blamebrampton: 15th century woodcut of a hound (Default)
Imagine my surprise!

Nicola Roxon is the Australian Minister for Health and Ageing. She is currently being interviewed on the ABC about swine flu and Australia, and has been a voice of calm and reason.

'We have 89 suspected cases of swine flu,' said the host of the news program.

'No,' she corrected, 'we have 89 people who have been travelling in affected areas who are experiencing flu-like symptoms that warrant further investigation. Of that there are only two who we have suggested be quarantined and they are being tested.'

It's the sort of nicety you'd expect from the daughter of scientists.

The Australian government has just declared it a quarantineable disease, a measure that is usually not needed as Australians, like New Zealanders, are generally very good about public health. It's the third major epidemic threatening the region in the last decade, after SARS and Bird Flu. First likely flu pandemic since I was a toddler, though.

I await the lunacy that will be flooding the internet over the next few weeks. And can I just warn that I will thoroughly ridicule any member of my flist who rants about why weren't vaccines ready and why aren't people being given antibiotics. (I will happily explain why both of these comments are stupid for people who just don't know, wanting knowledge is to be encouraged and there is no reason why you should be interested in the epidemiology of influenza!).

In a moment of irony-like coincidence, I have a mild case of normal influenza picked up in the week before I was booked in for my flu shot. Bloody typical. At least it is one of the feebler strains, I think those are all B this year. Stupid fast-mutating viruses!
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It has been over two months since the Victorian fires. Long enough for an inquest to begin, long enough for most of the funerals. Not long enough for journalists to get their heads around what happened, though I don't know if they ever can. You can see the film I am talking about here, it was shot for Four Corners, one of the leading Australian news programs, on the ABC, and produced by Liz Jackson, a good journalist.

The footage shown on Four Corners is astonishing. Darryl Hull, a local resident and worker and amateur photographer filmed some of the fire in Marysville after the firefighters who were there had been forced to retreat to the town oval. There were 50 of them, they had stood up on the Kings Road above the town until the fire grew so intense that they could no longer stay and keep themselves alive, even when turning their hoses on each other. They moved ahead of the fire back to the only defensible space.

Hull took refuge with them, and filmed. You can hear his commentary. 'That was the school, that was the information centre, that's all that's left of that beautiful church ...' Every few minutes, his voice mournfully breathes 'Oh my god ...'

Liz spends her time in the report interviewing emergency services personnel, trying to understand what went wrong. 34 people died in Marysville, some in their houses, some on the road leading out, some running to the road ahead of the fire. She cannot understand this. 'But there should have been a warning,' she says a few times. Some of the people agree, despite the fact they were listening to local radio that was broadcasting alerts.

'They had no siren,' one of the women said. 'I was expecting a siren.'

'Why didn't you sound the siren?' Liz asks Glen Fiske, the captain of the local Country Fire Association. And I am paraphrasing, but this is the gist of it.

'We did,' he said, shaking his head at her. 'It's the alert for the firefighters to gather at the station. They gathered, they were there. That's what the siren's for.'

She clearly can't understand, can't get her head around the fact that they've never needed to use the siren for anything other than calling the firies in to work in the past.

'But you warned the owner of the B&B to get his guests out,' she says to him later in the show. 'Don't you wish you'd warned other people, that you'd ...' and her voice peters out as she realises what she is saying.

Glen's wife and youngest son died in the fires. He lost his phone fighting a spot fire earlier that day. They couldn't call him. By the time he could leave the station to go to his house, it was gone, and they were, too.

'Obviously,' he says gently. 'I dearly wish that. But we had no idea, no one did.'

Liz stammers. She knows this, but she feels sure there must be an answer, must be something that could have been done. There must have been ...

She talks to the fire chief at Alexandra, the more senior officer. His eyes are red, and look as though they have been for weeks. He tells her how they stuck to their systems, but the day kept growing worse. He couldn't get through to the person he needed to sound emergency alarms, not by phone or radio, the state-wide emergency overloaded communications. The stay or go policy didn't work this time, because houses that had previously always been the safest place to hold out through a fire were infernos in minutes.

'But ...' she says.

He looks at her, tired, defeated. She gives up. She goes back to Glen Fiske, and ask him why he wants to stay and help rebuild Marysville.

'Because ...' and now he cries.

'Because you told me you wanted your other children to grow up here, to know it as home, as you did,' she prompts.

'That sense of belonging,' he says, holding his voice level by sheer will.

And Liz is quiet. 'No one should have to pay this much,' she says in her voice-over to the footage of the funeral for Glen Fiske's wife and son. 'There should have been more systems, more support ...'

She can't say what they should have been, exactly, nor how they should have known in advance. Nor can she bear to address the root problem beyond stating a simple fact. The fire, like so many of those that burned through Victoria that day, was deliberately lit.

blamebrampton: 15th century woodcut of a hound (Default)
Have been hammered by deadlines this month. I am juggling a few different jobs, and appear to be the only person left in publishing who can understand a range of craft patterns, which means that I am still miles behind wth everything that is not hitting print deadlines. Not to mention slightly cross-eyed from mental knitting ...

I am not ignoring your comments, I am appreciating them and internalising them before answering. It's different.

So, very briefly, Fiji has had another coup. Fiji has these semi-regularly and they are relatively civilised for the most part. This time, the 'government' has decreed that no media will be allowed to broadcast news that is critical of the current political situation and has put censors in many of the major outlets.

For the first few days, editions of broadcast and paper news were skipped. Then the journos decided that Gandhi was right and that passive resistance could make its point gently and pointedly. So they went back to publishing the news. Nice, safe news. Completely uncritical news. News such as: "Paint has apparently dried on his old couch, Max reports. Given the job of painting the couch, Max was excited at the prospect of the paint drying. But when asked how it dried, he was nonplussed.

" 'It just went on wet, but after about four hours, it started to dry. That was when I realised, paint dries,' the young scholar observed."

Find a few more here at the SMH coverage, or, for the full story, go to the Fiji Daily Post site and check out their local news. While the laid-back pace of Fijian life may trick you into thinking a few actual news stories are satires, the real comedy will soon be obvious to you. I curtsey respectfully in their direction.

In completely different and very sad news, the vicious and deadly Marysville fire, one of the fires that swept through Victoria in February, has been ruled arson and the police say they are close to charging a volunteer firefighter with lighting it. I have no words for this, and so go back to admiring the Fijians.
 

PS Thanks, Cal! You know why.

blamebrampton: 15th century woodcut of a hound (Default)
By The Guardian, with this delicious story ...

For those who lack time to click the link, the SMH summarises it thusly: 

In the UK, newspaper The Guardian announced it would become the first newspaper to be published exclusively via micro-blogging service, Twitter.

"Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters," the paper said.

"A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets.

"Major stories already completed include '1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!'; 'OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more'; and 'JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?'."

In actual Real World News, and I am not making this up, New Idea, an even lower-rent mag in the territory of OK and Hello, ran a cover story about the New Man in Bec Hewitt's Life!!!

Bec Hewitt is a former soapie star, now married to a famous tennis player. Chavtastic the pair of them, but basically harmless. Bec, it must be mentioned, is the 'public face' of New Idea. The story has many photos of Bec out and about with a handsome young man who is treated as theough he is one of the family and allowed free and unfettered access to her life and kids, acting as their father in their father's absence. Bec is clearly vey close to him, the writer slyly innuendoes.

As well she might be. It's her brother.
 



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