The Spouse absolutely despises poultry and he is always the one to tread in the chook shit thus making his hatred of all things feathered, loudly clear to all within the immediate vicinity. But, “The Spouse” also loves me and I like chickens. I like free range eggs, I like the fact that the girls eat the snails and slaters and I especially like that I have a free range chicken for the pot when I want one.

So to keep the peace, “The Spouse” very, very reluctantly built me a small portable A-Frame shelter for my newest batch of girls, which he didn’t actually know were arriving until the day before we were due to go and pick them up. This A-frame worked wonderfully well until last Christmas when I decided to keep two pigs. Mother hen decided that the pickings were much richer near the pig sty and moved her brood to a native cherry tree next to the pigs sty which only left the old red hen living in the A-frame.

I wasn’t too fussed about Mother hen moving as she wasn’t laying and I thought all her offspring were roosters and as such they were destined for the pot.

Veronica and I were also given some Muscovy ducks and once again I promised The Spouse faithfully that I would remember to lock them up of a night time and as I talked hard and fast about yummy roast duck and golden duck eggs, I could see his eyes glazing over and I knew by the way he noisily stomped off into the distance that everything would be fine.

And so it was, until the ducks squeezed through a tiny space in the fence and took up residence underneath the verandah at the back of the  house.

Nothing is ever easy when you are a scatterbrained keeper of totally free range animals.

Six months down the track and the fine batch of roosters have turned into a fine batch of hens. David and I went out one night and by torchlight captured the only rooster and one of the hens and gave them to Veronica.

We went out with our torches the next weekend to capture the rest of the hens and bugger me if they hadn’t moved to a different roost. Damn!

This has left me with two young point of lay girls who are totally wild and a mother hen, who has gone broody and is sitting on a hidden nest somewhere deep within the bracken ferns. A broody hen in the middle of July is very strange. Admittedly the weather has been very warm lately but broody in July? It is the middle of winter you stupid bird.

I will need to wait until she comes out to be fed and then after she has pecked around for what feels like hours and hours, I can follow her to the secret nest and replace her eggs, as these eggs are infertile and she will sit for weeks waiting for them to hatch. This isn’t as easy as it sounds as mother hen is very sneaky and I am easily distracted.

I think the ducks might be laying underneath the house which is a a bit of a problem as well because I gave the drake to Veronica and these eggs are also infertile, as well as inaccessible and my glowing promises of golden duck eggs are sounding a bit hollow.

So, I need to convince “The Spouse” to block off access to the underneath of the back verandah, to keep the ducks out from under the house. This will entail all manner of recriminations from “The Spouse” involving lots of swearing, angry glaring in my general direction, lots and lots of grumbling and threats of dire consequences to all poultry that cross his path.

Then he will block off access to underneath the house. Yay! Or that is the plan as I am sitting here writing and hoping.

Marylin has started  Sunday Snippets. I am hopeless with memes I either forget about them or I have all the best intentions in the world and then I write about something else entirely. But in the spirit of friendship I am going to do this one and it still counts even though it is Monday.

I need a good recipe for fake blood. I have been given a few recipes via twitter friends but they all seem to be very sticky, the main ingredients are either red jelly or corn syrup mixed with cocoa. The Spouse will be covered with this blood and as we will be filming on location, it needs to be easy to clean up. Also, “The Spouse” has super sensitive skin due to his EDS so we have to be careful there as well.

Did you notice I said filming on location? hehe That sounds very exotic when in actuality we will be filming about an hours drive away from home near the water somewhere. The only requirement being that the ground needs to be sandy as I cant have “The Spouse” writhing around  fighting for his life on a pile of sharp rocks. Just because he is going to die a gory death, doesn’t mean he has to be uncomfortable whilst he is doing it.

One of my props, a large blue seahorse has been posted and I am tossing up whether to alter it or leave it all shiny and blue. I think it might add an extra creepy tone to the film if I leave it pretty.

I will be firing some of the dragon eggs in reduction on Wednesday and having some of the dragon eggs actually finished makes me a bit less stressed. The exhibition is only seven months away and I have heaps to do.

Half of my studio has been delivered but I am still waiting on the excavator to come up and clear the site. I will post photos when something actually starts to happen.

I made something blue with butterflies for Tiff but the blue ended up black, so it is back to the drawing board there. Sorry Tiff.

My friend Martin and all the other walkers are ready to begin Hadrians walk. Things aren’t looking good for Martin if his tweets are anything to go by.

MartinFitz Wore backpack from train to baggage drop off point, took it off and had to steady myself from falling over. Kill me now. #hadrianswalk

To encourage Martin to keep on going you can go over here and leave a comment if you haven’t already done so.  I will donate a dollar per comment. (the small print says only one comment per person and a valid email address is needed in order for the comment to be valid.)

So there is a snippet of what is happening here with me.

I am doing a class called creative concept development. The aim of this eleven week class is to allow us the freedom to develop an idea that is separate from our current work. An idea that will inform our future work practice beyond what we are doing now.

I have decided to make a  short film.

Initially I wanted to make a fishing film where “The Spouse” or David caught a trout. I wanted to have this film showcase the gorgeous natural beauty of Tasmania, the excitement and thrill of catching a fish and the release of the lucky fish back into the lake.

I wanted to send this film to my friends in Massachusetts as well as share it here, with you on my blog.

But…

I just couldn’t get rid of the idea that it was a little bit boring, that it was just a bit too safe. I justified it to myself by saying that it would teach me the skills that I needed to make the dragon egg film in february, learn to walk Kimmy and all that.

Whilst inside my head mutant zombie fish were lurking. Killer fish banging on my mind saying, “Let us out! Let us out!”

So on the drive home I let the killer zombie, mutant fish out to play.

“The Spouse” thinks I am mad but that is nothing new and after his sixth beer last night he agreed to star in my film and be killed by a mutant fish. YAY.

So the idea is this, a man is fishing in a beautiful seaside location when he catches a large fish, he lands the fish and as he bends down to pick the fish up it suddenly transforms into a mutant killer and goes for his throat. He tries to fight the fish off but to no avail and and he dies a gory death.

Problems kept on popping up but they were easily solved. I thought of making the killer fish out of papier-mache but Veronica thought the water might wreck the fish. I also needed an oil rig, a couple of explosions, some oily water, a soundtrack and I probably will need a bex and a good lie down.

Last night I bought four blow up dolphins, a giant sea horse and an octopus from ebay, I can make the oil rig out of lego, I am sure I can find an explosion online, though I wish I had some crackers. David has said he will compose the music for the film. If I need some scorched earth a neighbour down the road has been burning off and I will ask them if I can film their front yard.

This is going to be so much fun. What do you think? Do you want to watch my film as well? Do you have any suggestions?

Now that the Tasmanian election is done and dusted, and the show-bag tinsel of non-core promises (in the Tasmanian context all promises are non-core) are being processed for deep storage or are being changed beyond recognition, it’s back to business as usual.

Business as usual in Tasmania is defined by giving absolute priority, above and beyond everything else, to the interests of corporatised industrial forestry.  Jobs can disappear in any other sector of the Tasmanian economy in their hundreds, whether it be in agriculture and food processing, or elsewhere in the primary sector, like mining, or in manufacturing everything from ships and vehicle bearings to footwear, without too much real concern and interest, but when it comes to industrial forestry that is something entirely different.

The irony, of course, as has been carefully explained by Max Bound and Tom Ellison, among others, is that there has been a steady loss of jobs in the forestry sector for at least a generation, at the same time that there has been an exponential increase in logging under the clear-felling regime, as well as an extensive expansion of the single-species plantation estate for woodchips.

Now, “suddenly” (to stretch the meaning of the word beyond any credibility at all), in the immediate aftermath of the election, we are told that something is more than seriously askew about business as usual.  There is a “crisis” in the bush, which “nobody saw coming”, as the hilariously jocular Jeremy Rockcliff described it.  Where’s he been?  So behold, all the cloud cuckoos are now screeching in unison that a crisis has “suddenly” occurred, and that business ain’t business as normal any more.

It might be back to business as usual on the floor of the new Tasmanian Parliament, resplendent in the same cultural rags of bile, invective, strutting arrogance and self-righteousness – as exemplified in the first week of May on one side by the baiting triumphalism of the Labor and Green politicians, and on the other by the high moral dudgeon of the Liberals.

And it’s certainly back to business as usual with the broken promises (some of them very hard core) which brokered the creation of the new-look Labor-Green administration, which has kept David Bartlett in the Premier’s office despite a swing of 12% against Labor, and a primary vote of just 37%.  Nor is there anything askew about the blatant dishonesty of the election campaign – that’s merely been confirmed as appropriate and proper.

But if there is one thing that is now as quintessentially Tasmanian as political dishonesty (after all, it is seen as a clever tactical virtue, deserving of praise and reward), or as distinctively Tasmanian as decimating its native fauna as vermin until species are wiped out or endangered, it is clear-felling native forest (old growth or otherwise) as fast as possible, at any and every opportunity, just to get rid of it, whether it is profitable to do so or not.

The world is surely tilting on an abnormal axis if the major water catchments throughout the State aren’t being stripped bare of their vegetation as rapidly as past experience has shown to be possible.  The emerging “crisis” has slowed the exposure of the bare ground, hectare upon hectare, in the headlands of rivers and streams wherever roads extend, keeping bulldozers idle and monster trucking rigs without loads for the chipping mills.  Things aren’t normal unless hundreds of tonnes of stumps and trees unsuitable for chipping are being windrowed and heaped for fire-bombing in next year’s autumn “regeneration burns”.

There is something really askew with the sudden halt to the establishment of single species tree plantations on well-watered agricultural land, especially alongside major waterways, in valleys and fertile soils, extending across thousands of hectares of public and private land.  Especially plantations that have only one value, as fibre for pulp.

As sure as night follows day, the name of the game in David Bartlett’s plan for “forestry restructure” – a misnomer for how to re-badge woodchips, as one might Easter Island rock statues, into things of “new” value – is about getting things back to normal.  That means, in a nutshell, knocking down the obstacles to woodchipping for pulp.  The most important obstacle in this scenario, in the view of the main players in industrial forestry, is satisfying the market demand for FSC accredited wood fibre.

Until now, the focus of the Tasmanian industry, as it has always been since FSC accreditation became the international benchmark for industry best-practice in 1993 (whatever its flaws) was how to avoid it.  That is no longer possible.  The problem for the industry is that FSC accreditation requires both an environmental licence and a social licence, as well as an industrial licence.

This issue needs a bit of background.
There was a time, in the good ol’ days, when a two-hour protest by anti-logging activists in an old-growth coupe or inside one of Gunns’ chipping mills (Triabunna comes to mind) would produce a traffic jam of log trucks stretching for several kilometers, accompanied by banner headlines in the local dailies about chipping delays costing Gunns and contractors millions of dollars in lost revenue.

But the problems in the Tasmanian industry were apparent well before the arrival of protesters in the Weld Valley or on the site of Gunns’ mill at Triabunna.  They were apparent well before the implosion of Timbercorp and Great Southern, and more recently, the collapse of Forest Enterprises Australia.  They were apparent well before Gunns began sacking workers in rolling closures over several years in its operations in several Australian States and in New Zealand, but especially in north east Tasmania.  They were apparent well before the final closure of the Burnie paper mill this year and the enforced shut downs of Gunns’ chipping mills at Triabunna, Bell Bay and Burnie for weeks at a time.  These are not just the daily stoppages caused at odd times by protests in the bush or at mill sites, which inflamed the whole industry, the media and two main political parties.

The problems have been exemplified in the systemic bottomless pit of government intervention.  It is now 20 years since the Field government wrote off over $270 million of industry debt, and the pattern has been repeated again and again.  But still the mantra continues, as governments come and go, of building a “jobs rich” industry, as it has for years and years.  And still the mantra continues of the need to pour more millions into a black hole until “the wheel turns”.

But the wheel fell off years ago.  The problems within the Tasmanian forestry industry are essentially, and most centrally, rooted in over-extension, fuelled by decades of subsidy and untold millions of dollars in handouts, and greed.  That in turn has a cultural foundation.

Antipathy to the Tasmanian bush, to its very nature, to its vegetation and to its wildlife, cannot be underestimated when trying to understand how the forestry industry operates in Tasmania.  Tasmanians are alienated from their physical environment, perhaps more so now than at any other time since the British invasion at the beginning of the 19th century. The notorious statement by former Tasmanian Premier Robin Gray that the Tasmanian Franklin River was a “leech ridden ditch”, exemplifies this very well.

It is in this context of fundamental dissociation, of detachment and separation from the land – no, from the reality of the place we live, and the necessary reciprocal relationships we should have with it for its health and our continued health and existence – that the spiral of dysfunction and malfunction within the free-for-all quarry of Tasmanian native forests and their well-sprayed, water-sucking, wheezing, neat-rowed, spindle-legged replacements began taking form and shape as a diabolical disaster set to infect Tasmania’s future.

It is only within a warped mentality of almost visceral contempt and scorn for Tasmania’s natural environment that a vision of the place as “plantation isle”, with one of the world’s largest pulp mills sitting in the Tamar Valley, and a doubling of woodchip production from c. 3.5 million tonnes to 7 million tonnes per annum, could actually occur.  This Ozymandias-type mindset of seeing nothing beyond power and profit for a few through whole-scale transformation of land and water usage, is so blatant and obvious that it prompts the question as to how it could take place at all in an Australian State.

The drive for transformation and power relegated the normal processes of governance, involving the application of proper standards of analysis, to the shredder.

The first step in this direction was State legislation which exempted the forestry industry from a raft of land use and environmental controls which applied to everyone else.  This legislation also effectively exempted forestry operations from international standards set in the 1990s under the FSC certification processes, and Commonwealth standards which apply in the jurisdiction of the federal EPBC Act.  The highly contentious Pulp Mill Assessment Act of 2007 is the culmination of a jigsaw of laws which have provided the rotten base for the crisis which now exists.

Internally there are other things, particularly subsidies, as already noted, which protect forestry from self-analysis and reform.  Most outrageous of these is the set of arrangements between Forestry Tasmania and Gunns, the publicly-known component being the 20-year wood supply agreement for access to native forests, which sees Tasmanian taxpayers subsidizing FT losses. How much public money has been squandered in this way is worthy of investigation. There are other subsidies as well, especially in provision of cheap water and transport infrastructure, but the lack of transparency in the affairs of Forestry Tasmania is scandalous, as has been clearly demonstrated in fine detail by John Lawrence.

Externally, the story is one of ignoring changing realities as if they don’t exist or can be willed away with a magic wand.  The rapidly changing world of information technology is not going to disappear in a clear-fell sterilization burn.

According to a report earlier this year by RISI, a leading forecaster and analyst on global forest products, in the ten years since the peak of newsprint demand in the US in 1999, there has been a 57% decline.  “In Western Europe… we estimate that newsprint demand in 2010 will be 24% below the peak year of 2000.” The decline is also occurring in photocopying-stationery-printing paper.  “Uncoated woodfree demand in North America has fallen 33% since 1999.”  This pattern will not be confined to North America and Europe, but will occur everywhere, and accelerate.

According to RISI, if current trends continue, driven by the information technology revolution, “demand should decrease by 50-75% in the first 10 years after the peak year and by 75-98% in 15 years.  That would mean that demand for uncoated woodfree in Western Europe would be only 2.3-4.7 million tonnes by 2014 (from a current estimate of 7.1 million tonnes) and only 187, 000 tonnes to 2.3 million tonnes by 2019.  Coated mechanical paper demand should drop to 144,000 tonnes to 1.8 million tonnes by 2022.”

Tasmanian economist Greg Suitor sums up the situation succinctly:  “Paper pulp is definitely going to be a victim of the information revolution and any trees grown specifically for pulp will not have much use except as firewood. The woodchip industry is in for a lean time, to put it as optimistically as I can.  I have no explanation for why our planners can’t see this, except that they are stupid.”

Just to drive this point home, the technology editor of The Age, Gordon Farrer, wrote last week that “the international launch of the iPad is the latest manoeuvre in a battle between two behemoths of the digital age…  that will shape how we consume and share all digital content, from films, books, music and personal blogs, to family photo albums, newpapers and magazines…  The monopoly of the printing presses and the media barons who own them has broken down”.  (Read for yourself Farrer’s article, Business Day, The Age, May 11, 2010).

All other external realities, such as competition, the tyranny of distance, climate change, fuel costs, and not least, increasing market concern for environmentally sustainable wood products, means that industrial forestry, as it is practiced in Tasmania, based overwhelmingly on woodchipping for pulp, has no sustainable future, and is doomed to failure.  The writing has been on the wall for a very long time, and no amount of round-table Camelot beating of breasts is going to find a solution to the hundreds of thousands of useless nitens plantations littering the Tasmanian landscape.

Like the Easter Island statues, Tasmania’s single species nitens plantations are just another exemplary testimonial to human folly.

Tasmania used to be called the “apple isle”, and some people still refer to it that way.  The Tasmanian apple industry refused to see that changes in the outside world would close their main market.  The industry never recovered.

It is easy to compare what happened to apples to what is happening now in forestry.  But there is an important difference.  That section of the Tasmanian forestry industry as it is currently managed and operates, clear-felling for woodchips, which represents over 80% of the timber harvested, needs to fail if Tasmania is to have a future.

If the solution to the present crisis is seen as reversing the stalled plantation estate, by consolidation and reaffirmation of Tasmania as “plantation isle”, rather than by dismantling it, then Tasmania’s future will be tragic indeed.  It will entail the squandering of public funds in ever-increasing subsidies for a less and less valuable commodity, and the ongoing destruction of water catchments and pollution of essential water supplies, and the continued spread of single species tree plantations across vast areas of land.

But it is clear already that that is the purpose of Bartlett’s strategy to create a Camelot group-think pep squad to get FSC accreditation for Gunns to get things moving again towards the John Gay dream of a Tamar Valley pulp mill.

Which brings us back to the nasty issue of a “social licence”.  From the week beginning May 11, 2010, Bartlett and forestry industry stakeholders have all been singing from the same hymn sheet, stressing three things.  First, “social licence” has become the new buzz-phrase, the mandate, if you like, in the arbitration for “restructure” – which is just a weasel word for business as usual.

Second, a key assumption is being propagated by all key stakeholders in the status quo of past practice, and that is that environmentalists are “to blame” for the need to adopt FSC accreditation.  In other words, FSC accreditation is seen as a nuisance by the industry, because it imposes higher standards of forest management than exist under current practices. On May 11, 2010, Timber Communities Australia spokesman Barry Chipman said that “the likes of the Greens and the Wilderness Society are reaping what they have sown”, which is tantamount to admitting that the industry gives lip-service to the notion of currently recognized best practice in the global market-place, but without actually practicing it. Bartlett has reiterated exactly the same sentiment several times in the past week.

Which leads straight to the third emphasis, a plan and a propaganda campaign to ensure that the “social licence” necessary for FSC accreditation becomes locked up as a rubber-stamp adjunct to decisions already made, or which can be relied on, to serve the interests of the indefinite continuation of business as usual.

Here’s a good example of what is happening in relation to “social licence”.  The comment by Tasmanian radio talk-back host Tim Cox (Monday, May 17, 2010) that it would be “a bridge too far” for the inclusion of anti-corruption watch-dog Greens MHA Kim Booth on the Bartlett-sponsored “forestry restructure” Camelot group, is indicative of the manipulative processes at work to exclude all but conformist views, especially in determining who has a voice in the “social chamber” to get woodchip operations (and hopefully the pulp mill as well) up and running via FSC accreditation.

Cox’s comment, whether it is his considered opinion or not, is in tune with a concerted effort to ensure that the “social licence” needed for FSC accreditation can be achieved without proper community (ie social) consultation, but can be controlled.  The most obvious way to do this is to try and conflate the “environment licence” with the “social licence”, in a way which wedges those interests against each other.  For example, Geoffrey Cousins’ view that it would be acceptable for the pulp mill to be built in the Tamar Valley if FSC conditions were met by industrial forestry, is a case in point where the interests of industrial forestry in maintaining and strengthening the status quo could be achieved by having the “environmental-social licences” put together and identified as one and the same.

This is the strategy of the Bartlett-industry collaboration.  Tactically, the Wilderness Society, which will be clamouring to be the key voice for the “environmental licence”, will be placed in a dilemma of its own making, for it has already locked itself into a trade-off, whereby it will agree to the continuation of large scale plantation agriculture in return for the industry exiting old-growth and native forests.  This bind is complicated by the fact that TWS is actively supporting the industry transition to FSC accreditation on the basis of the status quo, including “not opposing” the building of a pulp mill in Tasmania outside the Tamar Valley, a truly surreal situation, which leaves them in danger of being accused of betraying the true intent of the FSC “social licence”.  That dilemma has been severely aggravated for them by the findings of Drs Bleaney and Scammell about toxicity in water supplies downstream from monocultural nitens plantations in water catchments on the east coast of Tasmania.

TWS have been questioned often enough by analysts such as Mike Bolan and others on these matters, and should understand as well as anyone the perils of condemning Tasmania to a future of “plantation isle”.  At this point in time, if they betray the requirements of a “social licence” by allowing themselves to be wedged into unprincipled decisions, they will find it difficult to face the consequences, to put it mildly.  The same applies to other environmentalists who seek to trade off gains to meet their own agendas against the general community interest.

There is one other consideration which looms large in the current strategy articulated jointly by Bartlett and industry spokesmen.  That consideration is “time” for the world to return to normal, as it has been in the past and always promises to be in the future, as if wishing the world was flat would make it so.  So we hear, ad nauseum, the same old pleas for more subsidies until the world shrugs off the mirage of the information revolution, which is bound to implode upon itself, and result in a bountiful wonderland of renewed demand for paper, paper and yet more paper.  Forget the digital revolution, forget the on-coming iPad technology, forget the fact that India and China will adopt these technologies more quickly than you can plant a useless nitens hybrid in Tasmania for harvest in 2030.

So Bartlett and Chipman and FT and the CMFEU and the weird collection of forestry industry organizations representing “business units”, who all voted en masse for Howard in 2004, are looking for handouts to bide them over until the good ol’ times roll round again.  Six years ago a “bushie” I knew looked at the standing timber on a neighbouring property and remarked that it should all be woodchipped “before the bottom really fell out of the market”.  That says it all, for me, about the rotten culture in the Tasmanian forestry industry, about the contempt for the environment, about the willingness to trash, and about the lies we are now hearing of the “sudden” crisis in the industry.

Both the Bartlett government and the Liberal opposition continue to give their unequivocal support for Gunns aka Southern Cross to “get on with it” and build the $2.5 billion pulp mill.  So let us be aware that the current strategy of the main-stream political parties and the forestry industry is for a return to business as usual.

That’s the context for Bartlett’s roundtable.  It is totally the wrong context for meaningful reform.  It is totally the wrong context for reforms that are essential.

The real business of the roundtable should not be in providing “time” for the old world, pre-1990s, to rise from the dead.  It is now time for something else entirely.  It is time that the forestry industry was shorn of its special legislative protections.  It is time that the forestry industry was open to public scrutiny, by lifting the veil of secrecy and deceit that cloaks FT activities.  It is time that the forestry industry took its place as just another sector within the Tasmanian economy and polity, rather than an industry with special privileges and such extensive control of land and water resources.

It is time to scrap the woodchipping industry, and to focus on the real value-adding sectors which do have a future in a rapidly changing world, which would entail “restructuring” to accommodate about 16-20% of the current bulk harvesting operations and the elimination of clear-felling and the establishment of single-species plantations.  It is long past time that an “environmental licence” and a “social licence” be implemented in the forestry industry, but not by stacking those chambers with industry interests or by trying to conflate the two chambers as one.  There are serious doubts that FSC accreditation of the Tasmanian industry will actually deliver an uncorrupted “social licence” anyway, as Brenda Rosser has strongly argued.

In the final analysis, there are no positive signs that Bartlett’s roundtable will contain the right people to dispassionately analyse the internal and external problems, or to have the courage and the will to bite the bullet on any of these issues.  To the contrary.  That being the case, at some point in time external factors will, in the end, impose and dictate the decisions, but without participating in any process of discussion.  And, of course, by then there will be much more social, ecological and economic wreckage, and the scars and divisions will be greater than they are now.

This epitomizes what is so sad and so pathetically tragic about the nature of Tasmania’s future under such leadership.  These people have modeled their view of Tasmania and the wider world on their own ignorance, in order that their ignorance appears as a virtue and not a disadvantage in maintaining business as usual.

There is something seriously askew in Tasmania, and business as normal ain’t the answer.  But unfortunately, shifts in cultural mindsets don’t grow on trees, especially in Tasmania.

Copied with permission from the Tasmanian Times. You can see the original article here.

When David saw me at school he would launch himself at me and I used to have to brace myself so that the force of his hug didn’t knock me over. Then together, we would walk out the school gates holding hands, swinging our arms and smiling to each other. Away from the horror that was a small town primary school full of prejudices.

We were that family. When everyone around us was building McMansions and driving the latest cars. We were building our house room by room from recycled materials. The fact that we had an outside toilet was a major talking point and my children were teased mercilessly by the children of relatives as well as the children of the school establishment. People that had never been to my home would tell stories in lurid detail of the wild drug orgies we participated in and the squalor in which we lived. The fact that we had few visitors and that alcohol was the only drug I used was quite beside the point.

At a time in Australia when people were encouraged to buy buy buy and credit was king. We stayed debt free and went without. The spouse was labelled a dole bludger because he was unable to work due to the pain of his Ehlers Danlos. We didn’t know it was EDS then we just thought he was broken and that his constant pain was due to a very serious motorcycle accident he had been involved in, in 1992 and then compounded by the injuries received when he was shot in a hunting accident in 1993. The label of dole bludger is a horrible one to carry though and living below the poverty line makes you appreciate the things you have.

If people were happy to make snap judgements based on the way I looked I was also more than happy to encourage their misunderstandings by dressing differently and not explaining myself or my motives.

Now that I am a bit more grown up I am ready to start to explain myself a bit. I look at the glitterati girls and they are still desperately holding onto their fragile crowns, their makeup is getting thicker as they try to hold back  the years and I find it hard to imagine that these women’s gossip and innuendo once made my life difficult.

I am ready to step out into the light of my small community and announce that here I am, I am an artist.

Members of the Greater Green Ponds branch of  Tasmanian Regional Arts are building up a collection of art and craft created in the Southern Midlands area. Their plan is to acquire works and lease them for display in public and private spaces through out the Southern Midlands.

I am going to ring them up today and offer to donate Boganvillainy to their collection.

I am a bit nervous, but it certainly isn’t as daunting as walking through those school gates were a few years ago.

There are two students in my Art theory class who need the simplest of concepts explained to them in great depth making a simple fifteen minute introductory session, stretch into an hour of eyeball stabbing frustration.

There is also one rather large bombastic young man who very seriously told me that he had never been a teenager because he had been a chef at 15. I couldn’t think of a reply to that statement as I was trying not to choke on my coffee.

At least in this group we don’t have the obligatory over sharer who feels compelled to regale the class with anecdotes of  their time living in a grass hut, building fires from camel dung  and drinking yak milk smoothies or some such other sensory delight.

To be totally honest I know that I am the flippant smart arse in the group who, when things get particularly grim in the stupidity stakes bursts out with a one liner and of course that wastes more time.

Sometimes listening to one of the students carry on I feel like Yoda is on my shoulder whispering to me, “The stupid is very strong in this one.”  I am in danger of developing a nervous wince when ever they open their mouths and even now I am shuddering as I remember a particularly painful question and answer time.

On the upside the class is interesting and I keep on thinking of that old saying no pain no gain.There are also some really talented people in the group who are as frustrated as I am. I just wish that  sometimes the painfulness of being in a group situation where the class moves along at the pace dictated by the slowest learner in the group wasn’t quite so sharp.

The Australian Government, namely Senator Stephen Conroy has given the green light for a ‘Clean Feed’ to be applied to Australian internet.

News posts here, here and here.

In laymens terms, this means that come next August, MANDATORY ISP filtering will occur on all internet.

It’s not up to the Government to say what I can and can’t look at on the internet. I am an adult and so long as my activity isn’t illegal (ch*ld porn) then the Government should have NO RIGHT to filter my internet.

It is up to me to keep my children safe on the net. Not the Government.

See NoCleanFeed for more details and if you agree with me, sign the petition.

SIGN PETITION AGAINST CLEAN FEED.

As a web publisher, this scares me senseless. Officials have admitted that the filtering, while effective against the kind of sites they are wanting to filter (a blacklist, if you will. who knows what exactly they will be deeming ‘not suitable’) there are also plenty of false positives, ie: sites blocked that shouldn’t have been.

Does that mean I could ‘accidentally’ have Frog Ponds Rock blocked? Or what about you. What happens if your website gets blocked?

I don’t agree with it. It is censorship plain and simple.

Sign the petition against it. Please.

Reproduced with permission from Sleepless Nights

Robo-Mum could be programmed to stand at the doorway of my teenager’s bedroom repeating, “Get out of bed, get out of bed now!” every five minutes from 6.45 am to 7’15.

Then Robo-Mum would casually follow the teenager to the bathroom door and start repeating,”Move away from the mirror, get into the shower” from 7.20 to 7.30. Once the water had been running for 5 minutes, Robo-Mum would start chanting,”Get out of the shower.That’s long enough and my personal favourite, Do you think water just falls from the sky?”

Still stationed at the bathroom door Robo-Mum reverts back to the, “Move away from the mirror” cry at 5 minute intervals until her tune will change to the more frantic chorus of, “Hurry up, breakfast is ready,you are going to miss the bus.”

Robo-Mum will be skilled at juggling all the normal morning demands and wont even bat a robotic eye,when informed that the teenager needs some obscure item from deep within a Brazilian rainforest cave for a science project right this minute. Robo-Mum will just magically pull the obscure item out of her arse along with unlimited amounts of ready cash.

I doubt that David would even notice that I had employed a robot to do the repetitive hurry ups, the clean your teeths and the you are going to miss the bus, phrases that I  say eleventy billion times every single fucking morning. Aaaaaaaaaaaaarggggh!! He might be a tad surprised at the money out of the robots arse trick though, because I am sure he thinks it grows on trees.

This is where you, the reader can feel free to insert whatever dramatic quote you like. I was thinking of a bit of Dylan Thomas myself. Or even a bit of Shakespeare, the bard is always handy for a descriptive word or two.

Not into poetic quotes? What about a Doors song then? ‘ The End’ seems remarkably apt.

Scratching your head yet? Wondering what on earth I am blathering on about this time?

Sorry.

Fear makes me a little more scatterbrained than usual.

Today, in approximately three hours I am having all my teeth taken out. The whole twelve of them that I have left that is. All my teeth will be unceremoniously yanked out. One by painful one. Then I will be sent home with a brand new set of shiny plastic choppers.

So what are you doing today my lovelies?

Tell me a story to cheer me up. Come out of lurkerdom and say “Hello Kimmy”

It would be very nice to come home from the dentist and be totally distracted from the pain and the dreadful lisp by your fantastic comments. It would be especially nice to see where some of my lurkers come from.

If you need me in the next two hours or so, I will be hiding under the bed.Shhhh.

I met with the real estate agents at Mum’s on Monday and about 5 minutes into the conversation the tears started to roll down my cheeks. I walked to the window and watched the rain for a moment or two whilst I regained my composure. The real estate agents shuffled their feet and mumbled that it was perfectly understandable and were visibly relieved when we got back down to business.

A price has been set. There will be an open home in two weeks. It is all happening very quickly.

Yesterday I stood in the middle of Mum’s living area and tried to see the house with unbiased eyes and I couldn’t manage it. All I could see was my mother and my mothers things. After two hours of working like a cut cat I had the house presentable enough for marketing photos to be taken.

When I came home, The Spouse had cooked dinner and as he hugged me he asked if I was okay. I told him that I was and that I had a bit of a cry.What I didn’t describe to him was how I had stood for ages, just staring at the suitcase that I had brought home from the hospital, willing myself to open it. When I finally did open it I could smell the hospital and my Mother. I buried my face into Mum’s favourite pjs and in between my sobs I tried to capture her scent.

Today, finally after weeks of grey, grey weather that has been slowly sending me a little insane, the sky is blue. Mum’s good friend Lyn rang me last night and it was a relief to be able to talk to someone other than Veronica that actually gets how much we miss Mum.

It has been ten weeks and somedays the pain is so raw it hurts to breathe.

At least I have this place, my blog, where I can just dump all the words that are in my head and walk away. Contrary to what Veronica’s evil little troll thinks, I am not writing for sympathy. I am writing for myself. I am writing  out the pain so that today I can go outside and enjoy the blue sky before I have to go back down to Mum’s and pack away more of her life into cardboard boxes.