Safety and danger

If the name of the chap who was chatting on Friday afternoon to ABC Adelaide's Carole Whitelock about security is anywhere on the ABC website then I can't find it, but he made for riveting listening. He was an Israeli who'd been involved in high-level international security for a very long time, and he was giving a few tips and hints to improve the lives of the mostly safe and innocent citizens of Adelaide, who for the most part are a very long way indeed from the kinds of things he's seen.

But a couple of things he said made a lot of sense to me, as things that an ordinary citizen in a small city in a relatively safe country might well be moved to do. If there is some unforeseen disaster or attack, he said, the first thing that will happen is that communications will go down, which will mean you can't contact your family or any of the people who are important to you; it's therefore a good idea to prearrange a meeting place that everyone will make their way to, especially if your house isn't there any more. This, as Carole Whitelock pointed out, will have struck a chord with Adelaide Hills residents who have been through some of the worst bushfires, and for whom the idea of a prearranged meeting place is a very familiar one.

The other thing he said that was simple common sense, really (though have I ever been sufficiently organised to do it myself? Of course not), was that it's a good idea to make copies of all your important documents and keep them together and waterproofed in one envelope, somewhere they're easily retrievable. Ideally, he said, they should be in the small bag you've packed with emergency supplies of muesli bars, water bottles and anything else that might contribute to your short-term survival when the sky falls in.

It's easy to make fun of this kind of apocalyptic imagination. Peter Cook et al did it in Beyond the Fringe ('Have you got the tinned food?' 'Yes.' 'Have you got the tin opener?' ' ... ') -- but they did it, as they well knew, at a time when what was comedy sketch one day might well have become autobiography the next. And I couldn't help thinking of my friend R, who was living in Manhattan and working at the UN when the planes flew into the towers, and who for months afterwards carried around with her, as instructed by the authorities, a bizarre assortment of survival-oriented stuff. I also couldn't help thinking of the contemporary fiction I read for review as it comes out, and how much of it tells stories of utter ruination, destruction and disaster from the Second World War.

That might be part of the problem. Most Australians think of such events as the stuff of fiction and movies, stuff separated from our sense of ourselves by its packaging as cultural artefacts. Australians who live in the line of natural disasters, say the coastal North Queensland folk or those in the habitual paths of bushfires, have some sense of their indifferent and inexorable destructiveness. But with a handful of exceptions -- people with military training and experience; elderly European-born citizens -- I doubt very much whether any of us has a realistic sense of what a political attack would be like. Even the people fleeing the Gulf Coast in droves as Hurricane Gustav heads north-west have at least had a little bit of warning, but the people at the World Trade Center seven years ago, like the citizens of Dresden and Hiroshima in 1945, had none.

But he knows what he likes

The Northern Territory News begins its article on the current Art Monthly cover with the screaming headline NUDE GIRL ART OUTRAGE and concludes with an implied whine about arts funding, of the kind you get on the blogs of adolescent male libertarians. In the middle they brag that the Arts Monthly editor Maurice O'Riordan is a Territorian and former art critic for the paper. Confused much?

Not that I think putting the offending (!) photo of the then six-year-old Olympia Nelson on the cover was any kind of a good idea. It may have been meant to be a daring and defiant gesture and I am in sympathy with the various principles behind it, but in terms of smart arts politics it was a really, really stupid thing to do.

Among other things it has the Prime Minister, who during the Bill Henson furore revealed through his attitude and choice of language to discuss it that he understands nothing about the arts and presumably cares less, now harrumphing about requiring the Australia Council to direct its funding in accordance with his personal quirks. Remind you of any other Prime Minister we know?

When I first read this report of Rudd's plans for the Australia Council I was reminded of two things. One was his announcement that he personally will have the final word on the lucrative new Prime Minister's Literary Award, something the judges weren't apprised of until after they'd been offered, and accepted, their positions as judges; presumably he means to continue as he began, making arts policy on the run by fiat when he clearly doesn't know his chiaroscuro from his elbow.

And the other was an image of the entire Australian arts community represented by the outraged figure of Daffy Duck in one of many classic Loony Tunes cartoons: 'Of courthe you know thith meanth war!' [UPDATE: Bugs said it too.]

In the wake of the Henson debate there was urgent need for the arts community and the PM to mend their fences but this is just going to make it worse. You'd think, wouldn't you, that an Arts Minister worthy of the name might step in at this point and do something intelligent.

Oh well.

Hot August Day

Yesterday was Adelaide's hottest August day on record.

Not that I think the globe is warming or anything silly like that.

Tell us how you really feel

While I am sometimes in less than full agreement with the Age's Catherine Deveny and don't always think her columns are 'good' (unlike many bloggers, I think there's a very clear distinction between those two things), I have just decided that I want her for my new best friend.

That's because I've just caught up with her Wednesday column (my secret Terrist name is Pavlov Bin Busy), in which she expressed the feelings of -- I'm guessing -- about three-quarters of the Australian populace, thus:

You can shove your citizenship test up your poxy date.

Like many others, including -- again -- many bloggers, she then goes on to provide her own citizenship test, and I must say this is the best one I've seen so far. After long consideration I've decided that my favourite question is #1 under 'Customs':

'Macca, Chooka and Wanger are driving to Surfers in their Torana. If they are travelling at 100 km/h while listening to Barnsey, Farnsey and Acca Dacca, how many slabs will each person on average consume between flashing a brown eye and having a slash?'

(Zoe from crazybrave may well be able to answer this correctly, but I don't like anyone else's chances. Those who have had the experiences are unlikely to have been doing the arithmetic.)

Lose on the roundabouts, lose on the swings

In the immediate wake of Steve Bracks's shock resignation as Premier of Victoria, a decision in which the very public problems of his children played a major part, and after eight years as Premier that began when the oldest child was still only twelve, Bracks's replacement John Brumby has shown his Heffernan-hued true colours and demonstrated that he has learned less than nothing from his predecessor's life experience.

From today's Age:

'New Premier John Brumby has suggested one of the reasons he overlooked Tim Holding for the Treasury portfolio is that the young Finance Minister is unmarried and has no children.

Asked on ABC TV why he had chosen former education minister John Lenders over Mr Holding for the key job, Mr Brumby replied: "He's a bit older and has had a few more of life's experiences. He's a parent, father, husband. All of those things."'

Got political ambitions? You'd better get breeding, then, if you haven't already. And while you're at it, setting up a trust fund for the sprogs' counselling and rehab in fifteen or twenty years might be a prudent move as well.

What's In the Nappy Bucket?

27 May 2006, "Hard Man on the Hill", Good Weekend (as quoted in today's Crikey):

'When asked about the prospect of Julia Gillard as leader of the ALP, Bill Heffernan responds: "Na. Na. Na. I mean anyone who chooses to remain deliberately barren ... they've got no idea what life's about. We've got a few on our side as well. I've said this before, the most difficult job in the world is parenthood. Rudd's got three kids. He knows what a bucket of nappies is all about."'

Bill. Dude.

Why would we need a bucket of nappies to teach us what poop is, when we have you in our faces on a regular basis?

Illness and recovery

Over the summer two of my closest friends came face to face with mortality. One is married to a man who not long ago was diagnosed with lung cancer, with an initially really terrible prognosis. Then, quite unexpectedly, the tumour turned out to be operable. He's now staring down chemo and radiotherapy, but the women in his life -- his wife, his mother and his 19-year-old daughter -- are all very happy Vegemites.

The other is my dear friend Stephanie, who spent the summer undergoing treatment for breast cancer and blogging brilliantly about it at Humanities Researcher. When I saw her in February she was well enough, but only just, to come over to Adelaide from Melbourne for a conference.

Here's what she'll be doing on Friday.