There are more complaints about the "night life"

strip in this city. Apparently it is "run down" and the "lock out" laws are harming business. There seem to be a plethora of "massage parlours" and "illicit tobacco shops", to say nothing of the "convenience" stores.

I have not been "down the strip" for a long time. I have had no need to go. There is a very nice bookshop at the far end but I can deal with them on line. The woman working there actually advised me not to come in. "It's a bit rough around here."

Yes, it is. I used to go backwards and forwards along it for one year of secondary school and then in my three years at teacher training college. Once in a while, when I was feeling rich, I would stop at the only place in the city which sold some very nice lemon gelati. That place has long since gone of course. 

There are some odd little eating spots. I would not consider eating at most of them. There is often the distinct smell of "pot" about them or on the street. You need to be aware of where you are walking because there are syringes lying around.

The owners of the "places of the night" want the area "cleaned up". They want the "lock out" laws done away with altogether. They would like a greater police presence - but just to be there as "visible", not to ruin business. They want to be rid of the "trouble makers", those who have had too much alcohol or are in the grips of a violent drug episode.

Reading all this I am reminded of the story the Senior Cat used to tell about his only run in with the police as a teenager. As he told it he and a group of mates, including my godfather, were carrying a heavy double bed across the old swing bridge over the river near the docks. It was dark and they, as teenagers will, were making a bit of noise. A police car stopped them and wanted to know what they were doing. Why were they carrying a bed?

It was of course one of the props for a play the PFA (Presbyterian Fellowship Association) was going to put on. They had borrowed it from somewhere. They were making their own entertainment - and entertainment for other people. It cost them very little. It taught them a lot about each other, about working together, about all the things involved in putting on any sort of entertainment. The vast majority of the marriages in that group lasted too.

I wonder what would happen if we did away with all the "night life" of this strip now? It would of course have a very big negative economic impact on the "entertainment" industry. We would also have a generation of "bored" youth who would need to be taught to entertain themselves. The generation which came after that might be a little more able to look after their own interests but I suspect it would take more than that. 

We might be trying to deny under 16s access to social media but that is not going to teach them to entertain themselves. The bright lights of night life on the strip beckon as soon as they are old enough to be out without parental supervision.  We need to teach children to entertain themselves so that teenagers and young adults can do it too. I doubt we are doing that. 

Changing the name of an electorate

may or may not seem important to most people. It might come down to whether you live in the electorate or know how to spell the new or old name for it. Ask some people and, even in a country with compulsory attendance at the ballot box, they will not be able to tell you the name of the electorate they live in. Yes, this is true. I have heard people telling electoral officials they do not know. These people have simply arrived at the closest polling station. 

Then there is the other cause of confusion, a name change. Why change something which people know? 

This has just happened in this state. The geographically biggest electorate has had a name change. It was done without any consultation or discussion. It has simply happened. It will no longer go by the name of a former governor of the state. It will now go by the name of an indigenous activist.

There are many people who will see this as right and proper and a good thing. Certainly the person it will now be named after did a great deal of good in her lifetime. It is no bad thing to see her honoured in some way but was this appropriate? There is a suburb in the nation's capital named after a late indigenous person. Was that appropriate?

Our national multicultural and indigenous news service give a warning at the beginning of a news story that might contain the image or name of someone who has died - that is, the name or image of an indigenous person. If that is so important then why is the electoral commission changing a name to that of someone of such importance to the indigenous community if that person is no longer alive? 

The suburb in the nation's capital was named for a man who was also a Senator. There are other suburbs named for similar reasons. Some might want to say it was named for someone who was indigenous but it was his service as a Senator which was honoured. That is not the case with the other name change. It is being done to recognise her service to indigenous issues. Whether that is right or wrong is a separate issue but the proposal should, at very least, have been put to the indigenous people who live in the electorate. 

Our local council has gone ahead with name changes which supposedly reflect the indigenous history of the area. Local history is being lost to names many people no longer recognise, do not know and cannot spell. They do not know how to say them. We are told that these names are the original, indigenous names for places and that changing them is being done out of "respect".  The reality is that nobody really knows what the original names were. Is that respect or is it something else?

Name changes may sometimes need to occur. In this instance it might have been better to wait until an entirely new electorate was formed and then used that name.  

There is more than one sort of "multiculturalism"

and it is time we recognised this and discussed it.

Talking about "multiculturalism" and how wonderful it is has been one of those "big" issues recently. The government loves to tell us how wonderful it is. Others are being a bit more cautious.

I came across the idea that not everyone lived the way we did very early in life. One of my early memories is of being swung high in the air by a "black" man who, at least to me, appeared to be very big. He wore a "skirt" and he spoke a little differently.  He had "talked in church" and now he was with us for Sunday lunch.  He was of course a missionary. He came from Tonga. My brother and I thought he was fascinating. He was good with children, full of interesting stories. We met him several more times over the years as he came backwards and forwards for various purposes. He taught us a lot.  

The same church, of which Grandpa was an "Elder", sponsored a considerable number of migrants from Holland in the fifties and sixties. These were people who had been traumatised by war. They had very little. The role of the church was to see them provided with housing, the basics of life and work. Grandpa must have called in many favours in and around the docks.  

Their ability to speak English varied but, with adults, they made the effort. My paternal grandmother, with just three years of schooling herself, took on the role of accidental teacher of English as she introduced the women to the shops and other services.  That they needed to learn English and do it quickly was never questioned. At home they spoke Dutch. If we visited they would speak to our parents in English. We children were spoken to in Dutch, just as their own children were spoken to. We were permitted to respond in English of course - their own children did!  

The food was a little different. I remember staying with them and being given, as a very special treat, appelbeignets - apples fried in batter. There were other little things, like removing our shoes before going inside, that made them "different" but I simply accepted it all just as I accepted the Serbian woman who lived next door to us would point to something and ask "You say?" and I would tell her the English word. She always wore a headscarf. It would be tied behind her head at home and under her chin if she was going shopping. 

Those migrants kept their language at home. They expected to speak English at the shops or in the workplace. Their children "picked it up" at school. They had traditions. Our Dutch friends celebrated more on Christmas Eve than Christmas Day and we found that interesting but we were not expected to do it ourselves. Gradually they became part of daily life. There are still the occasional reminders of where their families come from but they have blended in.

And there is the other sort of "multiculturalism" brought in by people whose backgrounds are so very different from mine. They also speak a different language at home. Where I understood some Dutch simply because the language was so close to English I did not and still do not understand any Vietnamese or Chinese or any of the languages of the Indian sub-continent. Their food and their traditions are very, very different. It is all fascinating. We can buy some of those things in shops. Some of the most common items, such as rice noodles, can be bought in the supermarket. 

Middle Cat often goes to a Chinese grocery store because they stock a particular brand of soy sauce and several other items which are useful.  If you go in there you will rarely hear English spoken apart from what is absolutely essential in order to do business. These people are polite but it is clear their world is not our world. They see no need to speak English as our Dutch friends did. They do not need it. They have their festivals and family occasions and see no need to integrate the way the former migrants did.

And now we have more migrants from other places, many of them refugees. Some of them mix even less. There are some who speak no English, who rely on the many interpreter services. They are keeping as close as they can to their language, their traditions, their food and their old way of life.  For some of them I suspect it is because, for all they have been told they are welcome, they are homesick. This is still a strange country for them. They want it to be like "home" but it isn't.

I wonder how much allowing, even encouraging, them to keep all this is helping them. Should more be demanded of them? As someone asked me yesterday when we were trying to sort out a problem, "When does multiculturalism divide us?" 

Losing your licence to drive because

you are no longer fit to drive is not something that happens often. It should almost certainly happen more often than it does.

Someone I know has just lost her licence. She is eighty-two and was asked to undergo a practical test. That has just happened. She failed the test. 

I knew about this in advance. I also thought she would fail the test. It is very likely she should have ceased driving several years ago. She has had several "accidents" which were clearly related to her abilities - or lack thereof.

Naturally this has upset her a great deal. It is more serious for her than it is for many people because she also has a serious mobility disability. She lives alone and lives some distance from most of the services she needs to access. Even before the loss of her licence someone else was taking her to do her shopping.  Now she will need to make more arrangements and use taxis more often. She will get half price fares for now.

I am both relieved she is no longer driving but concerned because it will isolate her even more.  Although she has staff from a nearby nursing home coming in each day to check she does not seem to have any friends. Her days are spent "gardening", doing jigsaw puzzles and knitting while listening to radio or watching television. She lives too far from me for me to visit. I tried to work out possible ways of getting to her using public transport but the journey is just not realistic. We talk on the phone quite frequently...at least, she talks and I listen.

Each time the driving issue came up for her in the last few years I have thought of the Senior Cat. I will be forever grateful he had the courage to make the decision to hand in his licence when he did. He was not a "good" driver but he was no better or worse than the vast majority of people who get behind the wheel of a car. He did not enjoy driving. It was simply convenient. He switched to his "mini-car" - his gopher. It allowed him to go to church, to the doctor, the library and the shopping centre. Middle Cat and friends and taxis did the rest. 

The problem for the person who has just lost her licence is that she has none of those things. She could still ride a gopher. There is one in the house which belonged to her husband. It has not been used for some years. The battery would need to be replaced and the rest of it checked over but there is no reason to believe it could not be used. I have suggested doing it but nothing has been done. It is like getting a mobile phone. She started that process but has not completed it. There is a computer in the house that has not been used for a decade and is probably not able to be used now. Other things need to be dealt with but she procrastinates. Well all procrastinate perhaps but her procrastination is chronic.

Her BIL, the only "family" she is in touch with, tells me her place is much untidier than the way the Senior Cat and I lived...and we were not "tidy" people. I am not a tidy person but I do like cleanliness and things do eventually get put away.  Her place is littered with things and I suspect the effort of putting them away is just too great.

I also think she is depressed although I doubt she realises it. The lack of a licence is not going to help that.  

She likes to read. The next time I speak to her I might mention the library service which delivers books on a regular basis...and I must make the effort to phone her more often.   

   

No it is not "stolen"

but try to explain the "stolen" idea to a ten year old. 

I had one of those disturbing conversations with a ten year old yesterday. He has been well, too well, taught about "stolen" land at school. He has been taught the land we now live in and on, that we were both in and on, was "stolen" from aboriginal people "back in 1832". 

That he could do absolutely nothing about this was completely beside the point. He was supposed to feel guilty about it. He had no control at all about what his ancestors did but it was "wrong" and he is the one who has to feel "sorry".

We actually have a "Sorry Day". It comes around every year and, unless you are aboriginal, you are expected to apologise for those past wrongs all over again. "It's a big thing at school," my young informant told me.

It should not be but I know it is. I listened as he went on to tell me about the "very special belonging they have to all the land and everything". He has been thoroughly indoctrinated about these things and many people will believe it is a very good thing. 

He has not been allowed to question. The idea that there might even be any questions about these "facts" had not even occurred to him.

The "connection to country" is something which is often talked about in relation to aboriginal cultures in this country. It is given special consideration when planning issues come up, when sentencing is being done, when hurt and harm are being considered. Activists like to mention it frequently.

There were more than two hundred and fifty languages once spoken by indigenous people and I wonder if there was a word for any of them that describes that connection between the land, particular places within it and their ancestry. I tried finding a word in the language of the plains people on which this city is built. The closest I could come up with was "yerta". That word seems to mean "country" but it does not seem to cover any sort of emotional attachment. That seems to be a much wider issue, one for which there is no specific word. 

I do not doubt the idea exists now but did it exist when the first white settlers arrived? Did the indigenous population of that time actually think in those terms? Of course they had a connection with the land. Their very survival depended on it. It was a practical connection, not a philosophical one. It was essential to the way they explained the world around them and the dangers they faced. And yes, they were capable of an emotional connection because of the physical connection.

The problem seems to be that the idea of belonging, if that is what it is, is now being described in words and ideas belonging to another culture entirely. It is useful to be able to describe it in these terms because it can be used as a grievance tool, a claim of theft. Doing it this way actually takes even more. It does not allow any connection to be felt free of all the negativity and claims of harm.

There is a similar idea about connection to country in Scots Gaelic. "Duthchas" can, I think, be translated as the connection between a place, the land around it and your ancestry. I cannot think of a similar equivalent in English but it is part of my Scots ancestry. It is an idea of "attachment". It could also be one of "grievance" for those who lost their land during the infamous clearances. Demands for "reparations" or "compensation" or apologies from present day inhabitants would get nowhere.

They do things differently here. I wonder what the ten year old would make of duthchas. 

 

Why is good food so expensive?

Our local shopping centre has been running one of the "school holiday programs" designed to pull people in and get them to spend money.  They cost a lot to run of course but the centre management must think it is worthwhile and that all those running a business there will benefit...and therefore contribute to the cost.

There has been the usual "face painting", some messy sort of craft (definitely fun), balloons being tied into various shapes (and bursting of course) and a "tiny town" with big cardboard structures I would have loved playing with as a kitten. There was also a wheel of some sort where you could spin it and "win" a prize of some sort. 

The prizes seem to have been small packets of crisps or similar sorts of food. One of the local grandmothers spoke to me as I was passing and asked with a sigh, "Why is good food so expensive? They could have been handing out pieces of fruit but I suppose the cost was too much."

Yes, she was almost certainly correct. It was likely cheaper to hand a child a small packet of highly processed, salty something or other with little or no food value than offer them an apple grown in the hills behind us...and they are more likely to eat the contents of the packet.

It is of course the same story inside any supermarket. The white "own brand" bread kept fresh with a lot of preservatives is just over half the price of the "speciality" less processed loaves. Soft drinks are cheaper than milk. In the meat area the sausages (with goodness' knows what in them) are cheaper than a chop but all the meat is more expensive than buying a ready made "pizza". 

Right now, in the middle of our winter, the locally grown fruit is mostly apples, oranges and mandarins. They may be local but they are not cheap. We can still get bananas all year round and, now, it seems strawberries and even raspberries. The cost is enormous and the quality is not as good as the "in season" fruit. 

There was a glut of cauliflower recently. I heard people complaining. The problem seemed to be that many people had no idea what to do with "so much" cauliflower. Aubergine? Most people just continue on to the next vegetable? Leeks appear only in tinned soup with less than three stars on the label but it is much cheaper to buy than even just one leek. Peas and beans are in the freezer section with the mix filled out with lots of relatively cheap and filling sweetcorn.

As a person living alone I do not need five kilo bags of potatoes but I wonder why someone shopping for four teenage boys ignores those in favour of a kilo of frozen "chips". The cost for the former was just a little more but would have ended up less per meal. 

The man who runs our greengrocery was looking carefully at a box of something the other day. "It will have to do but let customers know that we aren't happy with it. It's just the best we can get."  

Opposite the greengrocery there is a "fish shop". It is such a far cry from the way my paternal grandfather bought the Friday fish that I barely recognise it. We might not have been Catholics but we ate fish on Fridays. Grandpa would buy it direct from whichever boat had brought in something they thought worthy of selling to a man who knew a good meal when he saw one.  The price of fish is far beyond the budget of most families.

I will go and buy milk today. The cost of milk has increased dramatically recently but the dairy farmer is getting less. I am aware of how hard they work even now that "it's all computerised" and the computer tells them just how much to feed the cow and how much milk the individual cow has produced. It is still cheaper to buy artificially flavoured carbonated water which is loaded with sugar that someone had to produce in a factory and involves even more production. Why is milk more expensive? 

I am grateful I can still afford to eat but it would be good to know that the good stuff is at least just as cheap as everything else. 

  

There is an overflowing letterbox

in the bank of letterboxes belonging to the group of units I live in. The tenant for that unit is currently absent and nobody is clearing it.

Yesterday a parcel delivery person told me it needed to be cleared. Nothing else can go into it. No, he did not have a parcel to deliver but something had apparently fallen out and he was trying to do the right thing and put it back in. He saw me and asked me to clear it.

I cannot do that. It is not legal to empty someone else's mail box, even if you know the person is not there. You need authority to do it. I do not even know the tenant's name. I do not know where she currently is or why she is absent.  

I left an email for the "management" person who is supposed to be responsible for problems. There was an automated response.He is on sick leave. I have now left a message for the long-suffering person who is the "chair" of the resident's association. No doubt she will respond in due course. I am hoping she knows who the owner is and they can deal with the problem their tenant is causing.

Yes, it is a problem. It informs the world that nobody is there at that unit. Those with "intentions" will be "interested". They need to go past all the other units to get to that unit. The mail needs to be collected and dealt with anyway. Obviously the tenant does not have a computer or access one anywhere else. There is far too much mail for that.

That it is a problem at all interests me. According to the local "postie" the other residents get very little actual mail. Most of my mail goes to the post office box associated with my work. That makes sense to me. It is secure. I can access that box at any time. Like most people I know I get much less actual mine than I once did. I am, reluctantly, forced to use email for many things. There are companies which, wrongly, refuse to deal with matters any other way. I say "wrongly" because they assume that everyone has access to a computer and is able to use it with confidence. I know this not to be true. The argument that "anyone can use a computer at the library" is not the answer to everything.

There was a long ago time when the postman (never a woman) would deliver twice a day from Monday to Friday and once on Saturdays. They would blow a whistle if they dropped mail into your letter box. Most people had mail several times a week. There were the dreaded "window" envelopes with the bills and the letters with copperplate addressing from "aunty" so-and-so, birthday cards and Christmas cards, invitations and newsletters. I know that being sent outside by a grandparent to "see what the postman left" and bring it in was something you could do from the time you could reach and empty the box.  Posting letters was fun too.

Most of that has stopped now. I doubt childhood is as much fun in many ways. Too much happens on a screen.