Tag: Australia

When the world changes, stories help

personby Gillian Polack
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Our election is over. Peculiarly and wonderfully so.

There are many, many reasons why the result is what it is. Those reasons include social justice, concern about climate change, fear of the Morrison government, loss of the centre-right part of the Liberal Party (the independent ‘teal’ candidates filled the hole left by the party’s shift right). One part of the equation, however, is very Australian. We see the world in our way, after all, and not through the eyes of any other country.

I don’t want to give an explanation. It would turn something light into something ponderous. Instead, I’m going to suggest you read some short stories. They’re all from over a century ago and they all demonstrate that the peculiarity and wonder come from somewhere very Australian.

If you want to read just one short story, try Henry Lawson’s “The Loaded Dog.” I’ve found you a link to the 1901 volume it appeared in, with a glossary.

If you see the specially Australian approach to life, the story will resonate and be very funny. If you don’t, it won’t. This saves me 500 words of weighty and possibly futile explanation.

If you want more along these lines, we have a whole literature. Steele Rudd’s stories about farming are good (Dad and Dave, On Our Selection), because colonisation was a bit different here to elsewhere. Just as wrong-headed, but we didn’t only celebrate the big and glorious. We also told stories about the small farmers who really had no idea what they were doing. Australia has always looked to small people and their lives and our literature celebrates it. And we celebrate that literature.

Decades ago, I was at a camp for university students. John Bluthal (the actor) talked to us about working with Spike Milligan. Then he moved onto a radio play of Rudd’s work. He told us how, as Dave in a dramatisation of Dad and Dave, he had no time to read the script beforehand. He was on live radio, reading straight into the microphone. Dave was famously slow of speech.

“Dad,” Bluthal drawled into the microphone, recreating the radio play. “Dad, you need to know…” He turned the page. “The shed is burning!”

Looking to small people and their lives, being aware of how foolish the whole of politics was becoming, needing to mock and put everyone back in their place: these factors changed the votes of many last weekend. My favourite example is how a conservative region of a conservative state voted Labor for the first time ever, because they wanted to bring a family home and Morrison said he never would allow it.

Now I’m wondering about my own fiction and about that of quite a number of other writers. We focus on the small, because in the small, implicit in the everyday, lies the whole universe. Those Australian writers who follow different paths to me may write to explore isolation and our challenging land, or to deal with baggage many of us bring here when we settle, or to look bullies in the eye and show where we go wrong. Some, however, write for an international market. In the nineteenth century and right through to the 1960s, that international market was the UK. Now, it’s more likely to be the US. When you can’t tell that the writer is Australian, when they lack that sensibility that marks the work as uniquely and bizarrely Antipodean, then that writer is probably writing for a different audience and marching to a different drum.

The Australian drum that resounded on Saturday occasionally skipped a beat or took a few polka steps. Marching? That’s not our way.

Children’s books can play mind games

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m writing late today, because it’s my birthday. In fact, I’m writing so late that my birthday is already finished in Australia. My birthday is on a public holiday. In a normal year, I’d probably introduce you to a book that tells the history of that public holiday, but the history of that public holiday is very military and there is enough of that in our everyday right now. If you’re curious, the day is ANZAC Day and the history is the landing at Gallipoli in 1915.

‘ANZAC’ stands for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, so I’ll give you one of my favourite Australian novels written by a New Zealand writer, as a compromise. Ruth Park moved to Sydney in 1942, where she married another writer of classic Australian books, D’Arcy Niland. I’ll introduce his The Shiralee one day.

I have several favourite books by Park: The Harp in the South, Poor Man’s Orange, and, of course all the stories of the Muddle-Headed Wombat. I suspect The Muddle-Headed Wombat was one of the first books I read outside school textbooks, in fact. I obtained my own copy of it in my teens and have never let anyone borrow it. My copy of The Muddle-Headed Wombat is pristine, however, compared to my copy of Playing Beatie Bow. I have maybe half a dozen books read so often that they cannot hold together, and this is one of them.

It’s set in Sydney, and is a time slip novel and… it’s almost impossible for me to describe. It’s been filmed and the film is charming but slight and the book is far more haunting and simply one of the best time slip novels out there.

Some books I read and re-read because they remind me of things I ought never forget. Playing Beatie Bow came out when I was an undergraduate, studying history. It became an instant reminder to me that history can happen as a narrative, as a spiral, as layers in time and more: history is not a simple thing.

I had only been to Sydney very briefly when I first read the novel. It suggested a society that was very different to the one I knew. More poor and urban and complex than the suburban I knew. Park’s two Sydneys brought the place to life in a way that made me rethink my own Melbourne. I wasn’t specialising in Australian history, but I attended every public lecture about Marvellous Melbourne by John Lack and I started to shape the stories of the streets I knew and I began to see the relationship between the stories we tell, the stories we lead.

When I myself moved to Sydney, in 1983, I walked down George Street and ventured down to The Rocks and found that the district was nothing like the novel. I had to learn another kind of history, or maybe another layer. Since then, The Rocks has been rebuilt and a museum established and it’s easier to see how the different moments of the past link, but then, I studied a street corner and tried to work out how it fitted and failed. I stopped trying and instead learned about the influenza pandemic and how it changed that tiny corner of Australia.

I suspect that this is the other reason I’m thinking of Playing Beatie Bow. The Rocks are indelibly linked in my mind with that pandemic, and, of course, now we are living through our own pandemic.

I can’t review Playing Beatie Bow. I can’t even analyse its history. This is unlike me. There is another timeslip novel whose history I analyse perfectly well, and that has an even more battered cover, Allison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time. I suspect that Park’s novel is too linked to that big change in my life, becoming an historian and, in order to do so, moving from Melbourne to Sydney. I may never be able to pull it to pieces in the same I way I pull most novels to pieces. All I can suggest, then, is that you read it for yourself.

How to vote, Australian-style

personby Gillian Polack
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A tweet is going round to encourage people to enrol to vote. It suggests that if they don’t, they are fated to be gently mocked by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC). This tweet suggests that maybe, just maybe, Australia might be a bit different to other countries. We’re only talking about a small portion of potential voters not enrolled, after all. 97% (and maybe a fraction more) of people who were eligible to vote were enrolled before the election was called. This is a higher % than usual, but not crazy high.

The thing is… Australians vote. It’s compulsory to vote, but, if we really wanted, we could return blank ballots. Nothing’s stopping us. We take an exceptional level of responsibility for government in this way, and the big question is, every election, whether the object of our vote has lived up to expectations. Accountability is that much higher when it’s not 30% of those who can vote, nor 60%, but nearly 100%.

What is at stake this election is whether we live up to our own responsibility and judge fairly. Last election enough people fell for promises (that didn’t eventuate) and trusted that nothing critical was being hidden (alleged rape by a politican turned out to be the thing that was hidden) that we voted in Scott Morrison. On May 21, nearly 100% of Australian voters will be deciding if this is worth doing again or if it’s time to vote differently. The LNP have, historically, been in power more often than any other party, which makes it their election to lose this year.

Given we almost all vote, a lot of the issues that apply in other countries are simply irrelevant. It means I can get straight to the nitty gritty of what we are voting for, how we vote, and how those votes are counted.

Australia is a federal government. The national elections rest, therefore on our regions. We fill in two ballots on election day. Let me walk you through them both.

Lower House: House of Representatives

The Members of Parliament (MPs) are chosen by a really straightforward ballot system. Australia is divided into electorates and those electorates are determined by the Australian Electoral Commission according to population (and to avoid gerrymandering). Candidates nominate for an electorate and try to persuade voters to put them high on the ballot.

The actual ballots contain all the names of the candidates, and we (the voters) have to number each and every box. We don’t chose our favourite person and walk away. We put all the candidates in our preferred order. Parties give out ‘How to Vote’ papers, that help their followers choose an order the party like.

I like to say that how the votes are counted is simple, but that’s because I’ve known it all my life. If a candidate gets over half the vote, then it really is simple: they’re elected. If no candidate gets over half the vote, then the candidate with the fewest votes is dropped from the list and the 2nd choices of those voters are added to the numbers of votes for the remaining candidates. The dropping of someone and reallocation of their votes continues until someone wins. In this system, first preferences are only reliable in some electorates. Quite a few MPs win their position from the distributed preferences of voters who had other first choices. What I love about this system is that more of our votes count, especially in an election like this one where many voters are reconsidering their traditional choices.

Some voters are not as enthusiastic as I am. They do a donkey vote or a reverse donkey vote. A donkey vote is when you start from the top with #1 and simply number down. Because donkey votes can change a very narrow result, the AEC has techniques in designing the ballot that will reduce this effect. (Donkey votes don’t work as well for Senate ballots.)

The leader of the party that wins the most votes in this House becomes Prime Minister (PM). They lead the country.

The Queen is technically the Head of Government and an appointed Governor-General acts on her behalf in the everyday technical things that must be done by the Head of Government, but the Prime Ministership is where the real power lies. The Governor-General can sack the PM, but that doesn’t happen often. Let me give you a video of an important moment in our history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXq056TJhU4&t=2s The moment where Whitlam declared his view of his sacking is now part of our deep cultural selves, and his statement beginning ‘Well may we say “May God save the Queen”…’ is one of the great one-liners in our history. You can buy mugs emblazoned with it, at the Museum of Australia.

Senate

The Senate is our upper house (like the US or Canadian Senate, in that way, and historically, a modified version of them) but its chief role is accountability. It’s very strong on research, on checking budget and on investigating propose legislation and how the practice of government is carried out.

Entirely irrelevantly, when I was a public servant I was never allowed to attend any of the Senate Estimate Committee sessions. Technically I was senior enough, but at that time there was a senator who went above and beyond the call of…something. She investigated private lives of key public servants and when they turned up to answer questions about the portfolio, asked them about their failed marriages. Way more senior people presented that material at that time, and answered those questions – the reasoning was that Sen. Bishop had already done her worst to them. This led to way less effective Senate Estimates than earlier or later, and to different career trajectories for public servants and less interchange between Parliament House and the public service. I watched from my safe desk and decided that ethics were practical as well as being good for all the philosophical reasons.

That’s enough detour!

How are Senators elected? Every State elects twelve senators, and the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory (the ACT is mostly Canberra, the capital) each elect two. Other parts of Australia (we have so many islands!) vote with the appropriate State or Territory. Norfolk Island (which is where the descendants of the Bounty mutineers ended up) votes as part of the ACT, for example.

This is not proportional. Tasmania, with a population of around 540,000 elects twelve Senators and the ACT and its adjunct places, with around 430,000 people elect two Senatorss.

The Senate ballot is fun to fill in but painful to explain. I’m going to send you to the AEC, because they have pretty diagrams: https://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_Senate.htm

I always fill in below the line. I also fill in every single box even though I don’t have to. I begin at the bottom and put the people I never want to see in a position of responsibility right down the bottom and I work up from there. When I talk about deciding who will get my #1 and #2 for the Senate, it’s misleading, because I investigate all the candidates.

The votes are counted in a way that is just a tad confusing to anyone new to it. The AEC uses a formula to determine a Senate quota (Number of formal ballot papers / (Number of senators to be elected + 1)) rounded down + 1 = Senate quota)

If a candidate gets a quota or more of first preferences, then they are elected. The votes that are over the quota are theoretically transferred ie they will be counted again, towards another candidate. Except that this isn’t fair. It’s impossible to tell which votes to count for first and which to transfer. So everything is transferred… but a reduced rate ie each vote is worth a bit less, but all votes are counted for the #2 choice. Unsuccessful candidates are excluded, exhausted votes are dropped (an exhausted vote is when a ballot has run out of marked choices – they can’t be transferred down the line if there is no candidate to transfer them to). This system continues until the correct number of Senators is elected. If you want to fully understand this system (which I love, but which I admit is complex) then the best place to look is the AEC website: https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/counting/senate_count.htm

Because we have compulsory voting, voter education is terribly, terribly important in Australia and an important part of the AEC’s role. The above-the-line and below-the-line options for voters for the Senate gives me the perfect excuse to show you how the AEC educates voters: https://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_Senate.htm

House of Representatives votes are usually counted by midnight on the night of the election. Not always. A complex result can take a few days longer, because some electorates need extra checking and recounting. The Senate always takes longer to count.

Now you know about counting. How about the elections themselves. Here’s a newspaper summary of things, so you can skip reading my undeniably strange prose if you want (this is a long post!): https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/federal-election-2022/2022/04/10/election-called-what-net/

For those of you still with me, the House of Representatives has 3 year terms and the Senate 6 years for State Senators and 3 for Territory. Half the Senate is elected every three years. When there’s a Double Dissolution things are different. Here’s a short paper on Double Dissolutions: https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/House_of_Representatives/Powers_practice_and_procedure/00_-_Infosheets/Infosheet_18_-_Double_dissolution The important thing right now is that 21 May 2022 is a normal election – there was no Double Dissolution. This means that the States are only voting for six Senators each. At a normal election, we vote for both Houses: the whole of the lower House and just over half the Upper. That’s what happens on 21 May.

Our elections are always on Saturdays (religious Jews have to do early votes) and are declared no fewer than 33 days before the election itself. There is no year-long campaign trail. It’s generally about six weeks.

21 May is the last possible day in this current electoral cycle: our Prime Minister was cutting it very fine. And he had until this coming Thursday to call it and called it on Sunday, so it’s not the shortest formal campaign, but it comes close.

We are now in caretaker mode, and the government can’t do anything new. The big thing this year is that the Prime Minister made a whole heap of appointments before he called the election. This isn’t typical of Australia (though it happens, it normally doesn’t happen on such a scale) – but Morrison is very influenced by the USA.

We have live vote counting from the moment the polls shut (6 pm) on the night of the election.

It’s a great spectator sport. We used to have tally rooms in Canberra and anyone local could just turn up and run into nervous politicians and stand around behind the ‘rooms’ the TV broadcasts used and read the autocues along with the presenters, then turn around and watch the numbers being manually put up on the big boards. That system no longer operates and I miss it, but you can still watch the whole thing on various free-to-air TV stations. On some stations it’s updates only, but on several the broadcast is from 6 pm until midnight or until the formal speeches are over, whichever comes first. Even on a landslide year, things aren’t over until at least 9 pm, because of the time differences between our east and west coast.

Not all Australians take the elections seriously, but enough do that any count dominates TV viewing on that Saturday night. Antony Green is the expert on the national broadcaster, and representatives of the major parties are called in to give commentary. In the right year and watching the right TV station, it’s possible to see the moment the commentators realise that they have lost their own seat.

Let me leave you with one last page from the AEC. This is the information they gave reporters for the last election. It covers some of the areas I didn’t talk about here. Why didn’t I talk about it here? This post is already 2,000 words long and it’s 2 am here and I am going to sleep!  https://www.aec.gov.au/media/files/aec-federal-election-reporting-guide-digital.pdf

Why the Aussie elections are so important this year: an introduction for the unwary

personby Gillian Polack
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It’s one of those Mondays. I say this with much care and I’m drinking much coffee. Normally I would give you a book post on a Monday, but Australia’s much-awaited (by us, anyhow) election was called yesterday. This is not just any election. It’s our last opportunity to move away from rabid and corrupt politics. It matters. I asked if that meant I should post about it and Nancy Jane Moore said, “Yes, please.”

I’m doing two posts. The first one is on my Monday and the second is will be posted when Monday finally hits the US. One is about our parties, and the other will talk you through our electoral system. All the cool stuff is in this post, and I introduce the parties. I’m not hiding my opinions – you can see where my vote is likely to go if you read carefully.

First, you need to know that, in Australian popular opinion, our current Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, belongs in the same crowd as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. When Trump was US President, the two acted as if they were best friends. Morrison is a fundamentalist Christian of the prosperity theology variety and, until a few weeks ago, was publicly a close friend of Brian Houston, the Hillsong leader who is currently on trial.

Until a few years ago, Australia was on various lists as one of the least corrupt countries in the world. Right now we’re not even considered close to achieving such an honour. In the last ten years, international influence and local decisions by the ruling party and their allies have pushed us away from our cultural standard.

How did this happen?

Just one example will explain it. In the last three years we’ve not had a week without a disaster of enormous magnitude. The Federal government put money aside to help and didn’t spend the vast bulk of it. In fact, a few weeks ago, the newspapers told us that the government had earned $800,000 on interest on unspent disaster relief. State governments have taken the brunt of getting people through disasters such as bushfires, floods, and the pandemic. Because they were promised Federal help and only a tiny fraction of the promised help came, we still have people who are living in caravans because they received none of the promised help when the 2019-20 bushfires ripped through territory the size of Syria. Some of these people have been evacuated (or even died) when the floods hit their town this year.

This is unheard of for Australia. We used to be outstanding at getting people through natural disasters with ridiculously low death tolls. We now don’t even have proper Federal policies to handle the natural disasters, and the government keeps cutting back support of the scientists who predict them and all the various bodies who normally find ways of dealing.

That’s just a small part of a complex picture. Australia is moving from being a laid-back country that really tries to do its bit, to a somewhat corrupt oligarchy. We still have our base culture, but I don’t think we can handle three more years of this culture being intentionally ground underfoot.

May 21, as you can see, is an important election. It will decide who we are and whether we care about people, about the land… about anything other than a small group of individuals making much money. The current deputy leader, theoretically representing rural Australians, has said quite clearly that money is more important than anything else. Farmers are one of his chief voting blocs, and he makes it clear he doesn’t care.

How we got this way has an interesting and sad history. It follows the same path as the changes in the US Republicans, and some of the same factors are at play. I don’t want to talk about that here. Instead, let me introduce you to who is standing for election. Our parties are not what they look like to non-Australians: their names are, to be honest, not that intuitive.

 

LNP – Liberal National Party, or the Coalition. This is the party currently in power. They are most definitely right wing.

‘Liberal’ in Australia has always referred to the small government (or smaller government) party, but these days it is the party that supports the coal and gas industries and is, to be fair, well-supported by those industries in return. In the sixties and seventies they supported cheap or free education. The free education was brought into play by the Labor party, and is the reason no-one my age ever suffered from university debts. The Liberals kept it when the Labor party was voted out. It was a Liberal leader (Malcolm Fraser) who was in charge when I was an undergraduate, and made sure that I paid no tuition fees. I paid student union fees (less than $100 a year) and for books, and anyone without income got Austudy , which was not quite enough to live on, but Austudy and a part-time job got most students through university with no debt at all. These days students emerge from undergraduate degrees between $20,000 and $100,000 in debt (or even higher) – it’s a choice between education and owning a house, even for most people who come from comfortable backgrounds.

These days the Liberals are, as I said earlier, quite right wing for the most part, despite the name. Even for a right wing party, they are light on addressing climate change, which is why Australia is labelled as bad on climate change – if you poll people’s opinions, dealing with it is important to us. It is not, however, important to our current leaders.

How does the LNP act in Parliament? One of my favourite clips (my least favourite clips make me want to weep): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7UCSpZB5Bo

 

Labor – currently the Opposition. Labor started off from the union movement. Unions are still much bigger in Australia than in the US, and considerably more powerful, though less than they used to be. It was, originally, definitely left wing but has drifted towards the right in recent years. Let me be clear, though – right wing in Australia is not the same as the US right.

The spelling of the name is due to one of their early leaders, King O’Malley. He was very important in the days when Australia became independent and he founded a party and… he was American. This is why the name of the party uses US spelling. Canberra (our national capital, where I live) reacts to this naming in its own way. O’Malley was a teetotaller, so a pub was named after him. I have met friends at King O’Malley’s many times and each and every time someone makes a joke about the spelling of Labor.

The party is now centre left (mostly) and centre right (increasingly often). It’s not a left wing party. If someone from the US were describing it, however, they might call it ‘left wing’, because of the same factors that made the old-fashioned Liberals strong on education and social welfare. Education, health, social welfare, and owning a home are four dreams that a large number of Australians agree on. Almost all of us also agree on doing far more to prevent climate change than we currently attempt. State Labor parties have a (mostly) good record on this.

Federally, Labor haven’t been in power since September 2013, so their record on all issues at the federal level is tangled with the strange politics and voting patterns of Opposition. Labor has a history, in Parliament, of not shouting loudly against things they can’t change ie by voting agreement where nothing can be done, and saving the arguments for places they can make a change. They may be not-good on climate change, then, or they may just be biding their time.

Labor has the electoral advantage of everyone’s favourite politician (OK, maybe not everyone, but a surprising number of us). Penny Wong is wildly popular. She refuses to move to the House of Representatives and become leader and every few months people say, “But why???” She’s probably right on not trying for leadership. Most leaders have come from NSW, Victoria or Western Australia and she’s from South Australia. What’s more, the bigoted parts of Australia hate her as much as the rest of Australia loves her: she’s Malaysian Chinese Australian and gay. She is targeted by many, many bigots and the way she handles these people is one of the reasons she is so popular.

She is also popular because of how she handles difficult issues. We watch her for her facial expressions as much as her words and her attitude. When she looks at someone in Senate Estimates and waits a moment before saying something, a clip will be sent around social media, to illustrate a moment where someone not doing their job was forced to explain. Her ethics matter to us. Clips of Wong are always circulated when Senate Estimates (one of our methods for ensuring government accountability) is at work. Let me show you. First, something very everyday (and actually Senate Estimates, where Wong is seeking answers from a minister for things done): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ein2OPaX4GI It’s not the most colourful of the clips, but it shows the everyday work she does and why she’s liked. It also helps that she does things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5pxE4RXpjc

 

Greens – the next largest party (mostly). Until recently they were a bit gentler than the Greens in other countries, but these days they are fixed in their policies and have very strong views. They still get a lot of the left wing vote, but some of us would really like it if they listened and were a bit more adaptable.

Pauline Hanson, Clive Palmer and other leaders of small right wing parties. We have them in abundance. They get up to 15% of the vote in some states and some elections. They’re a story in and of themselves. They’re important politically, but can also be problematic. The old White Australia is best represented in these parties.

 

Independents: not new at all, but a particular type of independent candidate, based on grass roots decisions in a given electorate, is gaining a bigger voice than previously. These candidates are the main reason this election is impossible to call. Their colour is teal and many of them get backing from groups such as Climate 200 – addressing  climate change is one of the few policies they all totally agree on. Much of this voice belongs to the centre-right and their supporters used to be the core voters of the Liberal Party. This election is going to be one to watch, because if these independents do well, then several ministers are in danger of losing their seats.

The Liberals are so worried about them that two Liberal candidates have shifted the blue of the party in all their advertising to a shade closer to teal and one took his party’s name off some of his corflutes. The Liberals are not just fighting Labor for a majority: an interesting number of them are fighting for previously secure seats. In the 2019 election Zali Steggall (an ex-Olympic skier) defeated the previous prime minister in his own seat. Several of the “Voices of…” (the official term for the new grassroots candidates) are ex-journalists or sportspeople.

In Canberra, I don’t know yet if there are any standing for the lower house (the election was only called yesterday), but there are independents standing for the Senate, and one of them is, indeed an ex-sportsman, David Pocock. He’s not part of the teal people, but he is the leading candidate to challenge our Liberal senator (whose name is Zed, which isn’t nearly as funny in US English as it is in Australian English – for us ‘zed’ is the final letter of the alphabet) and the moment a particular picture of him was circulated, his vote increased enough to make people start to pay attention to him. He now has an audience for his policies, but for such an Australian reason.

This is not a complete introduction, but I’ve run out of time. When I meet a couple of deadlines, I will write you the next post, and you can see why the election is so soon and some of the mechanics behind our system. In some ways it’s very different to the system is the vast majority of democracies. Almost every vote counts here. And we have democracy sausages.

Watch this space.

The Lessons Wombats Teach Me

personby Gillian Polack
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This week is far too full of crises. Every time there’s a crisis, people raise money to help everyone deal. When the Australian bushfires dominated my life (aeons ago: 2109-2020 – the fires were out just after the pandemic hit Australia) books were a good fundraiser. I often contribute to such books, because they give more than I can give, personally. The anthology I was in that helped save wildlife during that particular crisis was called Oz is Burning. It contains some remarkable stories, and I’m very pleased I could contribute and be in such company.

There was one fundraising book that stood head and shoulders above all the others. Jackie French lives in rural Australia and she’s currently dealing with floods. Her part of rural Australia was very badly hit by the fires, and she handled it in a very Jackie-ish fashion. During the crisis she reported to the rest of us what was happening in her local town. She was cut off for what felt like months (I don’t know what it felt like to her, but I was worried about her for over a year) and she compiled observations and reports and made sure the rest of the world knew what was going on.

She reported on wildlife as part of this. Also, as someone who knows wombats particularly well.

One of the wombats she helped had a particular story. She talked about this wombat on social media and we all wanted a happy outcome… but we weren’t sure that the wombat would survive.

Later in 2020, she turned the wombat’s experience into a book for children. The Fire Wombat became an instant classic (though not as classic as her earlier book, The Diary of a Wombat ) and raised money to help wombats. It talks children through the crisis and how those rare animals who survived were helped. It gave children a path to understanding the impossible and, at the same time, raised money to help wombats.

I have my copy in front of me now and have re-read it. The floods in Australia right now are hurting the same regions as the fires did just over two years ago. Jackie’s work reminds me that wombats need help, too.

When we’re both allowed to travel again, and when it’s safe (fire and pandemic and now floods) I’m going to feed her dinner and ask her to sign her book. Her work has helped me remember how to get through crises and how to look outside my small environment and see what I can do. I may not be able to do much, but if Jackie can write this amazing book when she’s confined to a very small piece of land for over two years then that opens the door for me. I just need to consider what I’m capable of. Step One is to not let the fear developed by over 30 months of sequential crises decide my actions.

PS Jackie writes about so much more than wombats. She’s one of Australia’s best writers. I wrote this piece because wombats bring me comfort.

Where Gillian is Peeved

personby Gillian Polack
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Every time I am invited to a Christmas party, I have to decide whether I should go. If it’s a friend asking me to share their celebration of their Christmas, I accept with joy. If it’s a public or professional event that’s called a “Christmas Party”, one of the implications is that if I don’t accept Christmas as a part of my life, then I am not really acceptable as I am, with my own views and culture, in that environment.

Not that the organisers articulate it in this way. Recently, when I asked a professional group what they meant by “Christmas” they explained that it was secular. While this was perfectly acceptable for them, they demonstrated that a secularised version of a religious celebration was seen as acceptable for all shapes of religion and belief because they explained to me (and they know I’m Jewish) that it was secular for me, too. This tells those of us without Christian backgrounds that there is a certain way we should live our lives.

How the lead-up to Christmas is depicted in Australia is related to this. There is an “Advent” book box being advertised right now. It takes the word “Advent” (which refers to a very particular coming birthday) and one can open one wrapped book a day from 1 December until Christmas Day. I’m told it is, also, not religious. But there are never any book boxes for the festivals of other religions. Instead, we are all asked to accept the redefined religious words for Christianity.

Whether these explanations work for me, for you, for someone else, depends on our background.

For me, it creates a disjuncture between the home and the outside world. The values in my home are Jewish, and my parents taught me that I should not celebrate others’ festivals for myself. Why? It’s an acceptance that their religion takes precedence over my own. In their homes, that’s a sign of respect. In my home, why don’t my own traditions and belief take precedence? In public events and shared places, explaining that a thing is secular not only sets the Christian festival as something that is shared by everyone (when it, frankly, is not) but it also rubs it in that my views do not matter.

The fact that someone explaining Christmas to me as secular shows how they set their own atheism in a cultural context. It also demonstrates that they’re not listening to people who have different contexts.

Cultural respect and religious respect involve understanding how the person we’re talking to sees the subject we’re talking about. This entails accepting multiple interpretations of an event. Do you leave someone out of a group because they can’t eat peanuts? Or do you make sure that there is shared food everyone can eat?

This is my annual rant on the subject. Shorter than usual because it’s 1 am here and bed beckons.

I shall skip the Christmas party, because I’m not convinced the person organising knows much about Christianity. Also, I won’t buy the books. Instead, on the day of the party, I shall tell anyone who wants to hear my two favourite miracles for St Nicolas (the children and the bones, for anyone who has had to suffer my tale-telling) for the party is on his holy day and he’s the bloke who became Santa Claus. I need to practise what I preach, in other words. If you who want to hear about the pickled children and how they are Santa’s backstory, please ask.

On the book-front, I’m doing my own thing. I will send book parcels on behalf of anyone who wants to give presents to friends and family in Australia. This is actually not my response to the religion issue. It’s my response to books being a bit difficult to buy and to international mail being a lost cause. If you know anyone wants to give presents to anyone in Australia over the next few weeks, check here: https://gillianpolack.com/sale-until-18-december-or-until-the-books-run-out/

I have nothing against presents (I adore presents), after all. My objection is to people who insist that my own background doesn’t matter a jot.

Two Things

personby Gillian Polack
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It’s been a difficult fortnight. Every time this happens all I want to do is cry in a corner. Alas, for me, I’m not really a crying in corner kind of person. I’m a “What can I do?” person, mostly. (If I’m not, you know there is something really, really, REALLY wrong.) This means I’ve done two things this fortnight that are over and above my usual. One is to do with writers and the other is to do with a book.

The book is probably the best thing I will ever work on. I was wondering why I hadn’t heard from the publisher in years. We sorted out what had happened and all is well in terms of communications, but I looked at the sales and realised that the word never got out about this book when it was published in the US. It sold nicely in Australia, then was taken up by a US press then fell into a black hole. This happens to a surprising number of books. This one volume, however, is special and needs to emerge from its black hole.

So what is this mysterious book? It’s an anthology called Baggage, and I was the editor.  Let me give you a link.  

I work (a lot, and for many years) on the subject of culture. I’m not only an ethnohistorian, I’m passionate about how we depict and share culture. When I told some of Australia’s best science fiction, fantasy and horror writers that I was interested in them writing me stories that explained cultural baggage… this book was the result. In a perfect world, I’d also edit one for, say, US writers, and French writers and Polish writers and more and we’d all have a marvellous ongoing conversation through short story about how fiction can explain cultural baggage. That was my dream. My reality, now, is that I’d be happy if these wonderful stories in this very Australian volume were read. I want everyone to enjoy everything from the sentient glacier to the way societies can fall apart and the way we can carry our history with us everywhere.

The second thing is that Australian science fiction circles are ready to deal with the ongoing affects of people being cut off from each other, and I’m a part of how we’re handling it. Prior to this some of us meet once a month, but it’s private. Now the Australian Science Fiction Foundation is setting up a room online where writers can meet up once a week, just to chat. Most of the writers interested so far are in rural and regional Australia, which may make this a longterm proposition. All our other ideas (“our” being the Australian Science Fiction Foundation, of course) will appear in due course, but our chat starts this Thursday.

This is another type of dream, I think. I want people to have more tools for talking about culture and about heritage and place in society, and the best short story writers give us those tools. I want people to be less isolated, full stop. The pandemic has given us all sorts of capacities we didn’t have earlier that help along these lines. In my perfect world having a bad fortnight, or living far from people, or having physical limitations due to disabilities should be an excuse for pulling together, not falling apart.

I’m still dealing with the effects of my bad fortnight, but at least I’m up to the pulling together stage.

Too much excitement (trigger warning – I don’t talk about things in detail, but I do mention potentially triggering events)

personby Gillian Polack
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Every fortnight, I am tempted to begin with the words, “I had intended.”  I had intended to write about Women’s History Month and to introduce the guests on my blog and to take a quiet moment and think about the past. I wrote a post for Women’s History Month myself this year. It’s about debating circles in the 1970s and 80s. There is a sudden wild interest in the nature of those circles because of what may have happened in them in 1988. Our Attorney General (AG) is suing the national broadcaster (ABC) over a report on something that may or may not have happened in that year. Porter (the AG) was not named in that article and was one of three possible guilty parties according to what was reported. I have my opinion on what happened in 1988, but if the AG is suing the ABC… then I might have to keep it to myself for a bit.

This is one of the reasons Australia found itself at a pivotal point for the history of women this weekend. Another is that on Monday (yesterday!) tens of thousands (or more – no-one did a proper count that I could see) of women marched for justice. A rape was done in Parliament House and the guilty party got support where the victim was … victimised. She spoke at the rally.

The Australian government was in trouble before then. It was trying to recover from the shock of the West Australian state elections on Saturday. The vote was pretty decisive. The ALP won at least 50 seats (52 predicted, at this point in time, 30 needed to govern), the Liberal Party won 2 (and might get one more, and their allies, the Nationals, won 3 (possibly one more, too). Upper House results are not yet finalised, either, but there was a swing towards the ALP there, too.

The ALP is not in government nationally. It is not the party the current Attorney General belongs to. It is not beyond guilt, but it’s been accused of harassment in workplaces in Parliament House: the alleged rape was in an LNP (governing party’s) office.

While the Federal government was reeling over so many events, Australian women were angry. We made jokes about the march of the ides, or the Ides of March. Australia will make jokes about most things. We did not, however, make jokes about safe workplaces and abuse of position by people in power. In fact, when our Prime Minister made what I think now may have been intended to be a joke in Question Time when there were protesters outside, it was the icing on the cake of abuse.

I didn’t even realise it was intended as a joke at first, because one does not joke about not shooting demonstrators in Australia. One MP tweeted about water cannons, but deleted that tweet.

This week is impossibly big for Australia and this post is very difficult to write. There’s so much stuff. And most of that stuff is scary-uncomfortable. Our weekend began with the vote in the west then moved to human rights and raging anger.

Two days ago I would have given links to reports on this or that element, but now… Australia is changing. I don’t know where we will end up, but I live in hopes that this is the rebellion against the fearful and wildly conservative government that has been hurting many people.

Right now, though, I’m tired. Every single Australian who watches politics (which is most of us) is exhausted.

It’s not boring here, that’s one thing.

A Quiet Moment

personby Gillian Polack
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So many people around me have found distractions help in dealing with the extraordinary times we’re living through. This post is my present to you. Big stuff happens in the US on 20 January. This is a breath. A break. A moment before everything changes.

For me this week is an anniversary. This time last year I had been evacuated to Melbourne because of the bushfires. The air in Canberra was dangerous for me. Tonight my windows are wide open and I’m up late, cooling everything down as much as I can, for we have an incoming heatwave. Earlier today, however, everything was shut, for the dust storms in NSW sent a bit of frazzled air our way. That reminded me that I’ve been mostly indoors since June 2019. Bushfires followed by pandemic. Every now and again I get out and do things and this reminds me that the world outside is real. These incidents come from that real world. I think this is also the moment to celebrate that.

The first story is from Sydney in 1956, for tonight someone reminded me about the torch carrying for the 1956 Olympics.

A group of university students didn’t like the link between the torch and Hitler. Also, they were Australian. Of course they were Australian.

They painted a chair leg silver and put a tin on the end. They filled the tin with a pair of men’s underpants and set it on fire. Two students carried that torch. One of them successfully handed it to the Lord Mayor of Sydney at the Town Hall. The Lord Mayor didn’t realise at first that this was a hoax, and the torchbearer had time to slip away into the crowd.

The second story is from Canberra, quite recently.

A writer-friend was telling us on Twitter tonight about a time… let me give you the story in her words:

“Was at a con sitting at the signing table under a poster with “K.J. TAYLOR” on it and behind a nameplate which also said “K.J. TAYLOR”. A guy came up to me and said “Is K.J. Taylor here?” I patted myself down and said “I’m pretty sure I’m here!” He looked so confused.”

My third tidbit is a bit older, and is from the US. I collect interesting stories about food history. How fast molasses can burst out of a factory on a cold day, for example, and where to buy meat pies in London in 1250. I didn’t know that, on 16 May 1902, there was a kosher beef war on the Lower East Side in New York. Some describe it as riots. Kosher beef riots. This one deserves a link.

I live in a city where there are 300 people who admit to being Jewish. I can’t see us rioting. We used to hold food fairs, where our numbers were drowned by the crowds who wanted to eat bagels and felafel and lokshen kugel and particularly tasty curry from Jewish India.

I used to cook Medieval Jewish dishes for my stall, and people would ask, “Were there really Jews in the Middle Ages?” I gave those asking morsels of history along with their plates of food. Other days I’d talk about the persecution and the murders, but not at the food fair. We all need times where we don’t bear the burdens of history. Take that time today. Tomorrow will come soon enough.

Sumer is icumen in, lhude sing “heatwave.”

personby Gillian Polack
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Summer is here and we’re in what I like to call ‘silly season.’ Other people dignify it with more worthy names, but other people have already had Thanksgiving. Australia doesn’t do Thanksgiving, and we’re already a bit daft so… “silly season.” I’m not the only one to call December and early January by this name. I am, however, one of the most consistent.

I’m sending out short stories (three of us have joined together in this) to Australian addresses this Friday. Three writers sending out short stories to interested readers is a good thing to do in a fraught year. Also, me, I have Chanukah, so extra treats might creep into some envelopes.

Chanukah starts very soon, so I had to sort out what I was going to do this year rather early. I’m sending a very few envelopes overseas for it. Instead of doing a public call-out, I decided to surprise a few people. Those envelopes are gone. They contain nothing useful and nothing valuable. They are, however, fun.

I’ll be going to the post office again on Thursday. I’m not supposed to do messages. No-one can get blood samples for me (their blood is not my blood), however, so I’ll do the post office/library/bank/chicken run after I’ve done the bloodwork. That will take a half day and it will solve many problems.

I will wear a mask at critical times. I have very pretty masks and need to show them off (thanks, Pati!).

This means that I can send three more envelopes to less unsuspecting parties anywhere in the world. The first three people to get me their addresses (no later than Wednesday morning your time) will receive something small to remind you there’s a world out there and that you deserve time out. And stickers. This year we all deserve stickers.

For local friends, I have bowls filled with goodies. Local friends get the best of the daft presents, because they have to come and pick them up. The bowls will lurk on my letterbox, for as short a time as possible because it is warm. By ‘warm’, I mean, of course, ‘quite uncomfortable and this weather is intolerable and why is it doing this to us?’

Summer is here. We have our first bushfires to prove it. One of my friends can smell the smoke from Fraser Island. Another put up the special shutters and promptly lost electricity to the first fire of the season in the Blue Mountains. This is normal… but normal doesn’t mean nice in any way.

The return of bushfire season coincided with the US Black Friday sales. Some really-not-very-bright Australian retailers have announced ‘Black Friday’ as a sale here, too. ‘Black Friday’ in Australia normally refers to the 1939 fires and reminds us of the 2019/20 fires and a lot of Australians are annoyed at quite a few retailers. The sales are nearly done and they’ve put a blight into the shopping of those whose silly season includes 25 December.

Me, I already have all kinds of presents for all kinds of people for all kinds of seasons. The moment I earned enough money to live on, I bought books for me and presents for everyone else. I’m all shopped out. This means I can spend the next few weeks doing relaxed things while others panic, doesn’t it?

Not quite. I’m several weeks into my PhD and have a structure for it and have met all my early milestones. This means I have forty books and over two hundred articles to read before 6 January. My silly season is splendidly different to most others’, and this year I plan to enjoy the heck out of it.