A recommendation.

Travels with Epicurus by Daniel Klein.  (Sub titled, A journey to a Greek island in search of an authentic old age.)

Funny, smart, direct, thoughtful.

Above all, honest.

He also wrote, Plato and  Platypus walk into a bar.

This tries a bit too hard while the Travels book doesn’t.  Funny, too, but doesn’t resonate with the words one might choose when time seems . . . to be running out.

Just my thoughts,

Michael

Bronte ocean pool gives moments of beauty, simplicity

I’ve put on idleness like a pair of comfortable summer shorts.

Books everywhere on the floor around my bed and on my bedside tables like a still life mice plague, ungovernable.  Their numbers and mess say it’s January, when I reflect, read, plan. What was last year about, what did I do badly or well, what would I like to do this year? I pretend to find answers.

And there are movies, walks, morning swims in the ocean.

Watching wartime England reject then embrace then reject again the genius of Alan Turing in the film, The imitation game, I saw how shame can outdo intellect, generosity, achievement and honour. It’s said Turing cut short WWII by two years and saved millions of lives. (See it; Cummerbatch acts so finely.)  After the war Turing was convicted of a crime relating to homosexuality and chose the court’s offer of a two year course of hormone treatment by which he would castrate himself in preference to a jail sentence but killed himself after the first year; during this period the state left him to swing in the wind of prejudice, unprotected, unthanked, friendless.

The story of Turing, how his country betrayed him, and the role of shame in private and public man, brought me to the poet who has so much to say to me about love, loss, shame, hope and beauty – Rilke – and to this:

“I love the dark hours of my life

which deepen my senses;

in them, as in old letters, I find

my daily life already lived

and, like legends, distantly beyond.

From these hours comes the awareness that I

have room for a second life, timeless and wide.

And sometimes I’m like the tree, ripe and

murmuring, which fulfils that dream

above a grave, the one a boy in the past

- so that he could press it into his warm roots -

lost in sorrows and songs.”

I love the image of the boy of the past in the ‘grave’ who nourishes the grown man, especially the words, “ripe and murmuring”: they speak of hope, motivation and energy and encourage me to linger in last year’s moments.

Lily, the family dog, a King Charles Cavalier, who brought spontaneity and smiles to us all, who we loved, died this year. I can’t walk through Sydney uni’s lawns in front of the grand building without remembering Lily running full tilt boogy in circles in early winter mornings, the frost water flying in a wide arc from her suspended ears like a garden hose dancing; gods, there was joy in a mutt on the move, right there.  A native mint has been planted above her grave.  She barks and smiles and runs, still.

A borrowed book, Maestro John Monash – Australia’s greatest citizen general, by the former Australian politician, Tim Fischer, describes the genius and triumphs of Sir John Monash despite prejudice and institutional calumny.  From it I learnt how Sir Keith Murdoch, the publisher, and CE Bean, the historian, conspired to badmouth and to have Monash sacked, sidelined and unrecognised because he was a Jew.

By his high level of planning, imagination, robust review of previous strategies and intense level of integration of all things needed to make war Monash cut short WWI by at least a year. A highly successful engineer in civil life Monash applied analytical discipline to the planning and execution of the Battle of Hamel.  He planned it to last 93 minutes and it went for 94.  It became the template for the rest of the war and its success was repeated leading to the war’s end.

The English King George V gave more recognition to Monash than did Australians, and travelled to the French battlefield to knight Monash. The King’s respect, recognition and friendship with Monash made Australia’s then Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, jealous, who then did his best to keep Monash unrecognised and in England away from Australia after the war so he, Hughes, could campaign for re-election without the public being distracted by Monash’s widely recognised war achievements.

The least approachable of January’s books, technical, with no obvious heart or warmth, is a book that’s finely crafted, rich with extraordinary amounts of research and professional experience and which nonetheless ends up with a backbone of humanity; Affect regulation and the repair of the self by Allan N Schore.  I read it to explore and get another angle on Turing’s experience, and mine, to seek to understand how we humans react to the emotion of shame.

“The essential psychological lesion in these individuals . . to shame and to a failure to self regulate emotional experience . . . is that they do not have the capacity to tolerate or to recover from narcissistic injuries that expose negative affect, especially hypoaroused affects like narcissistic rage and hypoaroused shame, while maintaining constructive engagement with others.  The coping ability to affectively reconnect with an emotionally significant other after a shame-stress separation, and indeed to use the other to recover after shame associated narcissistic injury and object loss has never effectively developed in this personality structure due to its early practising experiences . . . Shame-prone narcissistic personalities are known to suffer from narcissistic injury-triggered, overwhelming, internal self-shaming tendencies and repetitive oscillations of self-esteem, which necessitate ‘endless attempts at repair’ . . . ‘the task of the narcissistic repair mechanism is to be rid of shame’ . . . Without a system to actively cope with and thereby tolerate this potent affect, the immature, undeveloped, archaic superego avoids risk experiences that are potential points of shameful self-exposure, thereby diminishing the expansion and the province of the ego ideal.”  (3)

Which brought me to reflect on today’s Australian political life, politicians and Australia’s civic ego.  I toyed with re-reading Richard Sennet’s, The fall of public man, which  explores this, but the weather, walks and beach had put me in too good a mood to linger on societal disappointments, so it remains on the bookshelf, unplaguing me or my floor.

Fortunately, I’d discovered Men explain things to me and its author, Rebecca Solnit.  Solnit’s shaken me up about thought itself, writing, reading and walking, and her books make up two of the still-life mice on the floor. I’ll read the rest of her works this year.

In Wanderlust Solnit explores the history, motives, ways we walk.  There’s a running footer (how appropriate is that?) through the book with quotes from dozens of writers who have described walking and it’s hard to choose between them and the text itself there’s so much to catch the imagination.  In it she mentions an essay by Virginia Woolf about walking and it’s a treat:

“No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil.

But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and

dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes,

and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the

builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the

pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: “Really I must buy a

pencil,” as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the

greatest pleasure of town life in winter — rambling the streets of London.

The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter

the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are

grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for

shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour,

too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow.

We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine

evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.”

Woolf’s description of the chaos she sees and loves in the second hand bookshop on her walk suggests something of the January chaos in my room:

“Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books;

they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a

charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in

this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete

stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the

world.”.

An old favourite, contained in The Penguin Book of the Ocean, washed up one of my favourite essays, The gray beginnings, by Rachel Carson. If you want an example of how to write about science this would be as good a place to start as any:

“When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea.  Fish, amphibian and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal – each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as sea water. . . . In the same way, our lime-hardened skeletons are a heritage from the calcium-rich ocean of Cambrian time.  Even the protoplasm that streams within each cell of our bodies has the chemical structure impressed upon all living matter when the first simple creatures were brought forth in the ancient sea . . . ”.

Strangely, the news that Australia’s birds were the authors of birdsong and also the most aggressive in the world cheered me up; that seemed like a moment of backbone in the midst of Australia’s jellied body politic.  It’s described in Where song began, by Tim Low:

“The feature of Australia that is most revealing, I am convinced, is all the aggression between [bird] species . . . what impresses me is how often I see it in the vicinity of eucalypts, banksias, and their relatives . . . during six weeks . . . in Europe and North America, the only sustained bird aggression I saw was around a eucalypt planted in parkland near Los Angeles.  Hummingbirds were defending its flowers, and a hooded oriole its lerp, although they were only attacking their own kind . . . ”.

Whatever.

Of all this it’s walking and swimming which speaks most to all of me – body, heart and mind – and that’s when my mind is blessedly emptiest, the thing I am may hear, see and feel best.

• Lombok has about 4 m people on an area about the size of the Sydney wider metropolitan area
• “villa’ is perhaps the most abused word in Lombok and Bali, especially when used in ads, the Web and promotion – don’t be confident of something out of Italy – such villas exist but until you enter the place cross your fingers and hope what you get matches your expectations, and that things work and, unlike most, it’s clean and there are no rats and so on . . .
• at my villa the young groundsman’s wife had died of an infection in  her leg
• two sisters in their twenties live in the one tiny room about 2m x 2m, he in another, all jammed together in a shed outside my villa
• the sisters’ mother had gone to Saudie Arabia for work where her employer threw boiling water over her but she can’t escape and endures a brutal existence
• a young child had died in the sisters’ family and another in the groundsman’s
• the sisters earn about $60 Au a month and each has a scooter which costs $20 a month to pay off – it’s really a case of no bike, no job
• On the beach in front of a café in Senggigi is a warung.  In this bamboo structure, both shop and home, about 3 metres square lives a man and his family who sell t shirts and local things.  He once owned all the land on which the small town of Senggigi is now built.  His story is the story of many traditional landowners in Lombok.  To finance their trip to Mecca – which they believe will guarantee them a place in heaven, or for some other transitory reason, they sell their land, often for very little money, to expats or in many cases to Chinese or Indonesian or overseas hotel businesses.  Much of Lombok’s coastal land is now owned by hotel chains which have either built hotels or are land-banking for future hotels.  Beads and mirrors and trinkets . . . it’s always been thus when locals get done over, whether in Australia, New Zealand, Africa, these United States of America, South America, the South Pacific . . . It takes some pleasure out of the air con when I turn it on in my villa, tho, or listen to the waves on the beach just over the wall.
• some days when I sat for hours outside little shops in huts (warungs), and shops (cafes, hair salons, restaurants) in towns I did not see one customer buy a thing or walk by; it was like being an extra on a movie set with no cameras and no one to shout, “Action”, and, thankfully, no script!
• Lombok has few tourists – it was the ‘off’ season which begins through September to around November
• a word of mouth account from a local expat business person was that over the last ten years a business which has kept its building, menu and day to day affairs static during the period (no advertising, etc) had at the same time experienced a 40 per cent increase in business, and that trend was fairly common
• most fittings and buildings – taps, footpaths (rare anyway), showers, roofs, walls, cars, light fittings, fans, floorboards, tiles, crockery, blinds, furniture and, of course, the roads, are cracked, or broken, leak, lack natural light and ventilation, have faulty water and electricity plumbing and wiring
• every local, from road labourer to child to leather-skinned very old people, with the exception mostly of public officials, smiled with open warmth at me without hesitation and would say, ‘Good morning’ (in Bahasa that’s, ‘Salamat pagi pak”)
• locals love it when you try to speak Bahasa and warm to you immediately
• the lack of aggression and the ready courtesy  on the crowded roads was a continual delight and shows up the aggression that pervades Australian roads where drivers add avoidable stress and danger to western city living – I felt safe and relaxed on Lombok roads all the time and loved being on scooters among the locals
• there may be a relationship between wealth and human warmth; the Lombokian is far warmer, more open than the wealthier people from where I come from, Australia, and far warmer than the self-obsessed tourists I saw in Lombok
• the most broken things in Lombok were some of the wealthy expats some of whom do these things to the locals; under pay, exploit, buy their land, don’t pay Australian or local tax, build shonkily, overcharge their local compatriots, do things they couldn’t get away with in their home countries – they may be here because they didn’t get away with their behaviour back home so had to escape the law, they build buildings which discharge sewage to the creeks, oceans and groundwater, do not install solar hot water heating or solar electricity or rain water tanks, pump local wells empty for their tourist businesses, talk mostly about money and buying things  . . .
• the government has been carting water to villages in the eastern area of the island for most of this year
• water for the beautiful resorts on the tiny Gili islands is shipped over most days on water boats from wells on Lombok, several of which have run dry or turned saline; the water is used for pools, showers but only a couple of resorts recycle water and have rain tanks
• over the last 20 years more than 400 wells have run dry in the most rained on part of the island – that’s 400 well-using villages or households that have lost their water in one catchment
• mains water in some places only runs at night . . . and where that’s happening in enclaves of westerners there are still no rain tanks being installed there  . . . go figure
• energy from oil drives much on the island and even now when prices are much the same as they’ve been for a while there’s an underlying edge to its availability:  recently, at the request of the fuel supplier, police escorts were given to tankers carrying fuel to the western and southern side of the island after two tankers were held up and their fuel stolen by locals – speculation in the Lombok Times was that the theft may have been by local tobacco farmers
• I did not see one building designed to reduce the heat load (except the villa going green) by changing the colour of the roof or using good insulation; just painting the traditional red tile roofs with the heat reflective paint widely available in tropical countries would cut air con by over 40% – so, here are two useful places to begin your research if you’re interested in saving air con costs in the tropics and getting cooler buildings in summer and warmer ones in winter, or anywhere:reflectiveinsulation.com…www.dulux.com…
• a confronting daily thing for me was to know my sewage and water waste and the garbage from my villa – my waste – was being discharged or thrown into the creek which runs beside the villa and this was accepted practice by the owners and managers, and is common
• the many ex pats who don’t do these things set examples of attention to detail, respect and invest in local culture, skills and the economy.  And seem to have the most profitable, happy businesses and have beautiful villas, cafes and food
• wells, dams and groundwater are emptying in both Lombok and Bali as ever more water is used to bath and spoil tourists and locals without replenishment by the changing weather and with no self-renewing water systems
• most rainfall is wasted in both Lombok and Bali
• Lombok is far, far poorer financially than Bali – poverty’s in the air
• both Lombok and Bali depend for every aspect of their comfort on oil and presently, as one of the region’s major producers, Indonesia has plenty of it.

Overlaying all this are two larger truths about Indonesia.

Firstly, it’s economy is far stronger and is expected to have a higher turnover value than Australia’s soon. It’s wealth is consumption, not export, based. There are 35 m middle class people in its 240 m people compared to a total Australian population of 22 m .  It will rank higher in gross domestic product than the members of the OECD except Germany if things go on as they are.  Presently it has the second highest growth rate of the G20 members, after China, and its GDP is 16th in the world.

Most of that wealth, however, is confined to middle class pockets with the bulk of it held by the ruling politicians and the army.  Most people are poor and their daily life is tough, their lives often short and typically hard.

The physical poverty of Lombok is pervasive, insistent.  My memories of dusty feet, rubbish, face-wide smiles, genuine warmth and curiosity, gentleness, the call to prayer so beauteous in the dark, and the thin line between having no water, food or shelter and bare survival are deep in me now.  They tell me how fragile our existence is on Earth no matter our circumstances.

But things will not go on as they are falling apart.  Which brings me to the other larger truth.

Secondly, climate change seeps out of every well gone saline from over use, every groundwater pump run dry.  It has turned major dams into empty, cracked dry mud plains where boys fossick for crickets they sell for food, is killing the marine and land-born animals, insects, flora and fishes  and all that’s living.  For this catastrophe of disappearing water the media reports quote government agencies offering only three solutions; prayer, digging deeper wells and seeding clouds to make them rain.  If this is accurate the water future of those islands is bleak and getting bleaker.  I’m sure there are wonderful exceptions not reported.  But this ‘mainstream’ government response, different not at all in substance from Australia’s, is akin to a drug addict holding his hand out for more soporific delusions.

No matter the predictions being published in Indonesian papers about it’s bright economic future, climate change is overtaking and is collapsing its water, energy and soil resources.  Population growth is speeding up these trends; UN reports and others make this clear.

Climate change is the great leveller of these islands and the levelling is gaining momentum.  Out of sight is data on the real level of oil reserves in Indonesia.  Most data on oil reserves here, and in many other countries, lacks credibility and numerous energy sites on the Net explore the range of figures which may be accurate but they’re mostly well-informed guesses.

Whether its the lost predictability of the monsoon rains, the trade winds, the ocean currents that sustained fish populations, the decline of oil reserves . . . all that’s physical here is changing faster than the expats to whom climate change is irrelevant.  They, and the politicians and the military seem to see climate change as a Western problem not affecting folks who stake a claim in a poor country.  It’s as tho, without being believers, or even  knowing of the biblical legend of Adam and Eve, these folk think Earth’s going to be a nonstop Garden of Eden.

It will be difficult for the rich and the poor in Lombok and Bali when oil becomes expensive, very difficult.

And when growing food and paying for energy  turns harder, and surviving becomes more difficult, I would not like to be an expat here, whether I had been fair or unfair to the locals.

I’d rather compete for food in a country of 22 m people in Australia than with 240 m; we’ll be competing in the large island of Australia, too.  Australia’s resources are collapsing, too (as the reports above show), and are even more vulnerable to food shortages and high energy prices because we import most of our oil.  Climate change stalks every country now, it’s pace picking up with every freak weather moment, every failed crop, every food price rise.

The times of unaffordable energy and no food will be a “here’s a how-de-do” far more challenging than the dramas faced by the actors in the comic opera, The Mikado.  It won’t be a comic opera like that.  With the dramatically changing – worsening – weather and the declining energy reserve the harder life coming here for all from higher food and energy costs looks likely within the next five to ten years.  Predicting the weather is a fool’s errand but it happens daily in the media and we fly planes and sail boats on such.  Among  some specialist weather predictors the idea of collapse within a decade is feasible.

Good luck, then, investors, expats and middle classes in Lombok.

And big hug to the poor – you’ll soon have lots of company.

For all this, this one last thing; thanks, you spirits of travel,  for the opportunity to sit alone in an empty square in Senggigi with a Lombok coffee, to observe the quiet dignity of the Lombokian waiter or waitress who stands silently, patiently, looking out through the tropical blaze without prejudice to the distance, to listen to Lombokians whom I met in all circumstances and savour their immediate warmth and friendliness – these and other gifts may be treasured by the curious traveller who would get lucky to be there, and for those I’m grateful to you, Lombok  . . .  salamat malam. [Good evening.]

And, thank you, my friend, J,  for introducing me to this part of the world.

M

Anyway, to Fremantle where the rest of the day was a succession of delights.

Studio room at The Painted Fish

I reckoned I’d died and gone to heaven when I saw my room; a glassed studio called, The Painted Fish, a short walk from the ocean.  It’s on the web.  The owners, Shani and Tim showed me their two B E A Utiful and gentle goats, and the whole of their street, Hulbert Street, planted out to gardens.

Olive tree in gabion wall in Perth’s Urban Orchard and one of my hosts, Jana

Then by train from Freo along the coast to the Urban Orchard in the heart of Perth; imagine looking out at the ocean then landing at a station where there’s food growing, water bringing peace and all on top of what was once a car park.

Wetland as part of the urban orchard on top of former car park roof

On the way in and back by train we saw a pod of dolphins, feeding in the one place of the river for some hours; must have been lots of fish there.  The photo below shows where they were but you can’t see them because my phone camera and I can’t find out how to zoom in quickly on a train yet . . . but it’s reassuring to know, to me, at least, that dolphins may coexist there with all the port infrastructure.

Dolphins were feeding in the river

Then the best part of the day and something you just gotta try; Shani, who with Tim, owns and runs The Painted Fish, put me in the bike cart, me sitting up like a little lucky boy with a blankey over my knees, and she biked me into the New Edition book shop for the In Conversation with Mayor Brad Pettit which Peter Newman of CUSP (more on this later) compered.

Good space, a civil society

Bloke Sans Blankey, Mayor Pettit, Peter Newman

Standing room only and a sweet spot night of civilised conversation with those in the room, Brad and I.

Shani, boy in cart, blankey

After, laden by seafood cooked with respect and Italian hospitality, Shani biked me back to The Painted Fish, me sitting there again with blankey, holding an LED light for headlights, while we tootled through the cold night air, cars and buses whizzing by us, me videoing it, the road at my feet and the walls of the utes n buses whiskers away.

Being spoilt, packed in by Driver Shani; Let’s go . . .

I would say it’s one of the best things that you can do – a tinge of danger, a thrill of calling out to other bikies, the looks of amazement and smiles.

Ahh, you gotta love this lovely, lovely Earth; mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

And so it goes,

M

If you’re in Perth or Fremantle on Monday 16 July come to a conversation I’ll be having with Brad Pettit, Mayor of Fremantle at 6 for 630 pm, New Edition bookshop.

We’ll be discussing growing and buying local food, cooling cities by cooling their streets and, perhaps (for me, at least) one of the real goals of living sustainably, the dignity and delight we may accidentally come upon when we meet strangers or friends in those streets which may we cool and colour and surprise ourselves in when we make them into edible landscapes.  Street are our shared living rooms, don’t you think?

May the civil surprises of richly planted and diverse streets be with us,

M

Hear what worked and didn’t over the last 15 years.

How has the house kept over 1.5 million litres of sewage on site?

How are the solar panels going?

How can four people live in the house for energy and water bills less than $300 a year?

Booking details:

• Venue: 536 Marrickville Rd Dulwich Hill NSW 2203
• Cost: $20 gleeclub free
• Book: gleebooks – 9660 2333 or Secure Online Booking
• www.gleebooks.com…

See you there,

Michael

The venues and program has been published and is on the Net here:

www.swf.org…

It’s a terrific moment in Sydney’s life and there’s so much to read, listen to, join in and enjoy.

You’ve been invited to tell others how you would save the planet.  The event is called, You save the planet.  The spotlight is on the audience to volunteer ideas and solutions for the things damaging our lovely but torn Earth.   Get into the positive a la Stevie Wonder – come and let us know your thoughts.

It’s on at The Wharf, 230 to 330, Saturday 21 May.  For details of the venue and the event, visit:

www.swf.org…

Speak up!

Michael

In the second edition of my book, Sustainable House, there is some discussion of this technology.

In this weekend’s Spectrum the Sydney Morning Herald’s Literary Editor, Susan Wyndham has included my book, Sustainable House, in her list of the year’s top books to buy for Xmas.

13th.

That’ll do.

A great incentive for me to catch up on some more writing.

May the books be with you,

Michael

(And that’s terrific, Susan, thank you.)

Pause your beating heart, and breath.

Sustainability has today gone centrefold.

Ok, so I’m being dramatic, but it is such a B E A Utiful day, I hope there’s a song in every heart that shares it. (Don’t you reckon Earth sometimes can’t resist herself and she puts on days like today when she sings, “Look at me, Look at me . . . “; mmmm ah lurves her then.)

Anyway, in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Style liftout section today there is a two page spread about the new book, Sustainable House, with some beaut pics and some handy info from the book by the writer, Stephen Lacey.

Thanks to the Herald, Stephen and of course everyone I know who helped.

If you want to see the place and get the book you’re very welcome to take one of the special tours here this Saturday or next at 11 am for an hour – see how sewage has been kept on site for 14 years, how the panels lasted, and so on.  But back to this day . . . I’m out into it.  May you have a spring in your step, too,

Michael