Tuesday, May 07, 2013
Acts of charity – the William
Street Pieta, jail visits and gold-plated legal defence teams
On 30 May 2011, there was what the
Christian Brothers Oceania (Australia, NZ and the Pacific region) blandly termed a “sudden change in Best's legal position” – that is, their fellow brother Robert Best, who by
then had been living for about four months on pre-sentence remand in Port
Phillip Prison, after being found guilty of multiple child sex crimes by
various juries in the County Court in Melbourne (William Street), and/or
Ballarat, earlier in 2011 (as well as, possibly, back into 2010).
The exact details here are hard to
fathom; the suppression orders and closed courts applied until that May 2011
day haven’t seen much emerge retrospectively into the public domain since. We do know, however that it was a protracted
saga – Best’s committal was at Ballarat in 2009, and one of Best’s victims,
“Damien”, committed suicide before he got to see justice done.
We also know that it was an
expensive saga: a figure of about $1 million in defence-side legal expenses (for
the 2009-2011 cases) was widely reported in 2011 (and again, at the time of
Best’s unsuccessful appeal, in November 2012). But this same figure nonetheless
drew gasps from the public gallery when it was once again cited at last
Friday’s Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry. Of course, the taxpayer-funded
prosecution case and court facilities would have added up to millions more (same URL).
As to why the Christian Brothers
saw Best’s guilty plea to all remaining charges as a “sudden change” is also
hard to fathom. Granted, proceedings at that stage were only about
halfway through the marathon, in total, and all Best’s pleas to that date had
been not guilty. But Best had been found guilty by juries on most of the
earlier charges, and so was facing significant jail time, whatever happened in the second “half”. One might
have thought the early-2011 day (oh happy day!) that Best was remanded,
pre-sentencing, in Port Phillip Prison was a bigger “sudden change”.
(Note that prior to this day, the previously-convicted Best had not so far
served time, other than a three month appeal interlude between his March 1998
trial and the ordering of a re-trial on 23 July 1998 – a re-trial that never
went ahead.)
But for the Christian Brothers,
sudden changes, and acts of charity, are obviously very fluid and relative
things. Here’s Br Vince Duggan, the leader of Christian Brothers Oceania
in an early March 2013 email:
“Quite a few brothers in
Victoria are regular visitors to Br Bob Best who is currently in prison. I
applaud the brothers who do this. I have visited Bob on one occasion myself,
and plan to do so again in the future. One can visit someone in prison without
making any judgment about the innocence or guilt of that person. Visiting
someone in prison is in no sense condoning criminal activity. Indeed ‘visiting
those in prison’ is listed among what used to be commonly termed the ‘corporal
works of mercy’. I find it appalling that brothers who perform this act of
charity should be publicly condemned in the press by one of their own [viz
Christian Brother Dr Barry Coldrey]”.
Yep, being criticised just for
going about one’s charitable day-to-day business is “appalling”. If the
high-minded Vince Duggan is quite that sensitive, the mind boggles how enraged
he must feel, to this day, about the fates of the hundreds of children sexually
abused by members of his order. Or not – there is no public statement to
that effect by him, at least. Plus it is not hard to imagine at least a
sliver of self-interest behind all these prison visits (I stress here that I am referring to Best’s many Christian Brother
visitors generally): if Best is kept a happy man in prison, he is
less likely to have a pang of Christian conscience, and name others –
particularly those who concealed his crimes.
The $1 million or so of donated
Church funds that Vince Duggan also saw fit to tip into the pockets of Best’s
defence lawyers between 2009 and 2011 also stretch the meaning of “charity”, if
you ask me. Blessed is the guilty-as-hell, got off by a smooth-talking
QC, perhaps? One mysterious element here is that Best’s (sole?) defence counsel, (first URL) at least in May 2011, was the relatively junior – and so
cheap-ish – barrister Sarah Leighfield,
The Christian Brothers recently said,
by way of vague explanation, that spending on Best's defence between 2009 and
2011 “spiralled out of control”. I suspect that Best may say much the same
thing, by way of vague explanation, about his two
decades of rampant crime. In other
words, the Christian Brothers are still perpetuating what Best (and his
accomplices) started – albeit by being selectively incontinent with their wallets, this time.
In all this money, squalor and
pious delusion, there was one beautiful, heartbreaking scene in court on 30 May
2011:
“As [Robert] Best stood and
gave his [guilty] pleas, one of his victims turned to stare at him as the man's
mother wept and embraced her son.” (first URL, again)
I call this three-way tableaux the
William Street Pietà. My favourite work of European art, when I
want to touch base with an inconsolably burdened inner-child – somehow a
creature both singular/“me” deep-within, and yet universal, liberated – is the
Palestrina Pietà. Photos don’t quite do this unfinished (?) Michelangelo (?) masterpiece justice. The languid Christ figure is sumptuously over-finished,
or put more bluntly, blatantly homo-erotic.
His mother Mary, directly behind, supports him rather well, with one
very hefty hand.
But it is the sparsely-chiselled third, child-size figure
that makes this sculpture. Viewed from the side, she (?) staggers under
a heavy weight – giving the sculpture a forward momentum that is perfectly
balanced and resisted (I’m talking art, not physics) by the backwards fall of
the Christ figure, into the immovable upright pillar of his mother’s arm/s.
The William Street Pietà is, in my
mind’s eye (I wasn’t there, and only know of it from the newspaper account), a similar
masterpiece: a sculpture of a moment of both steely resolve (between victim and
Best), and primal howling (between victim and his mother) – two personal
qualities Vince Duggan has evidently never encountered in his “charitable”
travails.
Update/re-post 8 May 2013
I’ve tweaked this post in mostly
minor ways, adding some links, and fixing some broken ones. There’s also now a clarification/disclaimer,
which I’ve italicised and underlined,
a new para on the Christian Brothers propensity to “[spiral] out of control”,
and a two-para
background on my thinking behind the William Street Pietà.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Insuring against
crimes
While yesterday’s
forthright admissions . . . shed light on the extent of abuse attributed to
priests in Ballarat – more than 100 cases – there is a sense that there were
further questions about events in Ballarat between the late 1960s and the 1980s
which were beyond the scope of direct response yesterday. (1)
One such iceberg that we have barely seen the tip of is the
role of the Church-owned insurer, Catholic Church Insurances Ltd (CCI), in
shaping the Church’s response, since c.1990, to historical (pre-1990) instances of child sexual
abuse by clergy (2).
This shaping has not just been financial; CCI has also
backed Encompass (3), a residential treatment/“treatment” program, that ran for
a decade until 2008, for clerical sexual abusers (and also, it appears from
something said at yesterday’s Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry, for non-celibate
priests who have sex with consenting adults, at least when both parties were
male (4).
Leaving aside, for now, the regrettable – or deliberate? – conflation
of gay sex with paedophilia, you may well wonder what sort of a business takes
out insurance against crimes committed by its own employees, anyway. Ever heard of the phrase “moral hazard”?
You may be slightly reassured here by a couple of
facts. The first is that the insurance
policy, at least that which covered the Ballarat diocese, was not operating at the time of the actual
abuse. It was retrospective – like getting
cover after your place was
burgled. Of course no ordinary insurer
would offer such insurance, but CCI was no ordinary insurer. It was, in essence, the Church shuffling its
own money – robbing Peter to rape Paul, if you like.
Also, CCI didn’t write a blank cheque – it covered
historical instances of child sexual abuse by clergy only up until 1975 – the latest
possible year in which the Bishop of Ballarat, Ronald Mulkearns, became
irrefutably aware of at least one diocesan- priest child sexual abuser, Gerald
Ridsdale.
One definitely non-reassuring fact, however, arises from the
policy’s fairly hefty excess, of $25,000 (2, again). Not
coincidentally, I would say, the cited average total payout to victims under
the policy was $28,000 (ibid) – i.e. the insurance “arm” of the Church fought/negotiated
their own contribution so vigorously that it ended up being almost token: an
average of $3,000 per victim (the rest was the excess, which presumably came
from diocesan coffers).
What was the point of it all then, you well may ask? An
elaborate charade is my best guess – putting investigators off track, and
interposing a convenient corporate wall when playing hard-ball in payout negotiations. Oh, and also, more nebulously, lending a
retrospective veneer to the sort of “treatment” programs in operation at the
height of the abuse epidemic, such as the US program Gerald Ridsdale was sent
to c.1976.
If you ask me, it all seems to add up to a retrospective licence
for (i) paedophile priests, (ii) their covering-up bishops/bosses, and not to forget
here, (iii) those (although it is a class of one in the Ballarat diocese,
AFAICT) whose careers strangely prospered betwixt paedophile priests and their covering-up
bishops/bosses.
You shouldn’t be surprised that a (deceased) paedophile
priest ran the CCI show for quite a while (5).
But personally I don’t think that he, or the still-living Bishop Mulkearns, are the main
game in this still mostly-submerged iceberg.
Update 1 May 2013
Yesterday’s Inquiry hearing, at
which two CCI rep’s spoke, has clarified some things.
There are/were actually two types
of insurance policy which cover/ed child sexual abuse by clergy: standard public liability (issued since 1969,
but only invoked to cover child sexual abuse since the early 1990s, while the
original policy coverage intention would have been more like parishioners
slipping on banana peels outside Mass), and “special issues” (which were only
issued in the four financial years ending in June 1995, which covered only claims made (not abuse event occurrence)
in those respective years, and which were then superseded by the twin ADR schemes,
Towards Healing and the Melbourne Response).
Both types of policy had a
standard disclaimer, which boils down here to:
Did Church authorities know of that particular abuser’s propensity? If so, coverage of that abuser’s acts stops
at the date of such knowledge; i.e. the Church will be on its own,
insurance-wise. In Ridsdale’s case, this
doesn’t mean that insurance claims made after 1975 will fail (as Barney Zwartz
incorrectly wrote in yesterday’s Age),
but that claims relating to Ridsdale’s conduct
after some time in 1975 (the date here is yet to be made public) won’t be
paid out by CCI.
Much was made on ABC TV News
breakfast this morning about a “list” of 30-odd clergy subject to insurance
exclusion dates. While the disclosure of
such a list will be interesting, it is important to remember that this list is
an early-1990s (or even later) reconstruction of Bishop Mulkearns' (to use Ridsdale
as an example) knowledge-of-propensity in the early/mid 1970s. It may “prove” certain things, but it
certainly won’t provide a complete explanation, nor, still less, will it delve
into the more important (IMO) possibilities around earlier knowledge-of-propensity
dates.
To cut to the chase here: I’m sure
Bishop Mulkearns is quite delighted with the circumstance in which CCI has
deemed him with knowledge of Ridsdale’s propensity – a police officer approached
him in 1975 regarding Ridsdale’s abuse at Inglewood.
Note that therefore there was nothing Bishop Mulkearns then needed to tell
the police about Ridsdale – quite the opposite, in fact.
As I alluded to in yesterday’s post, there is
strong, if circumstantial, evidence that Bishop Mulkearns well knew of Ridsdale’s
propensity from his early days of taking up the job (in mid 1971), but that
power plays and machinations then taking
place within the Ballarat diocese had him (Bishop Mulkearns) backed into a
corner. And I am quite sure that CCI
will not have any record of this – so
beware of red herrings/cassocks.
Endnotes
- “The church must deal
openly with a very painful history”, Ballarat Courier Editorial April 29,
2013, 9:30 p.m.
- Ian Munro “Church insured for abuse claims”, Age July 1, 2002
- Richard Baker, Nick
McKenzie, “Church holds sex dossiers”, Age
November 17, 2012
- Bishop Peter Connors at Victorian
Parliamentary Inquiry, approx. 4pm, 29 April 2013 (my notes only; verbatim
transcript not yet available), in answer to a question from Andrea Coote, “Do
you believe that paedophiles can be cured?”:
“No, we used to think this, but
this is definitely no longer the case.
As an example of this, I had a priest who committed a homosexual act
with an adult man. I sent him to the
Encompass program, and after he finished there, I asked them whether they could
give me an assurance that he wouldn’t commit the same act again. As they couldn’t give me this assurance, I
did not return this man to the ministry.”
- Carly Crawford, “Abuser
priest led Catholic Church insurance scheme”, Herald Sun, April 8, 2013
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Albert
Namatjira – rooms (and humpies) for the memory
The Namatjira memorial is a rod-shaped 6 metre high, 1 metre square, stone-work pillar, with a small plaque on its north side. The wording on the plaque has changed at least once. In 1979, it read:
Plaque, remnant pillar from the former insane asylum at Yarra Bend Park, Melbourne
Right-hand driveway pillar of Lulworth, Patrick White's childhood home below King’s Cross (Sydney), at 73 Roslyn Gardens
Update 4 May 2013
"John Flynn, a revered Territory pioneering figure, asked to be buried under one of the Marbles. A giant boulder was carried to his grave in Alice Springs where it stands guard to the end of time".
- Frank Alcorta, Explore Australia's Northern Territory, Revised ed. 1992, p 117
Proving that in Indigenous Australia, "forever" is a short time (about 7 years will do it, it seems). And/or that animate objects pressed into service, standing guard for dead white Australia, will one day just chuck in their jobs and go walkabout - as Flynn himself may have put it.
“In
memoriam, the plaque’s on the wall and time stands still.”
- Michael Hutchence, “Rooms For The Memory”
lyrics
Introduction
The funeral arrangements for Albert
Namatjira in Alice Springs on the afternoon of
Sunday 9 August 1959 were presumably hastily made – the artist had died only the
previous evening. Nonetheless, they
seem, from one newspaper report at least, to have been a pitch perfect send-off
to a great, but complicated man.
In this respect, the funeral was in
contrast, in more than one way, to the Namatjira memorial pillar near Hermannsburg, almost three years in gestation, as unveiled on 22 July 1962 by the then Minister for Territories Paul Hasluck (PDF).
Privately funded, it appears to have been the subject of
behind-the-scenes tussling over its design and location. You might call the end result fitting enough
– a painstakingly unoriginal design by a committee (literally or proverbially),
whose main focus may well have been getting Minister Hasluck to officially
sanction their handiwork. A chief
proponent of the assimilation policy, Minister Hasluck could have only been
pleased to see his policy rendered in solid architecture – a white cultural
monolith superimposed on, with no apparent Namatjira-family consultation but
with heavy symbolism, to white eyes, nondescript, vacant land.
The on-the-hop
funeral
“[I]n bright clear sunshine, his body was
carried in its coffin from the [Alice Springs] hospital, and Pastor Albrecht
held a service in the street outside. The service . . . was conducted entirely
in Arunta”.
- “300 at graveside for funeral of Albert
Namatjira”, SMH Monday 10 Aug 1959 p 1
It is unclear why such a functional,
secular location, and not the local Lutheran Church or else a significant site
(to Namatjira personally, or Aranda generally) was chosen for the first stage
of the funeral, but whatever the intention, the quasi-street protest tone of
the first service seems to have given the next stage, the procession to the
cemetery about 1 km away, a sort of spontaneous, rolling momentum:
“As the funeral moved off, with many
natives walking beside it, local white businessmen, station owners, and
Namatjira’s friends joined the procession on foot, and in cars and truck until
the cortege numbered more than 300 – more than a third white people.” (ibid)
The final graveside ceremony took place in
a lonely part (to this day) of the Lutheran section of the Alice
Springs cemetery. Namatjira
was buried “after a moving ceremony, this time “half in the Arunta language and
half in English.” A “native choir” from Hermannsburg sang, and Pastor Albrecht quoted from the Bible: “By the grace of
God, I am what I am.” (ibid)
There were no white dignitaries – even
local ones – present on the day, it would seem:
“Wreaths were laid on behalf of the Northern Territory Administrator
[then JC Archer (1900 - 1980)] as well as many from leading citizens of Alice
Springs and Darwin
Undoubtedly, the relative haste of the
funeral arrangements would have precluded some high-profile, interstate white
associates of Namatjira – in the last few years of his life, at least – from
attending in person. Perhaps this was in fact a motivating factor in the timing
of the arrangements. In any event, some
“Sydney
The stodgy
memorial
The Namatjira memorial is a rod-shaped 6 metre high, 1 metre square, stone-work pillar, with a small plaque on its north side. The wording on the plaque has changed at least once. In 1979, it read:
IN MEMORY OF
ALBERT NAMATJIRA
1902 – 1959
THIS IS THE LANDSCAPE THAT INSPIRED THE
ARTIST
More recently and apparently currently, the
plaque reads:
THIS IS THE LANDSCAPE
THAT INSPIRED THE ARTIST
ALBERT NAMATJIRA
28-7-1902 – 8-8-1959
I have not been able to find any documentary
explanation of the change in the plaque’s wording – which shifts the primary
focus of commemoration from the deceased artist himself to the landscape around
the pillar (the Finke River plain and surrounding hills, including Mt Hermannsburg – a frequent subject
of Namatjira’s art, at least when he lived in the Hermannsburg area pre-1951.)
By now less directly commemorating the
deceased artist, perhaps the grim monolith is more honestly, if belatedly,
stating what it was always about: a monument to assimilation.
The vaunted landscape all around the artificial
object is a figleaf here – a pillar is antithetical to a clear, usually elevated
ground-space for viewing a view (which I am taking to be the white norm for
highlighting landscapes generally). So
the monolith’s plaque has become mainly about the monolith itself – a
development which, intentionally or otherwise, Namatjira’s descendants may have
welcomed.
Further back, to its originally proposed
format and location, the Namatjira memorial, at the drawing-board stage, saw
more startling changes. The earliest
documentation of a proposed memorial – other than a cemetery headstone – that I
am aware of is from 14 months after the artist’s death:
“Memorial. Author Frank Clune left yesterday [11 October
1960] for Alice Springs to complete
arrangements for the erection of a memorial to aboriginal artist Albert
Namatjira.
The memorial
will consist of a two-ton rock selected from Namatjira’s country and in the
shade of which he may have rested as a child.
It will be
placed at his camping spot just outside Alice
The cost has
been met by Sydney
- SMH Column 8,
12 October 1960, p 1.
Needless to say, despite the article’s
suggestion that arrangements for this memorial were well-advanced, it never
transpired, either in another format at Clune’s preferred location, nor
elsewhere, as a two-ton boulder, no doubt inspired by the eight-ton boulder
that is the bulwark of the 1952 John Flynn memorial* (and reliquary), also just
outside Alice Springs.
Clune’s nominating the boulder to have come
“from Namatjira’s [childhood] country” – presumably meaning around Hermannsburg, which is 130km west
of Alice Springs – seems a sincere touch, an effort to
be culturally appropriate, and perhaps even a rebuke to the boulder-procurers
for the original John Flynn memorial, whose act in removing one of the “Devil’s
Marbles” some 480km south* seems, in hindsight at least, a cold and pointed
sacrilege. Perhaps this is the reason that
Clune’s idea for a Namatjira “remake” of the John Flynn memorial never took
off.
Surely equally controversial for Clune’s
vision of a Namatjira memorial, however, was its location at the late artist’s
“camping spot” at Morris Soak, just west of the then boundaries of Alice Springs . Clune’s
sincerity in nominating this location is harder to assume, although it is clear
that a shaded humpy at Morris Soak was Namatjira’s main residence between 1951
and his death in 1959. Reminding white
Australians of this fact, for posterity, would perhaps be seen as
provocative.
Nor, aside from the boulder’s provenance,
would Clune’s Namatjira memorial have a “landscape” nexus. While Namatjira did paint frequently at
Morris Soak, it was mostly of country further west, from memory, and very
rarely of the Alice
Ironically, Clune’s aborted,
poignantly-located, rounded Namatjira memorial would have been just as inwardly
focused as the pro-assimilation blunt shaft that replaced it, at a safe distance from
Alice Springs (and perhaps even Hermannsburg, for that matter) – only the
narrative would have been opposite.
It is unclear why Clune’s Namatjira
memorial was never built – but financial difficulty seems unlikely, given the
relatively modest scope of the project.
What is clear is that the proposed Namatjira memorial lay fallow during
the first half of 1961, and when it was resurrected, it was with fresh funds,
format, location and a new instigator, to boot:
“In mid-1961 Rex
Battarbee [Namatjira’s early artistic mentor, and later, dealer] launched a
fund to erect a cairn at Hermannsburg in memory of Namatjira.”
- Robin Smith
and Keith Willey, The Red Centre, (1974,
orig pub 1967) p 72.
And the rest is history.
A sidenote concerns the design of the
successful Namatjira memorial – just like Clune’s aborted one, it had a
strikingly-similar nearby antecedent, in the long-demolished “Ayers Rock + Mt
Olga National Park” entrance gate/arch (see photo in Smith and Willey, The Red Centre, p 2). I am speculating on the “antecedent” part of
this, as I have not been able to locate a date of construction/opening for the Ayers
Rock entrance gate/arch (the attached plaque, which would no doubt indicate this, is not legible in the photo).
What is clear
from the above-referenced photograph is that the Ayers Rock entrance
gate/arch consisted of two rod-shaped 4 metre high, 0.8 metre square (both
approx), stone-work pillars; the left-hand one (as you enter) had a small
plaque on its south-east side (the “arch” aspect is the text, above, being
suspended as metal lettering, with only a modest metal bar to assist, between
the two pillars).
In other words, apart from being two metres taller, and a bit
thinner – and of course, singular – the Namatjira memorial is a copy (or vice
versa) of the former Ayers Rock entrance gate/arch. I presume that the latter was demolished in
part, at least, for being culturally inappropriate. A probable saving feature of the Namatjira
memorial, on the other hand, is that it is quite easy to miss, even if you’re
visiting Hermannsburg,
on an ersatz Western MacDonnells Namatjira
tourist-trail drive (well, I missed it in December 1994, anyway).
Finally, let me say I’m a fan of forsaken
pillars more generally. Below are my
photos of remnant pillars from the former insane asylum at Yarra Bend Park,
Melbourne (a solid one of an original front-gate pair), and the precarious right-hand
driveway pillar of Lulworth, Patrick White's childhood home below King’s Cross
(Sydney), at 73 Roslyn Gardens (not sure if the left-hand pillar is still extant;
i.e. that this is also the surviving one of an original front-gate pair).
Remnant pillar from the former insane asylum at Yarra Bend Park, Melbourne
Plaque (not original), right-hand driveway pillar of Lulworth, Patrick White's childhood home, later St Luke's Hospital, below King’s Cross (Sydney), at 73 Roslyn Gardens
Footnote:
Update 4 May 2013
"John Flynn, a revered Territory pioneering figure, asked to be buried under one of the Marbles. A giant boulder was carried to his grave in Alice Springs where it stands guard to the end of time".
- Frank Alcorta, Explore Australia's Northern Territory, Revised ed. 1992, p 117
Proving that in Indigenous Australia, "forever" is a short time (about 7 years will do it, it seems). And/or that animate objects pressed into service, standing guard for dead white Australia, will one day just chuck in their jobs and go walkabout - as Flynn himself may have put it.
Monday, January 21, 2013
Gay
AFL – the horseplay that dare not speak its name
“I totally agree with homoerotic activities
inside footy club locker rooms, but I think you have to be a bit classy about
it,” is something ex-AFL player Jason Akermanis would never say. (The
line is adopted from something TV
frontman David Koch said on Friday 18 January, about breastfeeding in public.)
Not that Akermanis has a problem with non-classy locker-room
“homoerotic activities”: they are “normal”, apparently. Which may
confuse many people, as both Akermanis and the AFL more generally undoubtably
have a problem with gay-identifying men. Even more strangely, this
problem would not seem to exist on nearly the same scale within the other major
(Anglo-) Australian football code/s – rugby.
The explanation to this is, I believe,
class. The AFL is a one-class code, while rugby is divided into upper-
and working-; viz union and league.
If you carefully read the Herald Sun article (same
URL), Akermanis’ anxieties are transparent: club solidarity is a precious,
fragile thing, and a visible minority – or a club within the club – endangers
this. It isn’t too much of a stretch to guess that this chip on his
shoulder may have more to do with class than sexuality; i.e. that Akermanis
fears his class’s locker-room horseplay being hijacked by an elite minority,
and so losing its working class identity, and worse.
In saying this, I take it as a given that
“gay” identity is incompatible with working class identity – at least when
there is a “one code” class mixture. That is, in such situations, the
forces of sexual gentrification can only be resisted by
sublimation/closeting on the part of those who identify as non-working
class. Here, I sympathise with Akermanis – if upwardly-mobile gay culture
gets a toehold in the locker-room, his class’s locker-room horseplay risks
becoming an objectified minority: “a bit of rough-trade, anyone?” Those
sublimating their sexuality do pay a price, of course, but at least Akermanis’
horseplay is pointedly inclusive of them – they are only an objectified
minority (“gay”) if they choose to be. This may be a harsh “choice”, but
it is probably not as limiting as the alternative formation: Akermanis et
al being typecast as rough-trade.
David Koch’s “classy” comments about
breastfeeding in public provide also some support here. There are two
classes of mothers who breastfeed in public, it would seem to Koch – nice ones
like his daughters, and common slappers who flaunt it. Objectified
minority, anyone? Rightly, a protest by breastfeeding mothers this
morning consciously slapperised the tone of the event, so denying Koch’s
daughters, and the rest of their class, status as an elite – or at least as an
elite within the main game.
For its part, rugby’s acceptance of out gay
players, and, in rugby union at least, out gay whole teams, shows how, even in
a two-class structure, the objectified minority issue doesn’t go away – it just
changes from being class-based:
Here, I find it interesting that Lancken,
like Akermanis, uses a borderline public-private space (the nightclub, instead
of the locker-room), to focus his anxieties – nightclubs are dubious,
sexuality-mixed places, while locker-rooms, in implicit contrast, are reassuringly
homogenous spaces. In the latter respect, Lancken and Akermanis are in
furious agreement.
* Disclosure: Paul Watson doesn’t
love rugby – or even understand its rules. He thinks he understands the
rules of AFL locker-room horseplay, though: say no more.
Tuesday, December 04, 2012
Sir Douglas Mawson and CT Madigan carry on up the Finke in 1927
Last Saturday’s (1/12/12) Oz carried two articles* re-appraising Sir Douglas Mawson’s 1912-13 Antarctic expedition. Personally, I prefer my heroes – if they be in need of re-appraisal at all – to be cut down to size by their own hand, or the hand of their contemporary peers at least.
Fortunately, there is the straight-bat monograph by Mawson’s fellow Antarctic expeditioner Cecil Thomas (CT) Madigan (1889-1947), Central Australia (1936) – all pages references are to this, unless stated otherwise – that does just this; albeit inadvertently, and with Mawson as only a bit-player. There is a nice symmetry here: Madigan is barely known as an Antarctic explorer, despite being leader of the six men who stayed behind, rather heroically IMO, for another winter, to wait for the overdue Mawson and party, viz Xavier Mertz and Belgrave Ninnis. (The oh-so-Burke-and-Wills-at-Coopers-Creek twist in this story is that Mawson staggered alone into base on 8 February 1913 – Mertz and Ninnis had died en route – hours after the expedition’s supply ship sailed off, at the end of the Antarctic summer).
Madigan and Mawson’s winter 1927** Western MacDonnell Ranges Ellery Creek
But to the joy of this particular map nerd, the journey somehow became a quixotic geographical quest – to sort out, once and for all, whether the Glen Helen Station of the time (where the present-day eponymous “resort” is) was in the same east-west valley as Alice Springs (“the Alice Valley”); i.e. was Glen Helen to the north (just) of the Heavitree Range.
Travelling by car, their expedition was probably the first such motorised vehicle in the area:
“[T]here is no way into the ranges up the Finke by vehicle; in fact, it is impossible to get through the ridges into the longitudinal valleys of the ranges [from the east] anywhere west of the Hugh with a motor-car, and only at a few passes with pack animals” . . . [W]estward from Jay [Creek] Gap there is only a bridle path to Glen Helen Station, made by [Fred] Raggatt’s donkeys and horses (pp 82, 84)
Fortunately, Madigan didn’t believe his own counsel, and his syndicate party managed to be the first car ever to reach Glen Helen Station, after crossing, with the assistance of some dynamite, the Heavitree Range through the “low and unimpressive” Eight Mile Gap (50 miles west of Alice Springs) (pp 86 -88).
The nitrate deposit – the official purpose of the expedition – is mentioned only in passing (p 86)***, apparently because Madigan discovered much more interesting things en route.
In particular, he was pleased to correct the errors of the 1894 Horn Expedition in thinking that Glen Helen Station**** was in the Alice Valley (pp 86 -87), and that Dr Charles Chewings had, “wrongly I think”, labelled, c. 1915, some (Eastern) MacDonnell Ranges’ fossils “cryptozoon” (p 87).
Unfortunately – but perhaps inevitably – Madigan, while on quite a roll of correcting the errors of distinguished others, makes a simple blooper of his own, calling Eight Mile Gap the last gap in the Heavitree Range before Ormiston Pound to the west, while on the very next page waxing about “magnificent” (albeit unsighted, on that trip) Ellery Creek Gap (or “Big Hole”, as it is usually now termed) just to the west (pp 86 -87; see also pp 194-199). Albeit, the pioneering car journey became particularly rough west of Ellery Creek
“He [Harry Wolffe] tore along creek beds, up banks, and through bushes; the car must have been within a few degrees of the over-turning angle”. (p 88)
Being a map nerd myself, I well understand Madigan’s “gotcha” conclusion in 1927, that Glen Helen Station was not in the Alice Valley Simpson Desert (which Madigan duly named), but also having a side-trip to – who would have guessed? – the Western MacDonnell Ranges
“The results of this part of the work exceeded all expectations. The identity of all the ranges and ridges was established, and some interesting and unique photographs were obtained . . . [albeit these photographs] stopped short of what afterwards proved to be the most interesting part of the ranges, the southern margin. [In case it is not obvious, Madigan was not the photographer on this reconnaissance – instead, he flew lower, on a second plane.] . . . It was finally established that Glen Helen is not in the Alice Valley , which is north of the Heavitree Range
Still apparently unsatisfied with his Western MacDonnell Ranges geography, but again with a geological pretext (p 192), Madigan once again set off from Alice Springs, in winter 1930, this time by camel (again without Mawson). He didn’t entirely retrace his wheel-tracks from 1927; in 1930 he stuck south of the Heavitree Range
“I failed to pick out the track we took with the motor-car three years before . . .which is not surprising, as I spent most of the time then hanging on to the car, and got completely bushed” (p 200).
Presumably therefore un-“bushed” (= car sick?) in 1930, Madigan was finally able to name “Glen Helen Valley
“We had then proved that the Glen Helen Valley does run continuously from the telegraph line (not from Alice Springs, but from the south side of the Heavitree Range Horn Valley Glen Helen Valley runs for not only ninety miles to Glen Helen Valley
It is tempting to leave this story with Madigan’s final, final conclusion on the tale-of-three-valleys (including the Horn Valley
The first time, after a rough car journey, Madigan did what any intrepid tourist would – climbed the range through which the Finke has cut the gorge, and then returned to Glen Helen the least worst way:
“It is a difficult climb, but not impossible, to cross the range on foot. Wolffe climbed over the west side of the gap, and I on the east . . . Neither Wolffe nor I fancied the climb back, preferring to try the water. On my return, I found him half-way through the gap, clinging half submerged to the steep rocky sides at water level, and working his way along, greatly handicapped by his gun and bundle of clothes. I followed him, and had such a wretched time of it that I realized that I would have been better to let the clothes get wet than scratch myself on the rock and endure the constant fear of slipping in”. (p 89)
Ah, “the constant fear of slipping in” – that primal nightmare, kept mostly at bay, it would seem, by Madigan’s obsessive cartography. At Glen Helen Station in 1930s, a guest of then owner Fred Raggatt, Madigan (who has arrived by camel) yet again oddly forgets his pioneering 1927 car journey there:
“The place, hedged in by the great ridges, was a stranger to wheeled vehicles” (p 202).
Odder, perhaps – but sadder, certainly – is Madigan’s feeling of being “hedged in” at Glen Helen, when just seven pages earlier we were told that the Glen Helen Valley runs for 140 continuous east-west miles.
Enter the northern wall of the Glen Helen Valley – at the longitude of the Station, this is the range between Ormiston Gorge (where the Heavitree and Chewings Ranges Finke River ’s home-ground (the actual “source” of the Finke is an immaculate binary: the confluence of Davenport Glen Helen Valley
“After lunch, we started on the Mount Sonder
As with the similarly “low and unimpressive” Eight Mile Gap (above), as permanently altered by Madigan and Mawson’s 1927 dynamiting, Gunpowder Gap is a transition zone that Madigan refuses to recognise – as if only those gorges that are (i) spectacular and (ii) need to be swum (e.g. Ormiston (where Madigan seems not to have gone) and Glen Helen gorges) are worthy. Cecil – if you can hear me – from one map nerd to another, it is (paradoxically I know) those dry and sketchy transitions like Gunpowder Gap that we really swim naked, deeply through. And through.
* Matthew Denholm, “Mawson’s ‘ambition, inexperience’ led to expeditioners’ deaths”, and David Day, “Flaws in the ice”, Australian 1 December 2012
** This date has been extrapolated by fact that the camel expedition was “three years” later, in winter 1930; see Central Australia (1936) p 194)
*** Madigan elaborated – slightly – on this in a 1932 geological journal article:
“A hurried motor journey was made to near Glen Helen Station, 90 miles west of Alice Springs , to inspect a deposit of saltpetre in limestone caves. Only five days were spent in the field, three of them in travelling, and there was little time for geological work . . .”
- “The Geology of the Western MacDonnell Ranges , Central Australia ”, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, February 1932, vol 88, pp 672-710 (paywalled URL, Google search extract)
**** Glen Helen Station has had four disparate locations since its founding c.1880. At the time of the 1894 Horn Expedition, it had moved to the banks of Crawford Creek, near Mt Razorback – west of, but in the same valley as, present-day Glen Helen “Resort” (the first incarnation of the station, on Ormiston Creek, was also in the same valley).
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Moomba
– “a kind of camp concert”
In the mid-1960s, camp concerts could have
meant two quite different things.
Writing in 1965, Mavis Thorpe Clarke (1909-1999), presumably had cheery
and low-budget stage productions in mind when she wrote this:
The [1951 Melbourne Melbourne
-
Mavis Thorpe Clarke, Pastor Doug (1965) p 155.
Writing just the previous year (1964), but
a generation and a continent apart from Mavis Thorpe Clarke, Susan Sontag (1933-2004), in her “Notes On ‘Camp’” essay, sees the camp
concert (or Camp orchestral concert, at least) as oxymoron:
“Concert music, though, because it is
contentless, is rarely Camp. It offers no opportunity, say, for a contrast
between silly or extravagant content and rich form”.
Fortunately for Tchaikovsky, who may have
rolled (theatrically) in his grave at Sontag’s doctrinal strictures, the
concert hall in 2012 is an increasingly flimsy marquee – at risk of being
declared a camp structure and/or Camp structure. A kind of “camp concert” that neither Mavis
Thorpe Clarke nor Susan Sontag could presumably conceive of exists – orchestral in scale and yet minimalist in
execution. Welcome to the East Kimberley joonba – and other allied or subsidiary song
and dance (and above all, stage) spectaculars from that region, including the
Krill Krill.
How one improvises a campground “stage” is
a solid topic indeed. Perhaps it
suffices to say for now that the fineness of the art is in the withholding –
whether orchestral or cadastral. Oh, and never forget the wall between “stage”
and “green room”*.
The previous paragraph should explain why
“street theatre” – of the sort that infests present-day Melbourne
The naming origin of Melbourne East Kimberley
(Gija?) word “joonba” can be added to the list of possible progenitors.
There is also a pleasingly circular vice-regal
postscript on Moomba and camp concerts. From
then-Victorian Governor Sir Reginald Dallas Brooks in 1955 (same URL) to
then-Victorian Governor John Landy’s 2001 “Reconciliation Gayip” speech, whichadopted the above Mavis Thorpe Clarke quote, without attribution, the Tchaikovsky-esque spectacle of
calibrated withholding rolls on.
* No Name Station (2010), pp 12-13, 130
(an audience member/photographer infringes Krill Krill performance backstage
area at Warmun).
Sunday, October 07, 2012
Taking on the Australian Christian Taliban, aka the Sydney
Welfare Recipients’ League
A month ago, I wrote a post that assumed there was at least one degree of separation
between the Anglican Church in Sydney
Fundamentalism latching
on to long-established institutions such as the Anglican Church is always an
interesting development. It may seem almost
impossible that a main branch of an overall mainstream organism can grow so
differently from the other main branches in Australia (and also the English
“trunk” and “roots”), but if the branch has sent down a vertical feeder to do
its own thing in the ground, then this makes more sense. So what is so different about what Anglican
Church in Sydney
My hunch is that this
rich fertiliser has to be welfare (i.e. taxpayer dollars) – surely no one is otherwise
capable of being so unaccountably self-righteous without actually spending the
very dollars of the groups they so loudly despise. “Passive” welfare may be the current
buzz-adjective, but active welfare is a much more insidious problem. By this, I mean welfare as a full-time job,
diligently devoted to keeping itself “employed”.
Of course, it would be a
transparent sham to just have an Everlasting and Increasingly More Taxpayer
Dollars For Me/Us campaign as the relevant “work”, so the job at hand needs a
cover-story. Enter the government school
chaplain program. When I first heard of this
John Howard initiative, I shrugged it off as “typical”. Now, after nearly five
years of Labor government, and the school-chaplain program apparently stronger
than ever, I regard it as a cancer on civil society, whose time for surgical
excision is now overdue – ridiculously so, in fact.
As with the Pakistan/Afghan
Taliban, the school-chaplain program explicitly aims to conflate church with
state. By muddying these waters, secular
opponents – or in fact, anyone who hasn’t (yet) been brainwashed, or is
otherwise a financial beneficiary of the fundamentalist agenda – have twin
hurdles to overcome. First, they have to
take the “low” moral ground, and secondly (and less obviously), they have to
stop feeding the monster.
Yes, I know that it is
taxpayers (and other adults) who elect governments, and it is duly elected
governments who have seeded, and then continued to propagate the
school-chaplain program. But even in the
most liberal Western democracy, the electoral process is just not equal to the
task of voting out “I Hate You, But I Get Given Your Dollars Anyway” cashed-up
lobby-groups. Ripping them up, root and branch, is the only
viable way of returning our civil eco-system to health.
* “The good fight” [a
profile of Archbishop Peter Jensen], by Caroline Overington, Australian Weekend
Magazine, 6 October 2012 pp 22 - 25
Sunday, September 23, 2012
The school, the cliquey in-group who can do no wrong, and the unfortunate prefect
who stuffed up counting the annual fete’s takings
The schoolyard is life’s stage at its
Darwinian brutest. And here I don’t mean
“stage” as a chronological, passing thing; rather, “stage” as in the raised surface
on which we rehearse, over and over, the script for the rest of our lives. You might be initially reassured by its being
only a rehearsal – there’s no real audience – but there’s quite enough
happening backstage (i.e. in-school) during these years to make opening night and
beyond, before an actual audience (i.e. the big wide world), seem like no big
deal. At least for some. For others, if you struggled during the
“rehearsal” years, the rest of one’s life can seem like the teenaged backstage
bullies have merely moved 20 metres, into the prime seats, in adulthood.
Following the last week’s oh-so-Melbourne,
storm in a pinafore (or so I initially thought) saga of sacked MLC principal
Rosa Storelli has had all the elements of a Year 9 drama. Whether you see this drama as set in the
primal schoolyard (as I suspect Ms Storelli does), or the boardroom (where Year
9 is only a fondly remembered, middlebrow David Williamson school play) makes
all the difference as to who you perceive as the baddies.
The known facts seem to be in surprisingly
little dispute. Ms Storelli’s employment was subject to a salary-packaged
arrangement. Salary packaging, which
basically means (legally) minimising assessable income for tax purposes, is common
for highly-paid executives and for workers across the board in the not-for-profit
sector (who are usually not highly-paid).
Where these two groups coincide, as they appear to in Ms Storelli’s case
– a highly-paid principal of a not-for-profit school – a salary packaging deal would
appear to be both irresistible and complex.
A “secret Deloitte report” into alleged
overpayments to Ms Storelli shows two types of shortfall, totalling $716,905.
The first is a relatively straightforward imbalance between money that the
school has paid to third-parties (including a nanny) under salary sacrifice
arrangements, versus that which the school has so far been reimbursed by Ms
Storelli. This apparently amounts to
about $267,000 (accrued since 1997-98), of which more than $100,000 is for the
nanny alone. The nanny’s $100,000+ is
separately itemised because this was an amount Ms Storelli apparently had
previously agreed (in early 2012) to repay the school, with the Board’s full
knowledge and consent, at least at that time.
We also know in some detail how and when this particular debt accrued:
“As the nanny's salary went up, so did the
amount deducted from Ms Storelli's salary. In 2001-02, the nanny was paid
$31,151 - the same amount deducted from Ms Storelli's salary. But there [i.e.
from 2002-03] the salary deduction stayed: $31,151 a year being deducted, while
the nanny's wages climbed to $45,433 by 2012”.
The second type of shortfall is the more
complicated matter* of fringe benefits tax (FBT). Apparently, the school has paid FBT of $1.33
million on Ms Storelli's expenses, but allegedly recovered only $882,105 under
salary sacrificing, leaving what the board says is a FBT-reimbursement shortfall
of about $450,000.
Ms Storelli appears to dispute her
liability for repayment of the $716,905, other than for the nanny’s
$100,000+. Her main defence here seems
to be that one or more of three previous chairs of the school board (Christine
Kilpatrick, Margaret Jackson and Lyndsey Cattermole) – not the board itself –
had made oral and written representations to her stating that those other liabilities
were properly the school’s, and not Ms Storelli’s personally. Ms Storelli has
also pointed out that all of the disputed arrangements were on the record, at
least such that accounting-consulting firm Deloitte (which has done the
school’s external audit every year since 2006), must have been aware of them,
and so at least implicitly approved them.
On the other hand, the school board and
Deloitte have presented a formidable and united flank. Their strategy here appears threefold: to continue throwing further mud at Ms
Storelli; to not even address suggestions of past negligence on their own (or
their predecessors’) part; and to profit from (in the case of Deloitte, and possibly
at least one other large accounting-consulting firm) doing the first two of
these. (I am assuming that the “further Deloitte review . . . into the salary packaging arrangements
of other senior staff at MLC” now under way is not pro-bono. Less clear is whether the two other big
accounting-consulting firms, which both have partners on the school board, PwC
(at whose offices Ms Storelli was formally sacked at) and KPMG also have/had
vested financial interests here.)
The mud-throwing by the school board and profiting by one or more big accounting-consulting firms is transparent, once you juxtapose
their repeated, shrill cry of “governance”, against the reality of corporate
boardroom seats in 2012. Interlocking
directorships make boardrooms – and here the school was moulded identically to
just about any given listed company – self-perpetuating** cliques. Calling them “bullies”, as Ms Storelli has,
may strike you as childish regression, or desperation, but in this case their
pack behaviour and systemic abuse of power over a visibly weaker victim is
stark. If you think I’m exaggerating,
here is how “governance” has been sanctimoniously invoked by the board three
times in recent days:
“A source close to the board said Ms
Storelli had previously offered to repay the outstanding nanny money
interest-free over four years. To accept
the repayment interest-free caused a fringe benefit tax problem for the
college, and would not represent corporate governance best practice”. [Note that this doesn’t explain why the board
was happy to renegotiate Ms Storelli’s contract in March 2012, apparently
including the interest-free element, against its own high standards of “best
practice”].
“‘You can't have your CEO able to hand out largesse bonuses to the people she was the boss of. This is a standard governance issue’ [also] said a source close to the board” (emphasis added and quote edited). [This
refers to annual bonuses of $40,000 to $50,000 allegedly paid in several years
to MLC's director of corporate services Christian Gusner and funding for Ms
Storelli’s long-time personal assistant Prudence Vernall to attend a
professional development course in the USA
Board treasurer Tony Peake said: “after
detailed forensic financial analysis by Deloitte, the board's unanimous
decision was taken with deep regret, but with good governance as the
foundation for the decision” (emphasis added).
[Translation: after Deloitte were
paid more money, they picked up things that they missed the first time. You might say that Deloitte’s regular audits
were “standard” governance (like public schooling, darling, you DO get what you
pay for), its second bite at the cherry (the one that led to Ms Storelli’s
sacking) “good” governance, and its pending further review promises to be no
less, I’m sure, than “best” governance.]
Talking of corporate waffle, the pending
further Deloitte review “is also looking at why another staff member [Christian
Gusner, I’m guessing] and Ms Storelli’s salary packages were handled
internally, and not by Salpac, the external company that handles salary
packaging for the majority of MLC staff”.
Translation: when it comes to minding
your lunch money, the bully clique has some hired muscle, too. Or at least the services of a company whose
apparent proficiency in the tax minimisation industry overcomes the dubious
literacy of its website’s self-promotion section:
Update
25 September 2012
When I read yesterday yet another media
snippet from a “source close to the board” (i.e. presumably a board member,
speaking off-the-record), I was confused by its tone:
On one hand, the anonymous board member invokes
the parol evidence rule as confidently as a know-it-all first year commerce
student, but on the other hand there is something disconcertingly personal
about “Why would the school pay for her house to be cleaned”. Apart from its vagueness as to which house is
meant (Ms Storelli has apparently lived in off-school residences since 2004),
there is the odd focus on cleaning as an apparently dubious element of Ms
Storelli’s salary package. Out of all
the expense items that might, in the court of public opinion, scream that Ms
Storelli was living the high life of the expense of “the school” (= school
fee-payers and taxpayers), house-cleaning doesn’t seem to be up there (especially
as Ms Storelli has not, so far, been accused of overpaying and/or sending off
her cleaner on “professional development” courses overseas).
My first strong hunch is that this
anonymous board member was a woman (who generally have much more of a “thing”
about cleaning than men), and more specifically, a woman with a bee in her
bonnet about cleaning. More
specifically still, my profile suspect is of a formerly high-flying woman who
is currently “reduced” (as she sees it) to doing her own cleaning. Enter Belinda Probert.
The MLC board’s official website (as
accessed today), and most of the non-Fairfax media coverage in the last week
have referred to Ms Probert as “the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of La Trobe
University”. In fact, she left this
position more than a year ago, in July 2011,“to do more policy and research work”.
Judging by Ms Probert’s subsequent
appearances on Google – but more importantly, her plain desperate reluctance
to give up an old job-title that has long been someone else’s – she has spent
the last 15 months with plenty of time on her hands, and with much less money
that she has long enjoyed. I therefore suspect that Ms Storelli’s
cleaner – and much of the fuel in the current fire more generally – boils down to a matter of concentrated, venomous jealousy –
as magnified by Ms Probert’s current under-employment.
It would appear that sitting on various
corporate/school boards is Ms Probert’s only paid current role – it is unclear
whether MLC board members are paid (most corporate boards, of course, pay
generous “honorariums”) but judging from KPMG partner and etiquette-columnist Bernard
Salt’s carefully worded We-are-saints-doing-a-thankless-task column in
today’s Herald Sun***, which notably doesn’t invoke the “and we’re not even
paid for it!” angle, I would guess that the MLC board members are paid – and
quite well – for doing their jobs. For
most, this honorarium would be merely the second/third/fourth layer of icing on
their nice main-job package, but for Ms Probert, who AFAICT currently lives on
this “icing” alone, the task of demolishing Ms Storelli’s cake – admittedly,
it’s a bit rich – is her main job. This
task has even, it seems, involved Ms Probert going back to her first year
commerce notes on the parol evidence rule.
And so far, you’d have to say, it’s been a
job well done. The cake has gone, and
its eaters (not just Ms Probert) are loudly proclaiming what a thankless task
it was, too.
Further
update 26 September 2012
Belinda Probert wrote a column published
yesterday (which I didn’t see until today) in which she seems to claim that the MLC board are all unpaid.
Personally, I have trouble swallowing many
things said by Ms Probert. Her prose in
this snippet: “the discovery by a
completely independent and highly regarded firm such as Deloitte” (same URL)
seems out of the “completely unique and highly acclaimed” Bali
villa-rental (or whatever) web-ad songbook.
Then again (and granted I probably should
have made this disclosure earlier), I have taught and marked w-a-y too many
contract-law-for-first-year-commerce-students to not have my own “thing” about
such students’ textual follies and legal over-simplifications. What’s worse, Ms Probert seems to show that
they don’t ever grow out of this.
* Herald Sun journo James Campbell (“Sacking of MLC principal Rosa Storelli is rich drama” 23 September 2012) is oblivious to the messy complications of salary packaging. “[T]hanks to the generosity of the Federal Government, Ms Storelli was able to pay for a lot of things including her mortgage, her car, her private credit card bills and her nanny from her pre-tax income”. The fact that Ms Storelli apparently owes a large bill for FBT indicates that the “generosity of the Federal Government” does rather come with strings attached. Even more dubiously, Campbell
** The MLC board has been literally self-perpetuating since 2008, with all new directors, other than the principal, “elected” by the existing board. As an aside, so it’s evidently now not just we gays who are tampering with nature by reproducing asexually or its corporate equivalent, the spawn of a board's naturally-infertile, collective wank. But in a possible strange bed-fellows twist, here I also concur with the words of former MLC chaplain David Bell: “I'd like to see a return to more church influence in the school. I do suspect the corporate model has now failed. It's not a corporation, it's not a big business, it's a school for heaven's sake.” (Footnote added 5pm 23 September 2012)
*** Bernard Salt “MLC board member defends
merits of a community board following sacking of principal Rosa Storelli” Herald
Sun 25 September 2012
Other
References (URLs paywalled):
Ellen Whinnett and Fiona Hudson, “How
Methodist Ladies' College's powerbrokers rang alarm on principal Rosa
Storelli's expenses” Herald Sun 22 September 2012
Ellen Whinnett and Fiona Hudson, “MLC board
asks sacked principal Rosa Storelli to repay $700,000” Herald Sun 22 September
2012
Stuart Rintoul “Sacked principal faces
demand for $700,000 following 'overpayments'”
Australian 21 September 2012 (Reference
added 5pm 23 September 2012)
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Archbishop
Peter Jensen – YOU need to resign as Archbishop of Sydney
Following my recent post on the perils of
“we”, comes a particularly egregious jump from the singular to the plural:
Evidently, Archbishop Jensen is quite the
amateur actuary. I am puzzled why he
first emphasises the “I”, because I thought that it was uncontroversial that gay
men and lesbians have higher rates of the following than the general
population: substance misuse, mental
illness, and suicide. Gay men (at least in Australia
From this list, suicide is the only item
which incontrovertibly shortens one’s lifespan.
If Archbishop Jensen really thinks that the suicide rate of gay males and
lesbians in Australia
The other items in the above list also
probably shorten one’s lifespan. AFAICT, tobacco is most actuarially
contra-indicated substance to misuse, but again, if Archbishop Jensen is really
saying gay men and lesbians should give up smoking (and if so, I’m all with
him), his worthy micro-message is hopelessly lost in his broadside. Likewise, if he is concerned about gay men’s
continuing high rates of HIV infection (and who isn’t?), why on earth wouldn’t
he use last night’s media spotlight to plug the single, scientifically-accepted
prophylaxis for this highly-preventable (since c.1985, at least) condition –
condom use in male-to-male anal sex?
Of course, the previous paragraph is
rhetorical – Archbishop Jensen’s use of the qualifier “practising”* gays makes
it plain that his concerned body-politic “we” does not, by definition, include
gay men, other than non-practising ones.
His logic is impeccable, though.
Non-practising gay men don’t need to worry about HIV infection – if you
hate yourself enough to deny your core being, then you’re “objectively” all the
more likely to add to Archbishop Jensen’s oh-so “compassionate” body count.
* I assume by “practising” he means
sexually-active.
Update
7 October 2012
See now:
