten years we have never seen one in our garden. There is a close relative, the Gould’s goanna, that is much rarer but its very restricted territory does include our suburb. Maybe we’ll see one of those one day. Even if it takes another ten years, it would be worth the wait.

All that remains now is to finish this and go back down to join Wifie. I know exactly how the rest of the day will go. We will sit side by side under the sun umbrella, drinking a nice Chardonnay and chatting about Life and lace monitors as the Brisbane River slides quietly by. Slowly the sun will go down, the hills opposite willl turn golden, the fish will start jumping and the welcome swallows will race them for the insects over the water. The cat will come out and lie down nearby, the cicadas and the frogs will sing their hearts out and gradually, imperceptibly, the warm, breezy night will fall.

Sometimes days just go well.

Telstra Writes Shonky Software

Well, my wireless broadband modem arrived from Telstra on Tuesday - just four days late. You may recall, I had a bit of a job ordering it. I rushed over to Wifie’s Macintosh to install it, put the CD in the drive, clicked the start button and 2 minutes later was on the phone to Telstra technical support. At first, they thought they’d sent us the wrong installation disc. Then I was put on to someone who knew what they were talking about and they informed us that, while the modem would run with a Macintosh, the software for that hadn’t been written yet. It might be ready in March, they said, ‘but I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

So the Telstra sales chimp had lied to me. What a surprise. Still, since Telstra’s 3G network is the only way to get broadband here, I decided I would have to install it on my machine. Because of the relative expense of Apple versus PC components, it would have been a lot cheaper to serve the internet from Wifie’s machine but, hey, them’s the breaks.

It has been a busy week, so I didn’t get to try to install it on my own Windows PC until the next evening – Wednesday. It actually seemed to install fairly smoothly. I got a clutch of error messages about this and that but you get used to that with any Windows installation. The thing is, it seemed to work. I actually had broadband – for two hours. Then I went to get something to eat and when I got back, it wasn’t working anymore. I got straight on the phone to Telstra technical support and waited on hold. I gave up after 25 minutes of listening to really bad music and had a whinge at Wifie. Then I came back and tried again. This time my patience only lasted 20 minutes before I gave up and went to bed.

The next day, Thursday, my Internet connection still wasn’t working. I seemed to be able to connect to my new ISP (‘Big Pond – or Big Pondscum as I have come to think of them) but couldn’t load any web pages or get any email. I waited a mere 13 minutes to talk to a silly, giggly girl who, in the course of the next 40 minutes, failed to fix it. We left it that I would download a new installation program from the Pondscum site (using my old dial-up service) and try running that. As this program was 9.2 Mb large, it took an hour and a half to download. When I ran it, I still had all the old problems.

So I called again (only took a couple of minutes waiting this time!) and spoke to a techie who seemed to understand the problem. Nevertheless, it still took more than half an hour (including four reboots of the machine) to fix. The solution was to delete half a dozen files that the installation had put on my system and which were ‘probably causing the trouble’ (so why put them there?) and to change the settings on some system files - including resetting winsock to its defaults. I also had to reset the modem itself.

I did not trust Telstra to write a decent piece of software and I was right not to. The installation was clearly a shambles and the ‘Connection Manager’ that runs the connection to the ISP is so buggy that it barely stays running for 5 minutes at a time (it is ‘not responding’ as we speak). When I shut down my PC last night, I got error messages saying the Telstra software could not be closed properly.

Today, Friday, the broadband connection was working again – for 30 minutes! Then I had the same old problems. It would connect to Pondscum alright but it wouldn’t load any web pages. This time I knew what to do, so I did it and it is up and working again – and still running almost two hours later! Any minute now, a new record will be set. I've already set the record for how hard it was to buy and install a piece of software. Six sales chimps and four technical support persons - and it's still not working properly. Well done Telstra!

Oh, and the speed? Just over 500kbps (kilobits per second). The chimp promised between 500 kbps and 1500 kbps ("depending on signal strength"). Well, my signal strength is "excellent" (according to the Connection Manager - when it's working) which is the top of the scale. What do you reckon, Telstra? Am I a satisfied customer?

I’m just hoping the connection stays up long enough for me to post this.

Broadband? We'll See...

Broadband is coming to the Brisbane suburbs after all. Telstra’s new G3 wireless network now serves my area. (Why can't they just lay a proper fibre-to-the-home network like a civilised country would?) In the past two weeks, I have been into three different Telstra shops to talk to their salespeople about it, and I have spoken three times on the phone to telemarketers. Each time I said to them, ‘I know what the service is, I’ve looked at your plans online, and I know what I want by way of a package. However, I have a couple of technical questions about how the service would work with the equipment I have at home. Do you have the technical background to talk to me about how the Telstra G3 modem will connect to a wireless local area network servicing a Mac and a Windows PC?’ Every single time, they said ‘Yes’ quite unequivocally and then went on to prove they had an almost total ignorance of computer networking.

God knows, I’m not exactly technically savvy myself, but I know when someone is talking rubbish: like the guy who confidently told me the Telstra modems can’t be used with a router and I’d have to buy a separate modem and a separate broadband service for each computer I wanted to use! Anyway, the sixth person I spoke to actually did seem to know something about it.

It’s true you can’t just plug a (fabulously expensive) Telstra modem into a router (Why the %$#% not? How stupid is that?) so I’ll have to set up one of our machines as a network server and then route the traffic from there. (Probably the Mac - it's always 50 times easier with a Mac.)Because Telstra’s 3G service costs twice what an equivalent ADSL (1) service would cost, we won’t be looking at generous download limits, and the speed (at between 500kbps and 1.5mbps, they say, ‘depending on the signal strength in your area’) is pathetic (but not so pathetic as the 16kbps to 24kbps I’m getting at the moment!) but I’m going for it anyway – if only so I can spare you all the agony of me whining on about not having broadband!

But, you know, I don’t hold out much hope for success. Putting a Mac and a PC together on a LAN has never been a simple matter – in fact, I’ve known IT experts reduced to tears just setting up a very ordinary, PC-only network at home. And those caveats about signal strength probably mean that we’ll be getting 100kbps speeds with endless drop-outs and spending hours on the phone to Telstra technical support people in India who haven’t got a clue what to do about it.

And it’s Telstra, of course, and they’re renowned for being useless, and their Big Pond ISP service is renowned for being flakey, and I had to talk to SIX of their untrained sales chimps before I found one that could answer a few simple questions!

Still, the deed is done. I ordered the modem last Thursday and I’m expecting it any time in the next few weeks (two days, the chimp said – but it’s been two days already). I’ll let you know how it all works out.