Come on 2013

It’s New Year’s Eve. 

Here we are on the verge of new beginnings, grand expectations, resolutions to do better, achieve to our potential, balance one’s life, lose weight, run a marathon, eat healthily, be kinder,  be more caring, think before we act, climb Everest and achieve world peace. This is a time of grand and glorious promise. See out the old year and triumphantly toast the new. Fun and celebration, that’s how it’s sold.

For me, it has often been something of a disaster. 

I offer as examples:

·           An unbelievable summer storm that trapped me inside the house while I painted away and a waterfall of rain sheeted from the eaves.

·           Being party trapped for hours with a depressive young man some twenty years my junior who I have no doubt had been stalking the young woman over whom he was threatening to do himself in.

·           Camped out in the great outdoors in my new tent, its flaps opened to catch the evening breeze after 35degree heat, and the storm coming in around midnight and flooding everything, trapping me wet and drenched inside.

·           No end of unsuccessful parties where people flitted in and out and on to the next venue while I as a good guest/host was trapped in situ dressed in my best fancy costume.

There’s a theme developing here.

OK, I concede none of these are really disasters of the large scale kind like the tornado that killed three in Cincinnati on New Year’s Eve 2012, The New York Mining Disaster 1941 (was that even real?), nor potential Near Year’s Eve style disasters that the internet is providing tips on avoiding.   

I’m speaking more disaster in the sense of events falling well below expectations – tragedy - failure.

Don’t get me wrong, there have been some fun times. Usually with friends, food and a few bubbles, and once with sparklers and a pair of runners.

 But in general, I’ve decided this is one time of the year when the hype never lives up to the reality. Bring on Easter - at least it has chocolate.

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Art Work of the Week 

Here is the picture I was painting on the New Year's Eve mentioned above.

You Devil You. Acrylic on board 500x700mm

Christmas Carol

When I was a child Christmas was about the smell of pine needles in the bush as they roasted in the blistering heat of an inland Australian summer. We knew we would have long summer days walking to the pool as the concrete pathways buckled under our feet, and we bought slices of watermelon to ward off our thirst. There was no sunscreen, no skin cancer council warnings, no UV alerts. We baked ourselves along with everything else, covered in coconut oil. Glistening little roast potatoes. And when we were overdone and had to don real clothes, we were basted with tea and vinegar and coated in protective cotton wool. 

From her childhood my daughter recalls the smell of old fashioned Christmas paper that her grandmother used to wrap presents . While everyone else was ooing and aahing at their gifts, she was busily sniffing. Grandmother is now in her 90’s, still lives independently, and never misses the girls with a card and a crisp banknote  for Christmas. My daughter still loves the smell of paper. Give her a new book and the first thing she does is open it up and put it to her nose. 

For a large part of my adult life I lived on the coast. It calls to me daily. Here were new Christmas traditions.  Breakfast at the beach with children and friends, fresh damper and fruit followed by a dip in the ocean.  Lunch was seafood and all the trappings, usually with a friend and her family - mother in her seventies and eighties who had been an Olympic class diver in her day, brother often visiting from the USA with a daughter who found us all mundane and uninteresting.

We tried to make each Christmas lunch notable. I think we topped it with our beach front adventure. No picnic baskets and blankets. No cross legged in the sand with grit in the food. This was full on white tablecloth and all the trimmings. We removed all the outdoor furniture from home to the shelter of the she oaks and set up the best restaurant in town. Smells of sea salt dropping on to our skin, sounds of waves running over tiny pebbles and shells.  A view you couldn’t buy – and it was all ours.

I’m back in the inland – don’t ask how that happened- but for the time being this is it. It brings great advantage of proximity to immediate family that for most of my grown up years was impossible. And it’s been a time to grow a new set of Christmas rituals, particularly as it started with a small grandchild.  

I have open house on Christmas Eve – that is until 8pm when Santa throws you out. My friends joke about the deadline, but they dutifully abide. It’s just the family members that linger, and that’s OK.  We have fun.  Christmas Eve in my house as a child was always tears and turmoil. 

Though we are all grown up – my granddaughter is now mid teens – we still hang up our santa sock and wait for early morning goodies. Once it was just me filling them as everyone slept , now everyone sneaks around all the bedposts depositing their fun presents- buzzy whistles, ring puzzles, zodiac predictions for the coming year, tacky plastic animals, fridge magnets, and always chocolate coins. We must look hilarious to circling aliens.

The damper and fresh fruit breakfast remains. I tried to change the Damper recipe last year and met with thunderous outrage from the girls. 

Lunch is with the extended family. We rotate the venue at our houses taking turn about each year. We all pitch in, and when the whole crew arrives it is noise and laughter from beginning to end. We start with barbequed prawns - another recipe that has disallowed variation. I thought a couple of years back that I would  try something I had found in the street markets in Hanoi: chargrilled prawns with a dipping sauce of lime and pepper -  but that got the thumbs down as well. 

My brother proposes every year that we finish lunch by 2pm. We all nod wisely and agree that he has a great idea.  

Desert never makes the table before 4pm.

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Art Work of the Week

Merry Christmas. Acrylic on canvas 1200x910 mm

Trite, Tattered and Tardy

This week saw the release of a range of test figures from The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2011 and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 

The Minister was quick to send a media release deploring the ‘poor’ performance and spinning that the present government’s reforms under National Partnerships, and the My School Website are only now biting and would make a significant difference. Just how is not articulated.

The usual candidates from every lobby group in the country took to their bunkers and rolled out the same old arguments: we need better teachers; schools need more funding; teachers need higher pay; we need to attract high performers in to teaching; extend school hours; principals need more autonomy; concentrate on teaching literacy and numeracy; get rid of poor teachers; scrap the union; provide more professional development;  improve the retention rate; set more targets; the National Curriculum will fix it; test, test , test, test…….. blah blah blah. 

We’ve heard it all before - the attempt to compress a complex set of reasons for individual student performance into a grab bag of the top ten ways to fix a perceived problem. It’s trite, it’s tattered and it’s tardy of the protagonists to give us the same old, same old. 

We are still with the basic assumption that the tests are right, the methodology is right, and that you can actually treat children and young people like scientific experimental subjects- if you control the variables you can get a constant result. Human beings just don’t work like that. They are each individual and the combination of factors which lead to the person before the teacher is as unique and variable as the number of people we are as a whole. 

It might be useful to look to a time when we valued a well rounded education that trusted the skill and dedication of the teacher and  that championed the full range of human knowledge as critical learning for a civilised society. 

A hard call in an economic rationalist world where the belief is that counting the beans in the jar over and over again will improve the quality of the beans. 

One of my favourite things about Christmas is that parliament stands down and we have a slight reprieve from the shooting gallery, the gaping clowns, the ducks in a row, the spin, spin, spin.

For a little while we will have no pseudo-Amazonian battles between  Bland Barbie and Juggling Julia, with their slings and arrows that are just a step up from a schoolyard cat fight with its hoes and moles. On Radio National yesterday morning one guest described the Australian parliament as an ‘infantile shout fest’. 

Revolutionaries have always known that words are one’s greatest weapon– the winning of the hearts and minds. Look at David’s Marat, dead in his bath like an alabaster Greek statue still writing rousing rebel rhetoric as his life blood leeches away. Never mind that he was in reality pox marked and delivered ignominiously by a spurned lover- so the story goes. 

The linguistics and ideologies of our representatives are piddling about in the mire of mendacity. It’s personal attacks, attempted broadsides, niggly skirmishes and nuisance hand grenades. 

Entertainment for the masses in the 24/7 sound bite and news grab - bread and circuses. 

But it leads us nowhere.

There’s a novel idea – Politician as leader. I wonder if it could catch on?

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Art Work of the Week

Here's a new way of looking at an old problem.

No testing was used in the creation of this art work.

Jester cuppa