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Travel bites: Euphoric redemption in Bali

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A downward dog-led economic recovery is probably not what you’d expect to counter the Covid/volcano/earthquake/tsunami-led tourism recession of recent years in Indonesia’s Ring of Fire.

For one thing, yoga fanaticism, spiritual con artists – think breatharians and didgeridoo healing – were around before the ongoing flight cancellations of late.

But sticking your bum in the air in a steaming, oxygen-depleted environment in an idyllic jungle mountainside has its merits. And that taps into the Balinese economy in a reasonably big way.

You’ll lose weight, to dehydration. You’ll feel euphoric, to heat frustration. You’ll feel achievement, to the weight-loss euphoria.

For people who in their youth might have frequented the booze-holes and fleshpots of Legian and Kuta, smoking dope and scoffing magic mushrooms, it’s probably kind of redemptive. Or something.

It’s neat to fly for six hours to buy a sense of spiritual tranquillity amid a deeply religious Hindu community surrounded by natural and human disasters of a scale unimaginable to your average clueless Aussie.

But con artists, faux spiritualism and healing, yoga fanaticism and Australia prices are once again the norm in post-Covid Bali.

This is across Bali. The idyllic mountain and inland villages and towns of the beautiful Indonesian island. Not just the Legians and Canggus with their booze-riddled churls and phone-addicted narcissists.

The latter remain tide-recycling rubbish tips with fancy hotels years as before ago. It’s surfing and ocean swimming where Bali belly comes from these days, as often as anywhere else.

Up in the hills, by contrast, the palms and bougainvillea, the paddies and river gorges, are ever-increasingly frequented by travelling souls seeking spiritual succour and purpose in a steaming, sweating contortion. It’s a downward dog redemption against their Western follies and prodigal excesses.

Big little changes to how you live

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know housing in Australia is changing. Has been for quite some time.

Tighter lots, increasingly prolific renewable energy, gas on the way out, recycled water, floor plans changing to work from home, the shrinking back yard, are all the norm. Today’s greenfield communities are far removed from the raw, bare estates of old.

These changes, however, are about to be ramped up big time. Or small big time to be more accurate.

Think more smaller homes, townhomes and townhouses, apartments, terrace homes. In the greenfields as well as established urban areas. Think many, many more. Medium density’s coming your way and it is going to be snapped up by a largely unserviced market hungry for affordable, low-maintenance and quality homes. It’s started already, in fact.

Numerous factors are driving this change. The over-arching factors are price, inadequate land supply, soaring migration numbers, demand – and governments anxious about financing new infrastructure in the greenfields and keen to ramp up urban growth around existing infrastructure. Then there’s also lifestyle options where buyers don’t want big houses, preferring easy-to-maintain smaller homes; buyers such as first home buyers, singles, downsizers.

Given the competitive nature of the property market, it’s no surprise to find developers, architects, designers, builders and planners upping the ante of small homes in terms of design, quality, craftsmanship and delivery.

The recently-released book Housing Evolution: Towards Better Medium-Density Design (UWA Publishing) is a powerful catalogue of how this transition is unfolding, what it looks like, of designers throwing themselves at it with a passion and the striking results they’re achieving. It’s been compiled by Western Australia’s Office of the Government Architect, Development WA and staff and students of the UWA School of Design.

   

“The ability to flex, adapt and evolve is becoming increasingly vital to respond to the challenges our world is now facing – and nowhere is this more evident than in our communities,” says DWA’s Dean Mudford.

“Housing design is evolving to address this challenge and this has given birth to exciting new urban precincts that deliver smarter density and diversity, including safety, connection, a greater sense of community and, importantly, affordability. By taking a strategic approach to designing housing with a diverse range of approaches to density, we can address community concerns and make the case for innovation.

   

“We can demonstrate how under-utilised pockets of urban land can be reimagined into thriving neighbourhoods where you can walk to work, shops, cafes, parks and public transport. While the nature of housing is changing, the importance of homes and community remains at the core of our society. Everyone wants to come home to a place where they feel safe, connected, comfortable and free to make choices that suit their lifestyle.”

These sentiments are echoed in the likes of developer  Villawood Properties’ approach to building new communities to include a greater proportion of premium medium density homes. Its VillaRange suite of small homes, on separate land titles as opposed to many other MD offerings, is a telling precursor to what’s shaping up as a powerful watershed for the housing sector.

VillaRange is geared directly toward a part of the market long ignored by the industry: people anxious to buy but kept at arm’s length by the tyranny of price. These homes smash that barrier while upping the ante in significant terms not previously addressed for this type of housing – central location, access to amenities and services, social networks, community opportunities.

     

Building homes is one thing, building communities is another, of course. And VillaRange (above) reflects a maturity and responsibility in urban design that is setting benchmarks for competitors. It’s part of a strategy of community sustainability that’s intrinsic to Villawood’s MO. An ethos delivered through a diversity of lot options, swathes of open space, recreation, retail and social facilities, and financial community support.

Villawood provides community infrastructure years ahead of what local councils or government might, or even can, provide. It’s a key part of how Australian housing is changing. As housing demand continues to grow, it’s the astute, caring and innovative urban designers who will best shape the future.

As Dean Mudford says: “The way our towns and homes were designed in the past is no longer sustainable and we need to be smarter about the way we use our land and resources to ensure our cities are well-positioned for the future.”

When the pain hurts like charity

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Cold as charity is a term that’s uncomfortably familiar to many people who have a new Geelong sanctuary for their lost and stolen childhoods.

It’s hard to imagine just how chilling that charity was for orphans abandoned by destitute, deceased or disappearing parents and stab-passed into the tender cruelties of church, government or community so-called ‘care’.

Numerous orphanages and foster homes were witheringly censured by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse for their appalling failure to ‘care’ for the highly vulnerable innocents in their charge. Way, way too many children were irreversibly scarred by the physical, sexual and mental assault they faced. By the constant belittling, forced labour and bitter discrimination.

Brutality was an everyday menace for them. This was underscored by a persona non gratis status. Family contacts and details were deliberately withheld by authorities. Lies and fabrications tarnished their understanding of identity and self.

Today those children are old. Many can’t bear to recall their childhood. Many hide it from others. Others again, however, have found a solace of sorts in the company of fellow survivors. Geelong’s recently launched Australian Orphanage Museum, just out of town along Ryrie St, is a crucial, long-awaited facility for these people. It is a remarkable facility and a sobering reminder of the institutionalised barbarism visited on thousands of defenceless children across the country over generations.

The museum has been created by CLAN, the Care Leavers of Australasia Network – led by Geelong’s indomitable Leonie Sheedy – and features rare memorabilia from orphanages and homes where those children were abused.

It’s not a pretty story. The scars still sting for many of the survivors CLAN supports. The museum is a very real focal point for these survivors, one that acknowledges and corroborates their often untold, and for far too long, unrecognised, stories.

Those stories aren’t pretty either. The rapes and bashings often spawned angry adults only too quick to lash out and all too often find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Others have lived lives chewed up by PTSD, deep mental health issues, unemployment, homelessness and poverty.

One woman told me she was raped from age seven and through her teens, several times a week, while in ‘care’. She said she punched herself in the stomach to stop any baby from growing. All the while, files have since revealed, her father was trying to get her out of care but the authorities wouldn’t agree.

“It was just disgraceful. The government was our guardian but there was no guardianship,” she said.

Another told me of multiple rapes and regular bashings, pregnant at 13, jail at 14, four kids by 20, two of whom have since died – one by suicide after the car he was driving crashed and his brother died – as well as a grandchild lost in a crash.

For all their suffering, these people don’t want to be known as whingers. They toughed it out as kids, they’ve done so as adults too. But they do want to be acknowledged. And Redress would be good, too. Might pay for their funerals, if government can ever get its act together.

As for charity, well you know where you can shove that – especially the tax-exempt charitable status still given to institutions that oversaw their abuse.

This article was published in the Geelong Advertiser 30 May 2023.

When the pain hurts like charity

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Cold as charity is a term that’s uncomfortably familiar to many people who have a new Geelong sanctuary for their lost and stolen childhoods.

It’s hard to imagine just how chilling that charity was for orphans abandoned by destitute, deceased or disappearing parents and stab-passed into the tender cruelties of church, government or community so-called ‘care’.

Numerous orphanages and foster homes were witheringly censured by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse for their appalling failure to ‘care’ for the highly vulnerable innocents in their charge. Way, way too many children were irreversibly scarred by the physical, sexual and mental assault they faced. By the constant belittling, forced labour and bitter discrimination.

Brutality was an everyday menace for them. This was underscored by a persona non gratis status. Family contacts and details were deliberately withheld by authorities. Lies and fabrications tarnished their understanding of identity and self.

Today those children are old. Many can’t bear to recall their childhood. Many hide it from others. Others again, however, have found a solace of sorts in the company of fellow survivors. Geelong’s recently launched Australian Orphanage Museum, just out of town along Ryrie St, is a crucial, long-awaited facility for these people. It is a remarkable facility and a sobering reminder of the institutionalised barbarism visited on thousands of defenceless children across the country over generations.

The museum has been created by CLAN, the Care Leavers of Australasia Network – led by Geelong’s indomitable Leonie Sheedy – and features rare memorabilia from orphanages and homes where those children were abused.

It’s not a pretty story. The scars still sting for many of the survivors CLAN supports. The museum is a very real focal point for these survivors, one that acknowledges and corroborates their often untold, and for far too long, unrecognised, stories.

Those stories aren’t pretty either. The rapes and bashings often spawned angry adults only too quick to lash out and all too often find themselves on the wrong side of the law. Others have lived lives chewed up by PTSD, deep mental health issues, unemployment, homelessness and poverty.

One woman told me she was raped from age seven and through her teens, several times a week, while in ‘care’. She said she punched herself in the stomach to stop any baby from growing. All the while, files have since revealed, her father was trying to get her out of care but the authorities wouldn’t agree.

“It was just disgraceful. The government was our guardian but there was no guardianship,” she said.

Another told me of multiple rapes and regular bashings, pregnant at 13, jail at 14, four kids by 20, two of whom have since died – one by suicide after the car he was driving crashed and his brother died – as well as a grandchild lost in a crash.

For all their suffering, these people don’t want to be known as whingers. They toughed it out as kids, they’ve done so as adults too. But they do want to be acknowledged. And Redress would be good, too. Might pay for their funerals, if government can ever get its act together.

As for charity, well you know where you can shove that – especially the tax-exempt charitable status still given to institutions that oversaw their abuse.

This article was published in the Geelong Advertiser 30 May 2023.

Alamora, Sayers and what lies beneath …

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Tarneit’s Sayers Road, home to Villawood Properties’ Alamora, was Nissen huts, quail-shooting, roadside eucalypts, wire fences and little else a few years back. Different now.

Mount Cottrell was to the north, beyond Cowie’s Hill and its brace of MMBW water tanks. The Spring Plains swimming hole was to the west across the Werribee River carving its way across the plains from Korweinguboora up near Daylesford down to Port Phillip.

The river was choked with fallen trunks, victims of what locals knew to be Victoria’s fastest river when in flood. The same wisdom contended that Bungee’s Hole, downstream in Werribee proper, was bottomless.

Sayers Road was designer-made for my rock bandmates as we happily plied our Santana and Doobie Brothers decibels across the wide-open spaces, rousing approbation from nothing more than the local mudlarks offended by thundering old valve amps. Raucous parties upset no-one.

Tarneit and its neighbouring Truganina were tough, rocky, grazing runs. Well out of town and aligned with Melton as much as Werribee, what little community infrastructure there once was was long gone even then – the old Trug township, post offices, old timber houses and bluestone homesteads, the odd hall and even school.

Remiremont                                                            Chaffey brothers George and William 

Some ruins remained, and still do, my ancestral home ‘Remiremont’ for one – a bluestone double-storey pared back to one for safety reasons but burned out in the 1969 fires. My grandmother grew up there, my mum stayed there with her uncle/aunty in the 1930s and ’40s and travelled to church not in Werribee or Melton but Yarraville.

For kids back in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, Werribee stopped at Shaws Road. Tarneit was somewhere out on the dusty Never-Never. But we rode out to explore the farmyards behind the CSIRO and the cemetery along Railway Avenue. Long before Glen Orden/Birdsville or Werribee Plaza existed, let alone Orchard Place, the first of Villawood Properties’ many Wyndham communities.

Cobbledicks Ford                                                Tarneit Primary School

We pedalled all the way out through Tarneit to Cobbledicks Ford, a hard trundle up Derrimut to Dohertys Road then down Dukelows and a precipitous grassy hill to the river. You could make out the Eynesbury stand of endangered grey box eucalypts across the river from the top of Dukelows. The Eynesbury old station’s since been transformed into an urban outpost south of Melton, south of Melton South and finally south of Exford. Urban sprawl will catch it soon enough.

But while Tarneit and Trug seemed no-man’s land, there are old and familiar names tied to it – Chirnside, Shanahan, Hogan, Leake, Campbell, Davis, Lee, Lawler – and there’s a history.

For one, there’s the 1888 Chaffey’s Channel culvert, pump, sluice gate – west of Sewells Road and thought to be to be the first irrigation scheme built in the area and the first crack at the game by the pioneering Chaffey Brothers. Didn’t fly, however, due to pumping and servicing problems and was moved to the Glen Devon Stud and what is now the Riverbend Historical Park.

The North Base Stone at 1245 Sayers Road is of State significance. It was laid in the 1860s by the Geodetic Survey of Victoria to facilitate the survey process used to subdivide land during the early days Victoria. Not much to look at but swags of map would be shot without it.

Wattle Park on nearby Sewell’s Road, was owned by the Chirnsides and leased to tenant farmers.  The Chaffeys efforts ran through it.

John Batman                                        Andrew Chirnside

The Werribee River’s been important forever, of course, as border, water and food source for Aboriginal clans of three language groups – the Marpeang bulluk, Kurung jang balluk and Yalukit willam. As a young Werribee reporter I recall covering Indigenous remains unearthed along the river by a mining operator.

In the late 1830s and 1840s, the Werribee River was the scene of conflict between Aborigines and the European colonisers. The squatter Charles Franks and a shepherd were speared to death near Mount Cottrell in July 1836. This resulted in the Mount Cottrell massacre – a punitive party led by John Batman which came upon a large party of Aborigines and indiscriminately shot and killed at least 10. There are accounts of arsenic laced flour being given to local aborigines.

Today, the river waters the Werribee South market gardens, is popular with anglers and bushwalkers and provides a rich flora and fauna habitat.

Alamora’s part in the reshaping of Sayers Road draws people to an area where its background is little known and little appreciated but where it remains a vital player in the lives of its residents in terms of location, geography, environment and natural resources.

  • Noel Murphy is Villawood Properties’ PR & communications manager

Travel Bites: Amazon chill, Lima vultures

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Tambopata River, Puerto Maldonado, Peru

IT’S cool down in the jungle. Yes, cold. In the Amazon. But apart from the bizarre temperature for an equatorial jungle, it’s most of the other things you’d expect.

It’s isolated, remote, dangerous, poverty-stricken, primitive, environmentally threatened and scary. It’s also beautiful, diverse, enlightened, even mystical. And it’s sultry.

Cool but sultry. That wonderfully evocative description that takes in leaves so dripping in condensation you’d swear it’s raining, dark thatch huts and hammocks, jungle bars with sour cocktails in sweating glass tumblers.

And it’s also full of nocturnal screeching by unknown species, howler monkeys bellowing in foliage high overhead, deadly bushmaster snakes, leaf-cutter ants and terrifying stinging trees to which adulterers are condemned.

That’s not to forget brilliantly-coloured macaws and toucans, giant river otters, piranha, naked children playing on riverbanks, shamans growing psycho-tropic drugs, riverside gold-mining operations from makeshift canoes, alligators, jaguars, tapirs, parrots and more parrots, waterways that rise 12 metres and more in flood.

 

Lima, Peru

VULTURES. Last thing I expected. And haze. Thick, enveloping haze. Like a bushfire approaching. Thick, close, under-your-shirt haze. Creeping in like a London pea-souper.

Except this isn’t London. It’s Lima, Peru, just a few degrees south of the equator. It should be steaming, hissing, like a busted boiler valve. Instead, the temperature’s a mild mid-20s Celsius. Balmy.

And the setting sun – slumping lazily into the vast watery desert of the Pacific – is a warm, gilded disc, all fuzzy, indistinct, at the edges. A gently vanishing glow, hardly a sunset proper.

Adjudicating over this trick of nature, from the vantage of San Domingo’s steeple, is the wizened black vulture, Coragyps atratus, with a basilisk eye. 

Breathe in. The warm jet-stream rising west of Chile; the abused children’s fate adorning the billboards of this confused, for years even train-less city; the demonic Christian conquistadors of Spain and their legacy ever-present … all are considered under the withering eye of the vulture; cousin of the native Quechuans’ chief totem, the condor.

 And the sunset’s fogged, blotted. Warm, soaking, otherworldly. As if like Peru and its history, perhaps its future, it too has been forgotten by the Fates.

 

When taking offence becomes offensive …

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Above: David Rowe’s commentary in the Australian Financial Review

Have to laugh when a bunch of comic administrators can’t see the irony in B-rating a professional cross-dresser for his comments on cross-dressers.

Especially when that cross-dresser is responsible for that bunch’s existence. Talk about biting the hand that feeds. Like the cannibal who ate the comic said: tastes funny.

Definitely something funny going on with the snarky little snub of Barry Humphries by the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

Cartoonist Johannes Leak summed it up neatly with his image of the festival thought police sitting about at a crisis meeting moaning: “We’re a laughing stock.”

Doubt they would have laughed either at David Rowe’s cartoon of Bazza’s alter-egos lined up at the Pearly Gates being told by old Peter to form an orderly queue.

Dame’s Edna’s eyes are popping as Sir Les Patterson, equipped with signature cigarette, drink and blazing erection, jumps queue on Sandy Stone and squeezes in behind her.

“ ’Scuse me for pushing in Edna,” he apologies, his face a lascivious purple not unlike the backside of a rutting baboon. Edna’s set to jump, to use Les’ diction, like a kangaroo bitten on the balls by a redback spider.

Are you with me, Parkie?

Barry Humphries’ disdain for wowsers, the woke PC, the patently unhappy cancel culture, tub-thumping moralists, is having an extended field day right now. He’d be jumping for joy in his grave, if he was in there yet.

Dan Andrews is talking of a State funeral for the comedy giant. He should be thinking of a statue, too. Might want to start thinking about an inscription, as well. Maybe something from Barry Mackenzie:

“I was down by Bondi pier

“Drinkin’ tubes of ice-cold beer,

With a bucket full of prawns upon my knee

“When I swallowed the last prawn,

“I had a technicolor yawn

“And I chundered in the Old Pacific Sea.”

 Probably a bit too Sydney-centric for a Melburnite, though. And glorifying grog, instead of gambling. Maybe something a bit more generic:

“One day I got to reading

“In an old sky-pilot’s book

“About two starkers bastards

“Who made the Lord go crook

“They reckoned it was a serpent

That made Eve the apple take

“Cripes that was no flaming serpent

“Twas Adam’s one-eyed trouser snake.”

Hmmm. Having a go at the Christians. That should get it a run but it’s probably still a bit too close to the humour that made Alvin Purple a hit in 1970s Australia. And Paul Hogan with his dopey drooling over a bikini-clad Delvene Delaney. Or Benny Hill with his cast of buxom, wink wink, co-stars.

Appalling stuff. To think that people used to roll up in droves to theatre restaurants such as Dirty Dicks. And to drive-in theatres with hard porn flicks on giant screens that could be seen for miles around. Hippies danced naked at rock festivals. Nudists made themselves comfortable on beaches.

Aaagh, excuse me, but the Kath and Kim character Sandy Freckle just suddenly came to mind. Shh, don’t laugh. The fun police will get you. Bit like that other farce, No Sex Please, We’re British. That was packing them into the West End way back when Barry Humphries was just hitting his straps.

Bawdy, risqué behaviour has been going on since Chaucer’s time. And the Romans. You should check out what the Greeks were up to. Maybe check a few cave paintings too if you want to get real funny about it all.

Sorry, it’s human nature to get down and dirty. Barry Humphries did all of that, with great skill and humour. He targeted the wowsers and what we’d now call the woke and PC brigades. The stuck-up, self-righteous and up-themselves do-gooders.

And there should be more of it.

As for the transfolk, well, according to Sir Les: “I yield to none in my abhorrence of sexual prejudice. As for some courageous folk who claim that they were born in the body of the wrong sex, Les Patterson has this to say: ‘I’ve been there, guys. I know. I need to get into the body of the opposite sex on a regular basis’.”

Les insists he defends “to the ultimate my right to give deep and profound offence … so long as people laugh while they’re being offended.”

When he was asked do they laugh as much nowadays?

“Oh yes, of course they do.”

Seems, it’s just not at the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

 

Bingeing on science faction

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Ascension, by Nicholas Binge, Harper Collins

Pseudoscience stuff’s good clean fun, right?  Why shouldn’t the world’s crust just ripple up and accelerate the movement of land masses like Pangea, Gondwanaland and Pannotia to a couple of million years rather than the eons we thought?

Authors like Graeme Hancock, and more than few psycho creation scientists, will try to convince you it’s all possible, even true. The world’s fossils were all buried in Noah’s cloudburst of 2348 BC. Six days fair slog and a day off on Sunday, all that.

Others writers, like Ian Plimer, are lauded for eviscerating the God-botherer science revisionists with common sense but spurned for doing the same to climate zealots. Yep, science is all good fun until someone loses an eye. But colour its reason and evidence with politics, religion, activism, fraud or other shape-shifting and that’s what you’ll get. And worse.

Nicholas Binge, however, seems more bent on fun than mischief with his Ascension fable of a giant mountain that springs up in the Pacific Ocean, drawing an autocratic monied/warmongering/science-led expedition – it’s a little unclear which for a while – to investigate its singular peculiarities. And he’s having a lot of fun.

Singularity’s probably a better term because there’s a good bit of space-time continuum shape-shifting as Binge coerces a crew of physicists, anthropologists, medicos, biologists, ethicists, mercenaries and explorers onto the mountain and points them upwards.

Strange things are happening, as protagonist Harry Tunmore smartly learns. Old friends can see the future, predict card turns perfectly, amid a catatonia punctuating by ramblings about time, about watching the seconds.  But they self-immolate before exploiting their new skills in the casino.

And they’re the smart ones. So you imagine what the wild-eyed soldiers of fortune make of things as time moves back and forwards, dead people come and go before their eyes, unearthly life forms start as microbes before infecting everything, as alien creatures from beneath the ice attack.

Yep, here there be monsters, as the old cartographers cautioned of uncharted waters. And they’re getting into everyone’s brain as the mountain, a good bit taller than Everest incidentally, lures everyone higher.

Brutal cold, hypoxia, paranoia and open hostility colour the research mission as it moves painfully higher. And the body count mounts as Harry tries to fathom what the devil’s going on, why his personal life is a disaster, how to survive his own expedition members as much as the creatures and why on earth the mountain’s luring them all higher like a physical hunger.

But Harry’s sharp physicist grey matter nuts out what’s going on and how to traverse the monolith. In a fashion, that is, his road map’s an inter-dimensional thingo which leaves a lot to be desired. But like TV’s It’s About Time, never know if you’ll wind up in the Stone Age with Gronk or in New York City, still with Gronk.

The physics, existential philosophy and violence make for a good rollicking yarn. Just don’t ask why Harry’s abandoned his family yet happy to relay his deeply personal story in letters of extraordinary minutiae to his 14-year-old niece. Or why he’s constantly writing them while trying to escape death climbing up a mountain, for that matter.

It’s a mechanism, I suppose. You know the drum. Don’t let reality, let alone facts or science, get in the way of a good narrative. After all, what do those scientists know?

Take the Big Bang, for instance. That’s a once upon a time story if ever I heard one. Here’s a poser for you. What was there beforehand?

Please don’t tell me fairies ….

Head-shrinking as a political art form …

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WATCHING Parliament the other night got me to thinking of the Peruvian jungle, of headhunters and, given the cranial magnitude evident in Canberra, the Amazonians’ skills in shrinking heads.

Not the psychiatric head-shrinking, mind you there’s probably a job there, but the real thing _ the secret savage lore that’s fascinated everyone from anthropologists to horror film directors.  

Ghoulish practice that it is, head-shrinking’s a time-honoured, popular pastime which as recently as the mid-20th century was commonplace from Panama to Ecuador and Peru. Not Canberra, regrettably, but had the simple procedure for shrinking scones been better known … well, who knows?

It’s not so hard, really. When you’ve despatched your subject _ presumably an enemy of some species _ hack off his head as close to the body as possible. Slit the scalp from the crown downwards to the nape of the neck. Through the opening, flay out the skull, remove the flesh and skin of the face and scalp.

Still with me? Next, ditch the skull, unless you need a conversation-piece ashtray or somesuch. Stretch the skin over a wooden handle and immerse it a vessel of hot water to contract it a little.

If you’re a purist, like me, you’d then sew a ring made from a vine into the neck to keep it open so you can drop hot stones inside.

Add hot sand to the pebbles and keep the head in constant motion, swinging it about, to allow the heat to apply to all the parts uniformly. When things cool, tip the sand out, reheat it and repeat the process.

Gradually, the head will dry out and become smaller. Remember to knead the features with your hands, pinching and moulding the face to retain its natural appearance _ even its natural expression.

That’s it. Simple, really.

If you were ambitious, mind you, you might care to shrink the whole parliamentary carcass. Peru’s Jivaro folks abbreviated one particular Spanish officer, an old conquistador supposedly searching for El Hombre Dorado _ the Golden Man _ reducing him to just a shadow of his former self. From five feet nine inches to just 31 inches.

According to Robert Ripley, of Ripley’s Believe It or not fame, he’s located in the National Museum of the American Indian as best I can establish and possible relocated from New York to Washington in recent years. He sports a rather grand moustache for such a little bloke.

Funny but he looks a little like the late defence minister Jim Killen to me, which is odd _ he was one of the least big-headed figures to grace parliament.

The once wildly-popular Ripley has been resurrected by folks at Five Mile Press in a colourful scrapbook entitled Search for the Shrunken Heads and other Curiosities. It features everything from a bloke with a full-on horn growing out of his head to pink polar bears and ancient talking Egyptian statues.

But it’s the shrunken heads that are the stand-out curiosity. And Ripley, true to form, offers an intriguing insight into the custom.

“The taking and shrinking of human heads is an ancient rite with the Jivaros, and one which has not vanished with modern times.

“It has, rather, been stimulated by the demand of tourists for specimens of the head-hunters’ skill as souvenirs and all the laws against the practice that have been passed by the South American republics are of no avail.

“While there are traders to pay a price, and tourists to buy, the sale of human heads will probably continue.

“The method of reducing and shrinking the heads remained a secret for many years and it is comparatively recently that anyone has witnessed the actual process.

“Friends of my mine in Quito (Ecuador) told me of a German scientist who ventured into the unexplored Pongo de Seriche _ the land of the Jivaros _ in hopes of learning their secret, and six months later a shrunken and mummified head with a red beard and light hair was offered for sale.”

This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser

Trying to stop courting disaster

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Never fail to be appalled by the time-worn old adage that you get the kind of justice you can afford.

Should never be that way but time and time again we see justice dispensed like an insurance company’s write-off car crash assessment. Too much to fix, car’s not worth that much, cut your losses all round. In jurisprudence-speak, just settle.

See it all the time. The cost of defence is going to be too much, cut your costs.

Lots of people happy to do it, too. Bordering on scam. People who might sue for defamation, for instance, for the supposed loss of their reputation among friends and colleagues. They’re happy to forego that sorry loss for filthy lucre instead.

Makes you wonder what a reputation’s worth if you can buy it back with a court order. You can’t, of course.

You can trick up the legal system in other ways, too, if you’re short of cash for legal fees.

Vocal accusations, untested police charges, the rabid court of public opinion and the cesspool of social media are terrific ways of buying the justice you want for next to nothing.

If you’re on the attack, that is. If you’re happy to see your target vilified, harassed, ridiculed, thrown out of work without a fair hearing. If you don’t subscribe to notions of a fair trial, innocent until proven guilty, the rule of law or the annoying notion of justice not only being done but being seen to be done.

If you’re on the defence, it’s a different matter. No amount of money can stave off this kind of out-of-court barrage. You can be done right over no matter regardless of any court outcome.

Which is why the Federal Court is restricting media access to various legal documents. To avoid undesirable consequences by non-parties, viz, reporters.

It means journos can’t report on untested initial applications and claims as soon as they’re lodged with court. They have to wait until the case has its first hearing.

There was a time when sub-judice meant something to reporters. The idea was that you wouldn’t potentially influence any juror, or judge for that matter.

The Federal Court is basically trying to restate that kind of legal protection, by guarding against a level of digital public discussion way beyond what a paper/radio/TV might once have prompted.

Media outlets are filthy on it. Chiefly because, I’d suggest, they’re worried social media has a massive jump and audience on them. They’re claiming the Fed Court has a fundamental misunderstanding of journalism, free speech and democracy.

I’d suggested they’ve got a pretty good idea.

That said, there remain some serious shortcomings to the idea of keeping jurors in the dark about defendants, notably about prior offences and all sorts of evidence that might be deemed inadmissible by our courts.

Jurors are basically treated as dummies. Not smart enough to weigh evidence without stuffing it up. Maybe there’s a case, if you consider how some people react to social media campaigns.

But the one-sided, bias confirmation indoctrination that activists rely on, and web giants happily exploit, is not what justice and the courts are meant to be about.

What we increasingly have these days is pure kangaroo court stuff. Like the old cowboy movie line: Sure, we’ll give you a fair trial, then we’ll hang you.

Jurors need full information, not just some biased information – and definitely not finessed, prejudicial information – if they are to make the same fair and accurate rulings/reports that journalism is obliged to present.

Situation’s pretty simple, really. Anything else and the media’s just embarrassing itself like the targets it too often seeks to lynch with public opprobrium.

 

 

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