Bruce is still the Boss

The first record I bought was “The Green Fields of France”. It was a single recorded by The Furey Brothers and Davey Arthur and I bought it sometime in the 1970’s, when I held down a pub job for pocket money. Most of my mates were into punk, ska or the other weird forms of music that were knocking around at the time. But for reasons unknown to me, I was a fan of traditional Irish music.

I didn’t pick this up from my parents. They seemed to be into the sort of country music were everybody mentioned in the song was dead by the end of the song and most of them horribly mutilated into the bargain. Our house was full of vinyl records by women who only appeared to have first names and men with large cowboy hats. My older brother, who might also have influenced me, was into a strange combination of psychedelic and heavy metal music. So if my friends and family weren’t to blame, who was? It’s not as though Trad music was cool. Its practitioners were shaggy haired drunks in thick woollen sweaters and generally the only place you could hear the music was in smoky pubs (although not the one I worked in). So I don’t know where I developed a taste for it. Perhaps it was the first awakening of my national pride.

Over the years I have drifted more towards country folk. But every now and again I wander into Youtube and bathe in some nostalgia. That led me to the guy who wrote the “Green Fields of France”; a Scottish gentleman by the name of Eric Bogle. To my immense surprise Mr Bogle and the lead singer from the Furey Brothers were booked to play at this year’s Port Fairy Folk Festival and for old time’s sake, I thought I’d better go.

Port Fairy is a lovely little seaside town in Western Victoria that hosts a dinky little festival each March that attracts folkies and aging hippies from all over Australia. All the food is authentically ethnic and people actually talk to each other in the queue for the toilet. Most people bring little chairs to sit on and many can be seen doing the cryptic crossword in The Age in between and sometimes during shows. I think it’s fair to say that everyone who goes to Port Fairy does the cryptic rather than the ordinary crossword.

So all in all, it’s the perfect music festival for people who don’t like music festivals.

We had planned to camp, but the forecast was for 35c and as we had a 15 month old baby with us, we made a late decision to book into a motel. We found a place in Warrnambool that I suspect was last used as the set for Psycho and spent two days listening to great music (my favourites were Chris Smither and Xavier Rudd if you fancy a bit of Youtube surfing). Eric Bogle and Finbarr Fury were both fantastic, although sadly neither sang The Fields.

But Port Fairy wasn’t my only musical outing in March. Last week I had to pleasure of seeing Bruce Springsteen for the 5^th time. My previous visits to The Boss had been in Ireland and Britain and were all outdoor, including his legendary gig at Slane in 1985. My only memory of that day (apart from the realisation that all his songs mentioned cars) was that my then girlfriend wanted to go up the front to join in the mosh pit. I was a timid lad even then and offered to look after her bag while she ventured forward. She returned about an hour later, covered in mud and missing her jeans. The relationship didn’t last long enough to get an explanation for that.

Bruce played at two venues in Melbourne. The iconic Hanging Rock, made famous by the Peter Weir movie and the less iconic but highly functional Rod Laver arena, home of the Australian Open tennis. Because I’m old and crabbity, I decided that Hanging Rock, being 100km from Melbourne, would be too hard to get home from late at night, so I opted for the indoor charms of Rod Lever.

The first thing I noticed was the average age of the crowd. Bruce is 63 these days and it looked like most of the audience had been to school with him. In Ireland, the profile would have been a lot younger. Irish people don’t mind following acts that their parents were into and if it’s good old fashioned rock and roll like Springsteen, then they’d love to be up the front sporting inflatable guitars as a tribute to Steve Van Zant.

The other thing I noticed is that Australian crowds at stadium concerts like to pretend that they are in Idaho or Colorado. Maybe they were just trying to make Bruce feel at home, but holding pieces of coloured card with handwritten messages is a cringingly American habit. Most were requests for particular songs, some of which he picked at random and performed, as though the concert was a late night radio phone in request show. Some were expressions of love or longing, or plaintive requests for a hug. And some were just funny, like the one that said “The Guy behind me can’t see”.

But I was willing to put up with all of that, just to wallow in three hours of majestic music. Bruce Springsteen has been a part of my life since I was sixteen when I first heard “The River”. I bought “Tunnel of Love” on cassette in 1988 and played it endlessly in my first car and I think it’s fair to say that the acoustic version of “Thunder Road” is probably my favourite piece of music.

I’m feeling older these days, but when the opening chords of “Born to Run” play like they did during the encore last week, I felt like I was transported back to 1985 and age doesn’t matter.

Home thoughts from abroad

I've been reading Browning, Keats and William Wordsworth
And they all seem to be saying the same thing for me
Well I like the words they use, and I like the way they use them
You know, Home Thoughts From Abroad is such a beautiful poem

A couple of weeks ago we went to the “Leaving Dublin” exhibition at the Melbourne Immigration Museum. This was a collection of photographs taken of people who were about to emigrate from Ireland. The accompanying stories were sad and despairing, telling of families ripped apart, economic necessity and the safety valve that emigration offers whenever Ireland gets into trouble.

I noticed that most of my fellow visitors at the exhibition were also Irish, not only from the accents but from their facial appearance. Most Australians don’t believe me, but it’s possible to spot an Irish person at 50 meters here. Sometimes it’s the ridiculous red faces from inappropriate exposure to the sun that gives them away. Sometimes it’s the GAA and Glasgow Celtic jerseys they wear (you never see anyone from Glasgow wearing a Celtic shirt, but that’s a discussion for another day).

But more often than not, it’s the freckles, frizzy hair and deep blue or green eyes that tells me that these people are Friends of Seamus. I obviously share these looks (although my hair lost its frizziness years ago) because I’ll often pass a similar looking person on the streets of Melbourne and we’ll raise an eyebrow to each other or mutter “How’s it goin’” as we pass.

We moved around the exhibition slowly and quietly. Most of us it seems, were pondering our own reasons for leaving Ireland. By their ages, many could have arrived here in the 1980s during the last deluge from Ireland’s shores. Some, no doubt, came for adventure and stayed. And some, like me, left for a number of reasons. Because we could see Ireland was going down the toilet in an orgy of consumerism and right wing politics. Because Ireland is a small and suffocating place and because there is a light beyond these woods and we should go and see what makes it shine.

That last aspect probably drove me onto the plane more than any. I’ve always felt like a citizen of the world and not tied down to a particular place. It’s a big and varied place and those of us who come from rich western countries have the opportunity to travel around it and live in many different places. Most of the world doesn’t have this luxury which makes me wonder why more people who can don’t try it. I do love my home country but I love the world too and if I could afford it, I’d live in Ireland for 6 months each year and somewhere else in the world for the rest of the time. Many people do this already, including the great and good of the racing scene and those property developers who got their cash out before the market went belly up. These guys spend one day short of six months in Ireland so that they can avoid paying any taxes there.

But unless I win the lottery, that’s not really an option. So I’ll have to make do with reading Irish papers on the web, listening to Irish radio on my digital radio or watching Irish television on DVD or on a live stream. The Internet has changed an emigrant’s life, that’s for sure. When I lived in London in the late 1980s my only connection to Ireland was through a weekly mad hatter phone call with my Mother when I would be read a list of the recently deceased on our street with a hushed summary of their past indiscretions. Occasionally, if I found myself in a certain part of the City after crashing on somebody’s floor, I’d be able to pick up a copy of the Sunday Press, which was a paper I’d never dream of buying when I lived in Ireland.

Now I can spend any free time I have indulging in Irish media or consuming goods bought from the Taste of Ireland website. Close your eyes and you could imagine you were in Connemara, if it wasn’t for the lack of rain banging on the roof or the need to wear a sleeping bag in doors.

In that respect, you have the best of everything here. The good weather, the exotic and multi-cultural food, clean streets, beaches, bicycle paths, efficient trams and trains and a health system that prioritises patients on the size of their ailments and not their wallets.

At the same time you can access a lot of the good things about Ireland from the comfort of your sofa in Melbourne. The humour that is unique to us Gaels, the story telling and intelligent writing. And curry Chips and Guinness if you look hard enough. The only thing that’s missing is the spontaneous fun you get from meeting friends and the tactile comfort you can feel from your family that is not available through Skype.

A friend here said to me that it’s actually harder to be an emigrant now because the Internet (and Skype in particular), make you feel close to home but not close enough. There is something very tantalising about a nephew’s hand reaching for a screen 17,000km away and trying to touch you.

The picture that will stay with me from the Leaving Dublin exhibition was of a young woman standing by the Royal Canal in Dublin. She was wearing a pair of vibrant red shoes. In the caption beside the picture, she said that she was bringing the shoes with her to her new life in Australia. “If I get very sad”, she said, “maybe I could just click my heels and I’ll be back in Ireland.” If only it was that simple.

Swings and a roundabout way of talking about them

Swimming Pools were a constant source of conversation in my youth.  Or the lack of them to be more precise. I grew up in a town of 25,000 people with no body of water bigger than a family bath. Ireland was a poor place back then to be fair but as we lived beside the sea; the council probably thought it was an indulgence to build a pool when God had already provided swimming facilities.

That sea was just 120km from the Nuclear reprocessing plant at Windscale on the English coast however, which polluted the water but did nothing to raise its ambient temperature from the icy levels it maintained all year round. As a result, only mad dogs and gents in wet suits ventured into it. We grew up as a town of non swimmers where the sea was as alien as deep space and we only ventured into the water when we went on holidays. Then we would flap about like drowning men (which wasn’t far from the truth) before giving up and retiring to the nearest bar. Unlike swimming pools, there were 168 pubs in the town I grew up in. So that was an area we had lots of experience in.

On the two or three occasions in my younger years when we found it desirable to visit a swimming pool (which was around the time that we became interested in girls in swim suits) we would venture over the border to Northern Ireland which was well endowed with facilities provided by the British taxpayer to placate the locals. We would then bob around for an hour or so like pasta shells in a pot of boiling water. There were no lanes in that pool because the users were mainly Southern day trippers who were unable to swim in a straight line if they could swim at all.

I’ve been thinking about this recently as my one year old daughter has started swimming and we are spoiled for choice in Melbourne. Every school here seems to have a pool and the local councils compete to have the best facilities.

But it wasn’t only swimming pools that our town lacked when I was growing up. There were no playgrounds either. Kids had to make their own fun in half built housing estates and on railway tracks. It didn’t bother us to be honest. If you’re inventive, there are lots of things to slide down or swing from and they are more enjoyable when done outside of the sanitised confines of officially constructed facilities.

Yet again, Northern Ireland was different. My grandfather died when I was five and he spent the last couple of years of his life in a nursing home in Warranpoint, a sleepy town just across the border from us. We would be piled into the car each Sunday to go and visit grandpa and while my Mother spent an hour or so with her Father, my Dad would bring me and my siblings for a walk along Warrenpoint’s foreshore.

Just across from the hospital was a well appointed park with a brightly painted playground. To my disgust each Sunday I would find the gates to the playground locked. My Dad did his best to explain. At the time, most councils in Northern Ireland were run by Protestants who had gerrymandered the boundaries to ensure that they were in power even in strongly Catholic areas such as Warranpoint.  And Protestants, he explained, wanted to respect God on Sundays by banning fun. As a result, playgrounds were shut, shops were closed and God forbid you’d try and get a drink anywhere.

This caused confusion in my five year old mind. To me, Sunday was the most appropriate day to do fun things like sliding and swinging and this inculcated my earliest understanding of the differences between Catholics and Protestants. When God said he rested on the seventh day, we took this to mean that he relaxed and what better way is there to do that than to go to a playground, watch a football match or have a beer with Friends. Protestants, or at least the fundamentalist type who lived in Northern Ireland, believed that rest involved pulling the curtains and huddling around a King James Bible.

My daughter doesn’t have to worry about any of this. There are ten playgrounds within walking distance of our house and none of them even has a gate that can be locked. She shows off her daring skills by climbing onto frames that petrify her Father and shows particular artistry in sliding backwards down slides with scant regard for what might be waiting at the bottom.

My hometown now has an Olympic sized pool, courtesy of the Celtic Tiger which also gifted almost every kid dwelling house with a backyard trampoline and assorted climbing and sliding paraphernalia. But outdoor pursuits require suitable weather and Melbourne provides more of that than Ireland.

So I can’t help thinking that my daughter is better off spending her formative years here where she can go to the park and meet kids of all colours and nationalities and play in a community environment. She might even bump into the occasional Northern Ireland Protestant and can introduce them to the concept of fun.

She loves other kids and finds them a welcome relief from her nervous and fidgety parents. Being a child is such a wonderful period time of your life. It should be spent in exploration and in the pursuit of joy. And every kid should have the opportunity to pursue these seven days a week and thankfully even in Warranpoint, you are now able to do that.

I’d like to think that on the seventh day God rested in a park, watching little children play and thinking to himself that for all its cynicism, this isn’t a bad old world that he created.

We'll keep the Red flag flying here

My Dad worked in a brewery, which was a great benefit to me when I started drinking. There is nothing like free alcohol around the house to excite the taste buds of a teenager. Just before Christmas 1981 he was working the nightshift when negotiations between his union and his employer collapsed. A picket was put on the factory gate at 6am stopping the morning shift from getting in but trapping my poor old Dad inside. When he finally left he had to put up with some abuse from the strikers who assumed that he had broken the picket. This upset my Dad greatly. He wasn’t militant in any way but he understood the power of Trade Unionism and the protection that it gave to their members.

As a result of the union’s efforts, he was paid for every hour he worked, including double and treble time when he worked nights or weekend. Which is more than can be said in my industry where people are paid “a salary” and then are expected to be on call 24 hours a day and to work bank holidays for nothing. My Dad got all that because he was a member of a union. They ensured that the brewery had a Christmas Party every year and not just the years when the company is making lots of money.

I’ve always had a soft spot for unions to be honest. Capitalism is a battle between the workers and the bosses. The bosses have the Police and the military to ensure that their interests are respected. Workers on their own will be picked off one by one by the whims of the system, through redundancy or wage reduction. Unless they are in a collective body which will stand up for them.

Saying you like unions these days however, is like saying that you like pictures of 3 year old Indonesians smoking cigarettes. It’s very 1950’s. I’m not helped, I must admit, by the behaviour of some Australian unions, who have been taken over by individuals and run as personal fiefdoms. The Health Services Union in Australia for example, is run by a family that would make the Sopranos look like a clan of Amish farmers.

Australia does seem to be particularly militant when it comes to the interaction of workers and bosses. I work near the Victorian Parliament and hardly a day goes by without the streets being filled with red shirted placard holders demanding better conditions for teachers, nurses or sheep inseminators (members of the Ancient Order of Mutton Botherers, with branches in Australia and New Zealand).

The teachers were the latest group to take to the streets. They want a 30% pay increase which sounds a lot when it’s reported like that (which is how the right wing media here went about things). But that’s over three years, so when broken down; it’s ... well, still a lot.

This didn’t elicit a lot of sympathy from parents who had to deal with their kids been off school for a day at short notice. The kids presumably were happier. These days, parents treat school as an unofficial child minder and get annoyed when the baby sitter is unavailable.

The nurses were up before that. They generated a lot more sympathy from the public but most of their complaints centred on their objection to plans to bring in untrained assistants to do clerical work. Nurses are pushing to do work normally done by doctors (presumably because it pays more) but object to assistants being employed to do tasks normally done by nurses. Presumably if they had cake, they would want to eat it as well.

It’s a shame really that unions have allowed themselves to be wrapped up in protectionism and a culture of jobs for the boys. Because Victoria has a proud record of labour support. The eureka stockade saw the formation of the first union in Australia and a statue on my way home commemorates the 8-8-8 movement which campaigned for an eight hour day. Victoria was the first place in the world to bring in the policy of eight hours work, eight hours rest and eight hours sleep. Although nobody seems to have told the banking industry or people with one year old children.

Banks used to open at 10am and close at 3pm. That was when they only serviced people within walking distance of the branch. Now banks are global, with clients in far flung countries who don’t even realise they are clients. As a result, you could work for 24 hours a day and find emails flying into your inbox demanding an instant response and phone calls from overseas at all hours of the night. Hardly anyone works an eight hour day in this environment, although it must be said that this is unlikely to garner much sympathy in the wider community. Banking is a pejorative term these days.

But I wonder what the men who fought for an eight hour day would think of this if they were able to gaze into the glass walled skyscrapers of the central business district? They would see an army of open shirted automatons toiling away to keep the wheels of capitalism greased. They would see lights on at 8pm and stressed out drones slouching towards miserably lit train stations.

The money is good it must be said, but it seems as though you sign a Faustian pact that negates all your other rights to rest and sleep. My Dad’s union would never have stood for it. If someone in my Dad’s brewery had been asked to work on Christmas Day for no extra pay, there would have been a picket placed immediately. But these days unions are considered to be a dinosaur, existing only to enrich their full time officials. It’s every man for himself now and the system will pick us off one by one. It’s a dog eat dog world out there and it’s no fun being a poodle.

Sleepless in Sleep School

Bedlam is a word that comes from the name of Europe’s oldest psychiatric hospital. But if you want a new definition of the word, you should visit a Melbourne sleep school at 7pm. Our baby is not sleeping too well and we decided it was time to learn a few settling techniques. The truth is that she’s probably getting enough sleep and just enjoys waking her parents up every two hours for a chat. She’s a happy little kid and developing well. She’s only ten months old but took her first steps this week and has learned to put her arms around her Dad’s neck and give him a hug. And that means I’d be willing to get up every hour if I had to.

I don’t know if they have sleep schools outside Australia. They are run by the health service and offer a four day program to parents with sleeping problems (because to be honest it’s them that have the problem and not their kids). We checked in on a Monday evening and were put on a wing with three other families. Everyone was polite to each other until about 7pm when the first kid was put to bed. She screamed her head off in a scene that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Exorcist.

Sleep schools are designed to give parents help in teaching their kids to sleep better and to therefore get more sleep themselves. You have to wonder then why they put you on a wing with three other kids. I reckon the four babies got together each day and worked out a crying schedule. Because none of them ever cried at the same time. They didn’t wake each other up but through a coordinated effort kept the parents awake all night.

In addition to keeping everyone awake, the school also ran a number of ‘Educational’ classes including one just for Dads. Four of us went to it and after a nice little chat from the facilitator about how we need to ensure that we hold on to the interests we had before we became Dads, he put up a few talking points on the board “what was it like before we were Dads”, “what were our Dads like” and that sort of thing. I was sitting on the right hand side and presumed he would come to me first, so I started rehearsing a story in my head about going to football matches with my old man and the acting life I had before I became a Father.

But he went to the guy on the left hand side first which meant I would have to go last and could relax. Richard proceeded to tell the group how he didn’t know his Father and therefore couldn’t speak to the first point. He told us he spent his youth in foster homes, started taking drugs when he was twelve and was generally a mess before he became a Dad. He was crazy about his kid but couldn’t live with the child’s mother due to ‘anger’ issues. But nevertheless they were still hoping to get married and have another baby.

We were all busy checking out the laces on our shoes at this point but he wasn’t finished. “Oh I have another kid” he said. “He’s nine and lives in America but I’d not allowed to see him”. The facilitator leaned in and placed a comforting hand on Richard’s knee. “Is his Mother being difficult?” he asked. Richard looked at him blankly and replied “You can’t get a visa to go to America if you have a criminal conviction”.

We finally moved onto Eddie and breathed a sigh of relief. However, it was almost as though Eddie wanted to trump Richard. He started off by telling us about his thirteen year amphetamine addiction before moving on to colourful tales about bi-polorism. In the midst of this, his phone beeped. He apologised and said that it was a reminder to take his mood suppression tablets. As the facilitator and myself exchanged nervous glances, Richard interjected to mention that he had been a heroin addict for seven years and for the next ten minutes he shared stories with Eddie about where to source the best grade A drugs in East Melbourne.

The third guy was a twenty one year old with the mental age of a young dog. He had stumbled into parenthood and his only real contribution was on the subject of bed sharing. His only complaint about being a Dad was that his girlfriend took up 90% of the bed. He reckoned the best thing about being a gay man is that you would get half the bed to sleep in. He also reckoned that this was why lesbians always looked miserable, because two women expecting 90% of the bed wouldn’t work.

He finished by mentioning how he had just joined the army and was looking forward to a posting to Iraq so that he could shoot people.

When it came to my turn to speak, I felt like making up a story about being raised by wolves in the amazon before spending years on the streets of Rio with a gang of seven year old cocaine addicts. My life seemed very dull in comparison to the other guys in the room but I felt very relieved about that.

We ended up by exchanging handshakes and nobody asked for anyone else's mobile numbers. It wasn’t that sort of meeting.

I shuffled back to the wing to listen to the coordinated attempt of four babies to keep a group of parents awake and they succeeded magnificently. I never knew how much I loved sleep until our daughter came along. No doubt in time, she will develop the same love. Probably when I’m trying to get her up for school. Till then I’d be happy if she could just stretch things out a little. 5am was a time of day unknown to me 10 months ago. Now I’m on first name terms and thinking of contacting Richard or Eddie to see if their dealers had any sleeping tablets for babies.

 

A Postcard from the Edge of the World

The cock he crew in the morning, he crew both loud and shrill and I awoke in Rarotonga, many miles from Spancill Hill.

Shortly afterwards several more roosters joined in to provide a veritable dawn chorus. Except it wasn’t dawn. It was about 2am and while many people describe this place as a sleepy little island, you’d have to wonder how anybody ever gets to sleep with the colony of early rising wild chickens that populate this place.

Perhaps the chickens are just as confused about the time zone as the tourists. Most visitors to the Cook Islands come from or via New Zealand. To get here you cross the International Date Line and Auckland becomes 23 hours ahead of Rarotonga (the main island in the Cooks). That means that you gain a day when you arrive here and lose it on the way back. It confuses the hell out of most people, particularly these days when you’re in constant communication with friends by mobile text messages. It’s difficult to remember that it is Thursday here but Friday in Australia.

I don’t remember there being so many chickens when I was last here in 1996. Mind you a lot has changed in the world since then. The internet, mobile phones, satellite TV and globalisation come to mind. All these have touched the Cook Islands too. Heineken for example, is available in every shop and bar. Globalisation means that one brand dominates every market. Apple in computing, Coca Cola in soft drinks etc. It’s just a shame that when it comes to beer that the fizzy tasteless rubbish from Holland had to win out.

As a country, the Cook Islands have grown up. Back in 1996 there were just two resorts and they were full of Americans stopping off on their way to New Zealand or Australia. The occasional independent traveller like myself (we hated being called tourists but that’s a subject for another day) wandered into the country and had to do with whatever lodgings we could find.

These days the place is full of boutique hotels, backpacker lodges and houses for rent. But it has managed to retain its small island charm. The local tourist board call it paradise and I’d largely agree if it wasn’t for the bugs and the spiders. I can’t imagine that God would have included them in his design of heaven.

I’m trying to be all Zen Buddhist about this and consider that all God’s creatures have a place in the choir, even insects. But I’m writing this with a can of mortine in my hand trying to stem the incessant attempts to suck blood from my pale skinned body. My ankles seem to be the favoured destination of these vampire like creatures. My lower leg area has received more hits than the BBC website. But everything is part of the buffet of the universe and we eat animals, so I guess we can’t complain too much when they eat us.

But on the positive side, the sun is shining, the sea is a dreamy shade of turquoise and the beer is cheap. We’ve rented a house near Muri beach which is the picturesque highlight of island.

Back in 1996, there were a few Utes on the island, now there seems to be more cars than people. Tiny silver Nissans usually. Tourists who rent them must get awfully confused when they stumble out of a café late at night and see twelve of them parked beside each other. There are some bigger cars too but it’s hard to see the point when the speed limit is 50kmph and there is only one road and that’s only 35km long.

Wild chickens are everywhere except in the cooking pots of locals. All the chicken in the shops comes from New Zealand and the ones wondering around the streets seem to be revered in the way that cows are in India. You get attached to them after a few days and our daughter was fascinated by them. So when we saw a chick stumble and break a leg on our lawn one day it became the saddest afternoon of the holiday. The chick’s mother tried desperately to drag him back to wherever they were nesting. But nature is cruel and as the mother hen grew more desperate you could see that the chick was getting weaker. We buried it in a hedge among some wild flowers.

Heineken is not the only thing to make inroads here. The Chinese are also around and not the ones who run restaurants with MSG laden food. The Chinese government are investing millions in the islands, as they are anxious to get their hands on a rich seam of cobalt that runs under the sea between the islands. Rather intriguingly they have agreed to pay for the judiciary and Police Force which explains why the courthouse is the flashiest building in town and the police drive around in sparkling new four by fours. The communists in Eastern Europe believed that the way to control a country was to keep a tight grip on the interior ministry and the Chinese have obviously learned from this.

But the highlight of the trip is the discovery that fish burgers are a culinary speciality here. They are delicious and I’ve had at least one every day I’ve been here. Needless to say chicken burgers are pretty rare here. And as much as I’ve grown to like the fluffy little things in the past week, if they crow again at 2am tomorrow, I might be tempted to open the islands first branch of KFC.

One Week in Melbourne

Two items dominate the local media in Melbourne this week. The disappearance of an Irish girl last Friday night and the sacking of a school principle. The fact the two stories get almost equal coverage in the posher end of the media market is a little sad but speaks volumes for what is important to middle class Melbournians.

 

The school mistress story broke first. Rosa Storelli was the principle of Melbourne’s prestigious Methodist Ladies College until she was fired two weeks ago. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing a few Methodists in my time and as Protestants go, they are the best of the bunch. They are humble and keen to help the poor, which by all accounts is why they left the Anglican faith in the first place.

 

Clearly no one has passed this message onto the people who run Methodist Ladies College. They charge $23,000 a year in tuition fees and attract the offspring of lawyers, doctors and various other social climbers. No doubt they throw out the odd scholarship to an aboriginal kid or a child genius from the poorer Western Suburbs, but the school is a factory to perpetuate social class and to ensure that the female lawyers and doctors of tomorrow are the children of today’s lawyers and doctors.

 

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t bother me. The world is an unfair place after all. But as with Ireland, the Australian government pays the same subsidy per pupil to fee paying schools as it does to state schools. And in both countries, capital expenditure on gyms, libraries etc are based on a matched payment basis. If the school can come up with $100k, then the government will match it. Needless to say, this means that the rich schools get most of the money and the inequity gap gets wider.

 

Right wingers complain about paying taxes to fund dole payments to layabouts. Well, I have the same problem in paying taxes to subsidise the education of the elite and to pay for the Australian militaries’ misadventures in Afghanistan. If we were all able to direct our taxes to the places we thought they should be best spent, then I reckon we’d have good schools and hospitals, ten members of parliament instead of hundreds and an army presence in the Middle East that would fit into a phone box.

 

The head involved got sacked after the school board discovered that they had overpaid her by about half a million dollars over the last ten years and she refused to pay it back. In fairness she probably hadn’t noticed the overpayment as her salary is also half a million dollars a year. And to think I passed up on teacher training college because I didn’t think the pay was good enough.

 

The principle and the school board are busy leaking information to the media every day and mediation councillors have been called in. The pupils must be laughing. In my day, a headmaster getting sacked would have caused great levity among the masses and a new catalogue of nicknames.

The parents however, seem to be fairly solidly behind the ex principle. A fighting fund has been organised and the city’s best legal brains (who coincidently are also parents in this case) are talking about taking a High Court case to get her reinstated. All of this makes the front page of Melbourne’s broadsheet newspaper each day and must baffle the vast majority of citizens, for whom $23,000 is annual income.

 

The other thing that this throws up is that if a school discovers that it has been overpaying it’s principle for the past ten years, you’d have to wander about the standard of bookkeeping that they are teaching their students.

 

I had the dubious pleasure of auditing a school back in my early working life. It was run by an order of Priests who covered the full gambit of religious stereotypes. The youngest Priest on the management committee was committed to social justice and argued the case of the school caretaker who was earning a wage equivalent to that of a Bombay street beggar. The young Priest was looking to get him an extra twenty pounds a week in his take home pay. The head master, who came from the pre Vatican Two tradition of the Catholic Church, tutted dismissively and explained that because of the penal tax and national insurances rates that existed in Ireland at the time, the school would be required to find 50 pounds per week to pay a net twenty and this was simply out of the question.

 

They looked to me for a suggestion and I swallowed my socialist pride for a moment. I told them to get the caretaker to give a note each week saying that he bought twenty pounds worth of nails or paint and seeking reimbursement. They could then pay him this amount without any implications for tax and insurance. The young Priest beamed with enthusiasm but they headmaster stared at me with a face as dark as thunder. Suddenly my heart fell as I realised I had just explained an illegal scheme to a group of clerics.

 

“That’s brilliant” he said.”Can we do the same for all the staff?”

 

I learned a lesson that day, that schools are not the paradigm of virtue that we think them to be and yet we entrust them to educate our young and to set them on a moral path.

 

There is nothing moral about charging $23,000 a year to school a kid or to pay a principle half a million a year in my book.

 

The other issue that has filled the papers was the disappearance and murder of a young Irish girl called Jill Meagher. She was snatched from the street not far from where I live and discovered six days later in a shallow grave. It is a desperately sad story and makes me wish that the papers were only filled with tales of sacked headmistresses and the angst of middle class parents.