Unhealthy compatriots

At a medical level, you might say, I would have thought it enough that Australian Internet news [my immediate informational contact with my land of birth] should reveal that equine flu had stopped the NSW spring racing carnival. But there seems to be worse news, of human kind.

There would appear to be what is referred to, in The Australian, as a "growing obesity epidemic". Now, this doesn't really surprise me in the sense that my French children and I first discovered the McDonald's phenomenon in Sydney, many years ago. Last year, during my brief excursion to Australia, I was shocked by specimens of obesity encountered everywhere, including my birthplace. In a South Grafton club, I witnessed a family of overweight monsters who appeared to be regarded as normal by the locals. At the place in Grafton where my dear departed father once sold spare parts for Ford automobiles, there is now a cake shop that distributes unbelievably heavy-weight luncheon stuff for workers. But my brief observations have little weight... you might say. So let me quote directly The Australian:

Almost all Australians are either eating poorly or exercising inadequately, while only five per cent meet national lifestyle guidelines, a new report shows. The landmark study of more than 16,000 Australians has painted a grim picture of a slothful, unhealthy nation falling short of its own recommendations for exercise and nutrition.

One in four—25 per cent—meet physical activity guidelines, while 55 per cent eat enough fruit and 15 per cent eat enough vegetables.

But an alarmingly small number—fewer than five per cent—met the criteria for all three guidelines, a statistic the University of Sydney and Deakin University researchers say is "extremely concerning".

At a personal level, I'm not directly involved in the problem to which I allude. I'm no longer directly concerned by Australia in general, because I've moved on. But I still react as if it were my birthplace [which it is] and my homeland [which it hasn't been, for ages].

I love a fat brown country...

Sydney skies

On the front page of The Australian this morning, we find this photo of an RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] jet fighter, illustrating an article with a shock title: RAAF may use 'lethal force' for APEC.

Australians in authority often take themselves a little too seriously, to the point of getting carried away with their self-importance. We saw a striking case of this behavior recently in the conflict between a self-righteous government member and the Indian doctor suspected of abetting terrorists. Today we find a member of the air force, in charge of protecting the airspace over Sydney next week, telling reporters that "any pilots entering the area without a permit ran the risk of being shot down". This excessive kind of cowboy talk, coming from a senior military representative, would be hilarious were it not alarming. The RAAF would do better to go about its assigned business quietly and expertly, with no spectacular but unnecessary buzzing of central Sydney, and no front-page stories in the media.

There is indeed a nonnegligible risk that an unfortunate private pilot might be unaware that special airspace regulations are in vigor over the Sydney region during the APEC conference. One can even imagine such-and-such a member of a visiting delegation with a civilian pilot's licence, who decides to rent a small aircraft and spend an afternoon with his wife, taking aerial shots of the Blue Mountains, while naively ignorant of the fact that a so-called "lethal force" is operating in the nearby skies. Imagine the huge diplomatic incident that would ensue if rescuers were to find that the wreckage of a small aircraft, blasted out of the skies by an RAAF fighter, contained the charred remains of a junior cabinet member, say, of Brunei, Peru or New Zealand.

No horses at next week's Sydney circus

This photo shows an unmounted policeman in Sydney, leading a horse that is probably suffering from equine flu:

That's the way it's going to be at the APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] event next week. Not only will police horses be absent, but Laura Bush won't be there either, because she has a mysterious pain in the backside, or somewhere or other. As for Bush himself, he'll be arriving and leaving earlier than initially scheduled, which means that a lot of the advanced security planning carried out conscientiously by NSW authorities will have been a waste of time and effort. They've nevertheless purchased some kind of sophisticated high-tech truck capable of spraying high-pressure water on groups of protesters. The APEC circus will provide the authorities with an excellent opportunity of testing this equipment... provided, that is, that there are groups of real-life protesters. According to plans, it is highly likely that people in this category will in fact turn up in Sydney. On the other hand, if ever the planned protesters did a Laura, or stayed away from the APEC circus because they were afraid of catching equine flu, then the police would have no other alternative than to stir up pseudo-protesting among crowds of normally calm onlookers, so that they can be hosed down experimentally with the new truck. I've heard rumors that the most disgruntled abservers of all are the members of the famous Bondi Icebergs: the folk who make a point of going surfing every day, even at the height of winter. Apparently the APEC organizers have taken over their clubhouse on Bondi beach, in the context of some kind of luncheon for APEC dignitaries. Wouldn't it be funny if Icebergers, protesting because they couldn't go for their normal swim, were to get hosed down by icy water from the high-tech truck. They would probably whine that the water's too warm for their tastes.

Finally, there'll be a fireworks show, but the authorities are telling Sydney folk to watch it solely on TV. As for me, here in France, I plan to watch TV to admire, not only the fireworks, but the high-tech hose-truck in action. I had been looking forward to seeing George W Bush and John Howard dressed up in R M Williams clothes for the traditional end-of-conference photo. But this is unlikely, unless the organizers were to take a photo of Bush in Aussie cowboy gear before he leaves, and then use Photoshop to insert him magically into the final group photo. These days, everything is possible. But only one thing is certain: This gigantic APEC shemozzle is going to disrupt the normally calm life of Sydney for most of next week. I'm glad I'm not there.

Kevin Rudd's a normal bloke

Howard supporters probably hoped that Kevin Rudd's reputation would suffer because of an old story about his spending a drunken evening in a New York strip club, while on a government-funded excursion to the UN. But those who unearthed and publicized this piece of ancient history have grossly miscalculated its effect. A phone survey carried out last week by the Australian firm Roy Morgan Research reveals that 87% of electors are not concerned by this incident. The feelings of electors were summed up in the following typical comments:

— We're all human and we all make mistakes.

— He's just a bloke, a normal Aussie male.

The comment I like best:

— It doesn't affect how he runs the country. Just look at Bill Clinton.

On the contrary, for the first time ever, a majority of people taking part in the survey said they disapproved of John Howard's handling of his job as prime minister.

Equine influenza

Little has been said yet outside of Australia concerning the outbreak of equine influenza, detected last Friday at Sydney's Centennial Park, close to the famous Randwick racecourse.

Finally, an informative website on this affliction, produced by the Queensland government [display], reveals that it's highly contagious, but apparently not life-threatening for horses or humans. A singular outcome of this viral outbreak is that there may not be any mounted police officers in Sydney to handle possible protesters during the forthcoming APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] conference, on 8-9 September. Worse still for most Aussies, if the outbreak of equine flu were to spread, horse-racing might be interrupted for a while.

Indian doctor and Aussie patient

This morning, I was happy to learn that Mohamed Haneef had succeeded, in a court appeal, in recovering his Australian work visa.

This young Indian doctor is surely an ordinary individual who has never been condemned of committing any crime whatsoever. The idea of being tempted to consider him as a terrorist is idiotic and grotesque.

Be that as it may, the Australian minister Kevin Andrews is not at all happy with the ruling of the Federal Court. As for me, I was satisfied to see a photo of this intriguing all-powerful Australian administrator:

Indeed, it's frustrating to remain aware of the existence of a curiously notorious individual without knowing what he might look like. Thanks to The Australian, I can now associate a physical image with the name of the man who declared that Mohamed Haneef couldn't pass an Aussie character test. Andrews, to say the least, has an intriguing face. To call a spade a spade, the stark face of Kevin Andrews, with its corpse-like rigidity, frightens me.

An Australian journalist compared Kevin Andrews with a notorious fictional character of the '60s named Maxwell Smart, an incompetent law authority who invented the shoe telephone:

Personally, I'm not sure that Kevin Andrews could invent anything whatsoever. He doesn't strike me as an inventor. He doesn't strike me as anything of a nice nature. Well, yes, his face does in fact strike me in a morbid sense. I wouldn't like to meet up with Kevin Andrews on a dark night in a remote alley, let along in a government immigration office. To put it bluntly, he doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who would wish his neighbor well.

Meanwhile, the amusing thing about this whole affair is that Haneef, sooner or later, will become a celebrity in Australia. People will be queuing up to obtain a consultation with this nice notorious Indian doctor. And many of his patients will be tempted to ask the same questions: "Who's this weird guy named Kevin Andrews? Why did he attack you? Do you think it's safe for Australia that such an individual should remain in such a prominent post?" By then, of course, I would hope that Kevin Andrews will have retired from active service.

Secret river

I'm fascinated by the story, related in The Australian, of the discovery of a so-called secret river called the Kallakoopah in the heart of Australia. [Click here to read the story.]

To remain geared to the universe, we humans need to discover things constantly, where the word "things" denotes both intellectual and material entities. One can imagine no more inspiring discovery than that of an ancient river.

Bali bird flu

Last year in February, a Sydney-based think tank named the Lowy Institute succeeded in scaring shit out of everybody by announcing the theoretical worst-case scenario of a bird-flu pandemic capable of taking 142 million lives. [Click here or on the image to display the CNN article.]

At that time, we Europeans shuddered most, because the mortal H5N1 virus had been detected here in migrating wild fowl. French authorities reacted to this threat in a draconian fashion by outlawing outdoor chicken yards. Meanwhile, people feared that the celebrated recipe of Poule au pot farcie Henri IV might soon become a thing of the past, like roast pheasant. [Click here to display the recipe in French.]

Today, alas, the action has shifted to Australia's playground: the tiny Indonesian island of Bali. Now, I hasten to add that I've never set foot in Bali, and have no immediate plans to go there. Besides, I've never understood what draws young Australian tourists to this place. Wouldn't it be a relatively simple affair, for filthy-rich developers, to create an exotic but safe Bali-like atmosphere in delightful local places such as Bondi or Byron Bay? Or even Yamba or Woolgoolga?

Judging from this morning's press, there's no panic yet in Australia. At the moment I'm writing, Australian health and tourism authorities don't seem to have issued any directives concerning Australian citizens who are already holidaying in Bali, or those who might be preparing to go there. Is this absence of official declarations an indication of calm and clear thinking, or rather a sign of negligence?

Aussie bungler of the year

I would like to nominate Kevin Andrews, minister of Immigration, for the Bungler of the Year award. Speaking of the departure for India of liberated Haneef, the bungler is quoted as saying: "If anything, that actually heightens rather than lessens my suspicion." Andrews is a bloody stubborn bungler, too, who doesn't even appear to be aware that he screwed things up. And don't expect him to apologize for his bungling. He summed up his idiotic actions with the following weird words: "I have had to defend this matter with one arm tied behind my back because of protected information." The guy's a nut, and the only decent thing he could do would be to resign.

Tony Abbott, minister of Health, spoke of the bungler as follows: "He's a terrific bloke and he's done a good job." When somebody goes out of his way to describe a mate with rotten egg on his face as a "terrific bloke", this is often a euphemism for saying: "He's not quite the total arsehole you might imagine him to be." OK, fair enough. Abbott seems to be telling us that Andrews is only a minor arsehole.

Land of law?

From my antipodean observational outpost here in France, I'm frankly alarmed by the way in which my native land is handling the case—or rather the lack of a case—against the accused terrorism supporter Mohamed Haneef. Clearly, the police investigation up in Queensland got screwed up, which explains why a federal law-enforcement directorate is now called upon to review the fiasco. My first reaction is positive: Thank God Australia employs a so-called Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions!

I don't know why Queensland premier Peter Beattie, in criticizing the methods of his police force, had to resort to the foreign [Hollywood] image of the Keystone Cops. Homegrown anecdotes of idiotic police blunders abound, notably in the bushranger domain.

The thing that worries me, when I observe what has happened in the case of Haneef, is a lurking suspicion that Australia might no longer be what we commonly refer to as a land of law. Sure, it's a land of politics, with a lowercase "p", and a land of Dollars, with an uppercase "D". But it appears to be a land in which an Indian doctor can find himself involved, overnight, in a frightening imbroglio, as indicated by the following extract from today's The Australian:

Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty was also forced to deny reports police had written the names of overseas terror suspects on Haneef's personal diary, and that Haneef was being investigated for plotting to bomb a Gold Coast skyscraper.

Many years ago, when I saw customs officials in the port of Fremantle confiscating jars of baby food that my wife was bringing ashore to feed our Emmanuelle during our brief stopover in Western Australia, I formed the vague opinion that certain Australians in authority often tend to be excessively zealous, as if their credibility depended upon their obtaining outstanding results. I witnessed this same behavior twenty years later, in exactly the same city, when I saw WA cops taking pleasure in arresting drivers leaving places of revelry associated with the America's Cup regattas.

If all the events surrounding Haneef were to mean that the threats of terrorism in Australia will henceforth be diminished, one might conclude that it's worthwhile. But that's like saying that the invasion of Iraq could be justified a posteriori if it had reduced the outlaw phenomenon in that land. In my view, in their sunny microcosm, Queensland cops are surely just as dumb as George W Bush.

Trains

On this sunny Sunday morning, I decided to drive to the Valence train station to buy a return ticket to England for five days in August. It's a splendid new station out in the countryside, catering primarily for TGV [high-speed train] links.

I've become accustomed to using the Internet to make purchases of all kinds, but I prefer a person-to-person contact in the case of train tickets. I have the impression [but I may be wrong] that the human operator in a train station has access to more information than an Internet user, and knows how to find an optimal solution to queries in a minimum of time. Above all, I guess I'm old-fashioned, since I simply like the idea of dropping in at a railway station to buy train tickets from a human employee. Besides, in the special case of the Valence TGV station, I get a kick out of visiting such a nice place, whether it's a matter of buying tickets, catching a train or picking up visitors.

On the other side of the planet, in my native New South Wales, people don't seem to have such a positive attitude towards trains as they do here in France. A few days ago, in The Sydney Morning Herald, there was a derogatory but well-written article entitled The curse of CityRail [read], which started out as follows:

Sydney is supposed to be a major global city. We're constantly telling ourselves how world-class we are, and major surveys keep agreeing - most recently we were ranked fifth best city in the world to visit. And we are the largest city in a wealthy, highly developed nation. So can someone explain to me, in extremely simple terms, why our train system is reminiscent of a third world country - or, worse still, England?

Last year, I spent no more than a month out in Australia, but that was more than sufficient to provide me with ample evidence concerning the antiquated train system. First, I wasn't able to visit Braidwood by train, because the railway doesn't even go there! Second, one afternoon, I spent over an hour in a halted Sydney north-shore suburban train, for reasons I never learned. Third, my trip up to Grafton and back provided me—without my asking—with old memories of my adolescence, because the train system doesn't seem to have evolved in any noticeable fashion since then. But I wouldn't go out of my way to complain about anything, because I have the impression that this antiquated railway system corresponds to my overall conception of my native land and its people. Australia is a place where nothing much has ever happened, and probably never will. Maybe the constant humid heat provokes torpidity, preventing people from being creative. In any case, every country has the trains it deserves.

The above-mentioned article in The Sydney Morning Herald includes a significant reflection: We're constantly telling ourselves how world-class we are... To my mind, most praise of Sydney is indeed locally-produced hype. I'm not so sure that many non-Australians are convinced that Sydney is "world-class", whatever that might mean. For European visitors, Sydney is definitely not a charming city. Once you've had a beer in one of the few surviving pubs at the Rocks, strolled through the Botanic Gardens, wandered around the Darling Harbour area and taken a ferry to Manly, you've "done" Sydney. There's truly nothing more to be seen there... unless, of course, you're a native-born Australian, like me, who finds it meaningful to visit the place where Braidwood bushrangers were hanged, and to drive with one of my sisters to the shoreline of La Pérouse, where the vessels of the French navigator were seen for the last time. In other words, Australia is a great place for Australians, who are sensitive to its interest and charms, and don't necessarily mind if the train system is shitty. Things only start to go haywire if you're tempted to make silly and unnecessary comparisons between Sydney and great cities such as London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Jerusalem...

The author of the article in The Sydney Morning Herald mentions a recent ranking of Sydney as the "fifth best city in the world to visit". To appreciate correctly the significance of such a judgment, one would need to know more about its origins. If, for example, we're talking of a poll conducted by a travel magazine that caters essentially for globe-trotting Florida widows, then we should view its findings with a certain relativity. In any case, visitors of that kind don't catch trains, neither in New South Wales nor anywhere else.

Having said all this, I do believe that the fellow in charge of trains in New South Wales [whose identity I ignore] should pull his finger out, and look around for ideas about improvements and evolution. And I'm sure I'm not the only Australian with this opinion.

Concept shock

Travelers who visit the Antipodes, in one or the other direction, are familiar with the feeling of disorientation known as culture shock, brought about by the simple fact that people do many things differently at the opposite extremities of the globe. However, once you're accustomed to visiting foreign lands, there's usually no longer any real shock, merely a mild bewilderment upon discovering that familiar activities—such as eating, for example, or talking to strangers—are not performed in the same way as back home.

Concept shock, on the other hand, is a far more serious rupture, since it concerns, not so much the way that Antipodeans act, but the way they think. Let me give you an authentic personal example of concept shock that affected me when I was out in Australia for a few weeks, a year ago. One evening, on television, I saw an Australian news documentary concerning a young woman [let's call her Mary] who had become the victim of an allegedly wicked female cousin [Betty, say], who appeared to be a fraudster. The gist of the story was that Betty had apparently stolen [or at least acquired illicitly] certain identity documents and banking data that belonged to Mary, and the evil woman was now exploiting this stuff to steal money from her innocent cousin.

Now, my first reaction to this tale was that it sounded complicated and far-fetched, if not dubious. As they say metaphorically in French, the affair seemed to be tied together crudely with string that was simply too thick to be kept out of sight, but too coarse to hold. Much more would need to be known about the relationship between Mary and Betty before we outsiders could be certain that one was definitely a goody and the other a baddy. Fair enough, I said to myself. It's obviously an affair that needs to be handled by society's competent authorities: police, lawyers and finally judges. But I was in for a shock: a concept shock! Instead of culminating in an appeal to such authorities, the TV producers decided that they would take the case into their own hands. And, to maximize the reality of the show, they called upon Mary, Betty and their respective friends to participate in the performance, playing what they thought of as their authentic personal roles... but not necessarily with adequate acting skills.

Watching this fiasco with relatives, I complained that the notion of a TV channel taking justice into its own hands was utterly shocking. I tried to point out that a concept was at stake here: the time-honored concept of old-fashioned Justice with a capital J. But I had the impression that my relatives didn't understand what I was raving on about. They seemed to think that it was bloody good reality TV. And it was, too. But it was hardly an instance of the concept of Justice.

Today, I find myself confronted with a jolting case of concept shock when I discover the way in which the Australian minister of Immigration, Kevin Andrews, has just overturned a court order to free the Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef. The most ridiculous aspect of the minister's disregard for the basic legal principles of the nation (in this case, the respect of a court decision) is the antiquated concept brought forward to justify his outrageous decision: Haneef's failure to pass a so-called "character test"...

I'm profoundly shocked. That's all I can say. Concept shocked.

Medieval Australia

I'm shocked by the fact that certain elected politicians in Australia are described in the local press as "Catholic MPs", as if their religious beliefs might impinge upon their political convictions and choices. Are so-called catholic MPs expected to cater for voters who might be Protestants, or Jews, or Moslems, or atheists? Or does the Catholic tag attached to such a politician mean that he/she is morally justified in ignoring non-Catholic citizens, and leaving them to rot in hell? To my mind, the expression "Catholic MP" cannot logically exist, and should not be tolerated in serious journalism. When an elected member enters the sanctuaries of the State, he/she should leave his religious beliefs in the cloakroom.

Today, no nation can claim to be adult, and no political constitution is sound from a purely human viewpoint, unless a strict separation is established, once and for all, between the supreme concept of the State (that is, in the case that concerns me, the nation of Australia), on the one hand, and the multifarious religious organizations that the land might shelter. Ideas of the latter folk should not be allowed to ooze, like medieval sewage, into the sacred domain of the Nation and the People.

Now, as if it weren't enough to have the Church—like an antiquated harlot in parrot-colored robes—trying to allure hesitant politicians in the context of the ongoing debate (not only in Australia) about research using human stem cells, there's a greater cause for concern in this domain. Apparently, a new social phenomenon is arising, described colorfully by Australia's national media organization as stem-cell tourism. What's it all about? Well, in the backwoods of Australia's great Asian neighbors, private charlatans have started to jump onto the bandwagon of stem-cell treatments by offering miraculous cures of a highly suspect nature. Their potential patients (customers) include Australians with a terminal illness or spinal injury.

Funnily, in speaking out against this quackery (a tiny voice in the wilderness), I would seem to be on the same side as the Sydney cardinal. This is an illusion. In French, there's a terse old saying: Robes don't make a monk. In Sydney parlance: Clothes don't make a drag queen. My simple advice to the cardinal (borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick): Watch out for life. The same advice might be given to travelers of all kinds, including sexual tourists and stem-cell tourists.

BigPond story (continued)

In yesterday's message entitled BigPond deserves a big kick in the pants [display], I didn't go into details concerning the nature of the BigPond problem that has been annoying me for so long (well over a year). Furthermore, behind the visible part of my blog, I've been using email to instigate an investigation into BigPond's behavior, with the aim of forcing this organization to abandon their French blacklisting.

First, let me point out that my use of the expression "French blacklisting" is eloquent (people understand that image) but slightly approximative. A more precise way of describing the situation in technical terms consists of saying that certain BigPond mail servers (not necessarily all of them, because some of my emails to BigPond do get delivered) have placed the names of certain French ISPs (Wanadoo/Orange and Free) on what is known as a DNS block list.

Why? If I understand correctly, BigPond calls upon an outside firm to help them combat spam... which is a noble intention. Apparently, this outside firm (maybe TrendMicro) considers that Wanadoo/Orange and Free "continue to allow spam to be generated by their customers"... that's to say, by ordinary people like me. Consequently, BigPond has taken the decision to include the names Wanadoo/Orange and Free in DNS block lists on their servers.

To use a famous image (popular in French), it's like throwing out the baby with the bath water. Since BigPond believes that lots of spammers operate from Wanadoo/Orange and Free (which may or may not be true), they've decided to punish everybody, globally, by refusing to deliver any email emanating from these two French ISPs.

This morning, I was happy to receive an email from my old schoolmate Ron Willard who reminded me of the existence of an excellent technical website [display] on the subject of DNS block lists. It includes a more powerful image than my metaphor about the baby's bath. A US army officer is quoted as saying (no doubt in a Vietnam setting): We had to destroy the village in order to save it. BigPond has decided to destroy the possibility of emails from France in order to save their Australian customers from spam.

Memory of the world

That's a big formula: Memory of the world. What's it all about? Well, Unesco has decided to register a certain number of outstanding historical documents as a permanent testimony of the human story of our planet. I'm enchanted to learn, for example, that the choice of US documents is neither the Gettysburg Address nor even the Watergate tapes, but a whimsical Judy Garland movie that charmed me infinitely as a child: the Wizard of Oz.

In the case of Sweden, Unesco has registered two sets of family archives: those of Alfred Nobel [1833-1896], founder of the prize, and those of the 88-year-old cineast Ingmar Bergman.

Concerning France, Unesco has selected the tapestry of Bayeux.

This fragment shows the Conqueror's half-brother Odo wielding weirdly a massive shaft at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. I've always liked to imagine, not very objectively, that he might have been a nominal forebear of my 13th-century ancestor Odo de Scevington [literally, in Saxon, place of the shaft], owner of a manor in Kent with the lovely name of Dolce. In any case, if future researchers use a computerized network to look up the Bayeux tapestry, they might find their way to my Skeffington typescript [click here to find it straightaway].

In the case of my birthplace, Australia, the Unesco Memory of the world project is perfectly explicit. The documents to be registered for posterity are our convict archives. Here's a treasured personal fragment of this memory:

This is the famous ticket of leave indicating that my Tipperary great-great-great-grandfather Patrick Hickey [1782-1858] was transported to New South Wales in 1829, and even spent time on notorious Norfolk Island. Today, I get a kick out of thinking that the future world, as envisaged by Unesco, will remember my maternal family and me, not for the pioneering efforts in Braidwood of Charles Walker [1807-1860], probably the elder brother of the whisky inventor Johnnie Walker, nor for smart hotel founders named O'Keeffe, nor for northern Irish Protestant pioneers named Kennedy and Cranston, nor even for any of us living folk (including my two Smith cousins, Australian doctors, who were indirect recipients of the Nobel Prize for Peace awarded to Médecins Sans Frontières a few years ago)... but for a vulgar and no doubt lovable Irish cattle-poacher whose son William Hickey [whom I'm researching] was an early bushranger.

Personally, I'm not troubled by this strange filtering process that determines what might, and what might not, be remembered. On the other hand, I was disappointed by the fact that, during my one-month visit to Australia last year, I was unable to visit Braidwood, the territory of Patrick Hickey. He got there easily in 1829. My ancestor Charles Walker, too. But William Skyvington never made it. Modern Australia was incapable [because their public transport is shit] of letting me visit the region of one of my major ancestral memories.

Same name as Australian mountain

France's newly-appointed 34-year-old State Secretary in charge of Ecology has the same name as Australia's highest peak (2,228 meters), whose official spelling now includes an unpronounceable letter "z": Mount Kosciuszko. The mountain was climbed for the first time in 1840 by a Polish explorer and geologist, Count Strzelecki, who named it in honor of Thaddeus Kosciusko, a Polish military hero.

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet [often referred to as NKM] is a descendant of this man. In fact, she comes from a distinguished family on the recent French political scene. A graduate of the famous Polytechnique, she specialized in biology, and then trained as an engineer in the national school of rural management, rivers and forests. Attached to the super-ministry now attributed to Jean-Louis Borloo [who replaced Alain Juppé, who resigned after his electoral defeat], NKM is an experienced militant in the ecological domain.

Snake oil

In my blog, I've already mentioned a couple of daring Aussie money-making inventions:

— first, half-naked female automobile washers [click here for article],

— then yesterday, oysters macerated in Viagra [click here for article].

In this exciting marketing domain, there's no reason why I shouldn't add a plug for the following Australian product [click the banner to visit their website]:

If I understand correctly, uncorking a bottle of this magic liquid in the presence of snakes creates an effect of repugnance upon them, filling them with a desire to get the hell out of the area. You might say it's a little like the effect upon humans when somebody stealthily lets off highly odorous wind in a crowded lift.

To be perfectly frank, I have to admit that I once purchased a French version of such a product. My son and his girlfriend, holidaying at Gamone, had informed me excitedly that they had glimpsed a terrible-looking reptile, with colored stripes, on the edge of my vegetable garden. Naively, I went along to a pharmacy in nearby Villard-de-Lans and asked them what kind of product I should have in my medicine cabinet, knowing that I was living in the presence of an unidentified but no doubt awesome snake. Actually, I was thinking vaguely of some kind of first-aid product: maybe a snakebite antidote. [I later learned that the use of such a product by anybody who's not a skilled medical specialist is no less dangerous than the snakebite.] Well, the pharmacist was delighted to sell me a big bottle of expensive yellow liquid labeled snake repellent, and I was out of the pharmacy and on my way home before I realized what a sucker I had been. I mean: What can you actually do with a bottle of alleged snake repellent in the case of a reptile that you haven't even seen, which is not likely to reappear spontaneously on your doorstop pleading to be repelled? Sure, you can squirt the stuff all around your property until the bottle's empty, then sit back waiting to check that the snake does not indeed reappear. But that's a bit like using a mixture of warm water and sugar to repel butterflies. The chances are that, if you get up early in the morning, and pour a cup of warm sugared water on the lawn, you won't see any butterflies there for at least an hour or so. There's a similar system of a flashing bicycle lamp, in the early evening, to chase away falling stars. To make things worse, my son and his girlfriend finally admitted, with great hilarity, that they'd hidden a rubber snake with green and purple stripes on the edge of my vegetable patch, in the hope of scaring shit out of me. Retrospectively, I can't recall ever having seen this object, which probably means that the rain washed it down into Gamone Creek, from where it might have floated down to Pont-en-Royans to frighten the tourists. As for my bottle of snake repellent, I finally used it in an attempt to repel mice in the attic, but it didn't.

Normally, with a bit of imagination and talented showmanship, it should be child's play to demonstrate that a snake repellent does in fact repel snakes. In the style of the late Steve Irwin, the master of ceremonies could arm a courageous child actor with a can of repellent spray, and then let loose a snake in front of the kid. One press on the button of the spray can, and the disgusted snake would go sliding back into its box. To make the demonstration more scientifically convincing, they could let loose a whole assortment of different snakes and the kid would repel them, one after the other, as if he/she were playing table tennis. If only the ShooSnake people were able to put up such a video on their website, they would sell tons of their product overnight... and the Aussie kid actor would be offered a fortune to star in Hollywood-produced ecological, environmental and wildlife films.

Business imagination

We Australians can be imaginative in the business domain. On the central coast of New South Wales, oyster farmers have been putting a mixture of crushed Viagra pills and calcium in some of their tanks, and then canning the oysters. What I don't know is how long the oysters were allowed to lead a euphoric sex life before they were canned. Imagine an oyster with a huge erection chasing its hermaphrodite partners around the pool. No doubt many of the poor buggers died of physical exhaustion after a few hectic hours of this behavior.

Apparently the aphrodisiac qualities of these canned oysters are greatly appreciated in certain Asian countries where sex is the national sport. Note the subtle marketing language on the labels: sex in a can, hard down under, rock hard oysters... Poetry from the land that invented bare-breasted barmaids.

El Nino and global warming

In an email yesterday, my sister Anne informed me with joy that the drought had broken in NSW [New South Wales]. Today, I learn that a gigantic tempest has been blowing in on the NSW coast, accompanied by torrential rain on the vineyards of the Hunter Valley, and that five thousand people have been evacuated from their homes around Maitland because of imminent flooding. Eight individuals have already drowned in this sudden bad weather: the worst for thirty years.

A question springs to mind immediately:

— Could this exceptional weather be associated with El Nino?

Two complementary questions:

— Are Australians, in general, conscious of the El Nino phenomenon?

— Have Australian scientists envisaged the possibility of correlations between global warming and El Nino? More precisely: Could the former phenomenon have any effect upon the latter?

Big questions. Big risks.

Neighbors who dwell in castles

Here in France, authentic ancient castles abound. And all kinds of manor houses and stately homes have the look and feel of castles. So, in countless villages, it's not unusual to have neighbors who dwell in structures that we might refer to as châteaux. During my recent excursion to Provence, I was particularly impressed (among many other surprises) by the mysterious white castle in Lacoste that once belonged to the famous Marquis de Sade.

Today, it is inhabited by the equally famous Pierre Cardin, genius of haute couture, who is both a familiar neighbor for the village people of Lacoste (including many US students) and the organizer of a summer music and theater festival.

Not far away from Choranche, in a village named La Sône, on the banks of the Isère, I recently visited a fairytale castle that belongs to a friendly ex-pharmacist from Avignon.

The adolescent novelist Françoise Sagan was a friend of the daughter of the former owner, and the present owner informed me that the novelist used the La Sône castle in 1960 as the setting of her play entitled Château in Sweden.

Talking of castles, believe it or not, back in my native Clarence River region in Australia, in the vicinity of Grafton, there's a kind of castle, called Yulgilbar, constructed by German craftsmen for wealthy cattle men named Ogilvie between 1860 and 1866. Historians of architecture would refer to it as a mock-Gothic folly, because it has crenellations of the kind that once played a role in defense.

Here's an old photographic glimpse into the courtyard of Yulgilbar:

During my adolescence, I often heard my father and his beef-cattle friends referring to the huge and prosperous Yulgilbar affair, owned by a great rural pioneer: Samuel Hordern [1909-1960], member of a wealthy Sydney merchandising family. Today, the immense Yulgilbar estate belongs to Hordern's daughter and her husband Baillieu Myer.

If I understand correctly, the original name of the rich land on the banks of the Clarence, belonging to the Bunjalung Aboriginal tribe, was Baryulgil, and the Ogilvie pioneers decided to invert the syllables to obtain a name for their huge property. Much later, in about 1940, descendants of this Aboriginal community were employed as laborers in local asbestos mines. And today, there is distress in this community because of asbestos pollution and poisoning.

Yes, sometimes we have rich neighbors who dwell in castles, while neighbors on the other side of the castle walls lead very different lives. It has always been that way with castles.