Skullthorpe's Blog

Black cats are cool,  those cats are free,

They dig Ornette and noir coffee.

There are beatnick cats called Bryce

Or Minerva or Licorice.

If you’re not a b c man

Disown your parents that’s the plan.

Then learn to play the saxaphone,

Eat cheeses bleu and drink alone,

Grow a beard and write poetry.

Black cats are cool, the cats to be.

Stones: are they keeping in or out
What love, what dread, what awe misled
with a heavy slow lithic dance?

Meaning scattered as time winds blew,
Broken, do they adore or dread,
Stones: are they keeping in or out?

Did Hecate dolorous strew
rue to drug the unquiet dead.
with a heavy slow lithic dance?

Did Estre splash and scatter dew,
in joy consume the wine and fed
stones: are they keeping in or out?

Seasons dawns flickered and flew,
Stones tumbled, bright purpose fled
with a heavy slow lithic dance

Order ended, stones askew,
Their final spell left still unsaid.
Stones: are they keeping in or out
with a heavy slow lithic dance?

This came out of conversations at The Angry Pigeons.  No Lights No Lycra is a world wide movement (started in Fitzroy). They are clubs for dancing without all the impedimenta usually associated with public dance venues.  Someone presumably still has to clean up afterwards.

No Lights, No Lycra.
No visceral sub-sonics.
Just the drift of dust
through lines of light
penciled by nail holes
in the tin roof.

No Lights, No Lycra.
Circling slowly in 
sun-punctuated gloom,
humming 'Some enchanted evening',
with thongs flapping softly.
Dancing with the mop,
ignoring the steaming bucket - 
no lights, no lycra
on the morning after the night before.

I would like to offer my special and sincerest thanks to all you wonderfully generous people who helped in the projects with which I have been involved in 2014. See how much we have enriched this town –

The Artist in School ‘Gabo Rock’ Project and Music Program, especially thanking the active members of the P/12 Arts Sub Committee and Lisa Broome, Padma Newsome, Nick Fischer and Rachel Severs.
Mallacoota Markets (both sorts) especially The Market Committee and Jenny, Geof, Pete S. Neil and the Traffic Nazis.
The Mallacoota Halls and Rec Committee who after over two years of planning and community consultation have prepared a Strategic Plan for our Community Precinct. that will go to Council early this year. They have also managed the use and upkeep of your halls and reserve grounds.
All those who have helped with The New Kids on the Block Radio project (Mallacoota P to 12/3MGB. This is great booster of our children’s self confidence and communication skills.
Assisted with The Stilt Walkers (especially Denise). Stilt walking is an unusual activity and Mallacoota may be the only community in Victoria that does it on a regular basis. This year the activity will have been on going for twenty five years. It is always life changing for one or more of our members every year
All who helped out with the ten or so visiting bands that have performed at the Muddie in 2015.
The mounting of the Winter Solstice Celebrations. We are planning a return Bush Dance this year.
All of you who helped set up all the community events – celebrations, weddings, funerals, fund raisers and exhibitions.
All of you who did the endless reading of stories for the EJ Brady Short Story Competition.
All who put their time into keeping 3MGB open and on the air. Don’t forget Australian music content!
All you active workers in The Mallacoota Progress Association. With over 80 members, we are a significant voice.
The mounting of the Gippsland wide community radio advertising campaign for Scott Campbell-Smith in the recent elections.
Ros and her gymnastics team doing so much for the fitness and coordination of our children.
Special thanks to The Mallacoota Lions for all the thankless things they do around the place.

A great deal has happened, which could not have happened, without all you generous community members who sacrificed your time to make our community so much better to live in.
The best of luck in 2015, have a great rest of your life and I will see you around town.

Once upon a time communities would get together and do things – build a community hall, hold a cricket match, fund raise for the local school. The work was shared The job was done.
These days it is called ‘volunteerism’. There a courses available on how to get people to volunteer. The greedy and the litigious have forced a whole complication of rules and regulations around trying to undertake the simplest things. Thousands of more or less worthy causes try and grab some of your time. Sometimes grey egos, with personal agendas, try and enlist you in their paltry dreams.
We live busy lives. We spend more time at work than we have for generations for relatively less pay. Everything is more expensive than it was and everything is a whole lot more than it was. Once we could carry everything we owned in a small skin bag tied at our waist.. The numbers of people willing to help out are dropping and the those left are aging and overworked.
Is there is a looming crisis? Is ‘What’s in it for me?’ taking over from ‘How can I help?’.
The problem is exacerbated by groups with careless, inept leadership. Organisations that want to reach out and need volunteers, need competent, generous warm people at the helm. The grey, self righteous, egotistical and bureaucratic quickly sour people and chase the willing and creative away. You may think your organisation is worthy and does a job that needs to be done but does the community agree with you? Does the community even have a clear idea about what you do? Are the aims and role of your organisation codified and clear in the minds of your management team? Have you examined them lately?
If you are getting paid for what you do and enlisting volunteers to help you. You have a special responsibility. You will be taking the credit for what your organisation does with your superiors and peers. Be very sure to acknowledge your volunteers
Boards and Committees of management that use volunteers – be very careful what you ask them to do. Is it the best use of their time? Is the job leading to a well considered outcome. Have you scoped the project with an expert? Have you consulted the community at large? Are you providing adequate resources in support – tools, clothing, food, drink, first aid and public acknowledgement? \

Some issues to consider for management committees-
You want to run a fund raiser, – you decide to run a cake stall. A volunteer volunteers 90 minutes of time and $10.00 on the ingredience and then some one volunteers two hours of their time selling it. You sell it for $2.00 a slice = $16.00. Cost of cake including (notional) labour costs and on costs = $40.00 plus fraction of the sellers donated time. It would have been more economic and volunteer useful to ask the person to donate the cost of the cake and your committee use the volunteer’s time for something of a more lasting value
Do you realistically acknowledge the contribution of your volunteers? You run a sausage sizzle or a market stall or even a market….. You use ten volunteers for 6 hours and you make $2,000. Your volunteers have effectively donated $200 each (minus on-costs) to your organisation, because without them you would not have the funds. The people who purchased items walked away with something of value. Your volunteers used their very valuable time to raise money for the organisation. Be careful how you spend it! Be very careful how personal, extensive and fulsome is your praise for your volunteers. They might not do it again.
Considering a fund raising option? An important point to consider – if you apply a monetary value to your volunteers time as an hourly rate. Say $15.00 per hour. Will the amount of work undertaken in hourly/dollar terms be equal or similar to the amount raised or the value of the job done? Is the outcome worth it? Is it a sensible project or are you just burning out your volunteers?
Enlisting volunteers to do a job? Have you got the right tools available, are your plans complete, is it scoped for safety? On going jobs like web page/news letter editors – is your committee supplying them with regular interesting and informative material? The tough jobs like secretary and treasurer – is the committee right behind them and offering support?
As a community organisation how do you relate to your volunteers? A two line general ‘thank you’ form-letter doesn’t cut it, you need to acknowledge your volunteers, by name if practical, both at your events and in publications like The Clarion. You need to make sure your workers are cared for when they are working for you.. Contacting your membership only when you want something, doesn’t cut it. Consult with your membership/volunteers about what they might want to do or see done. Position the aims and activities of your organisation to be in line with the aspirations and needs of your community. Run your organisation in an open and transparent way. Be fair, nepotism and playing favourites turns people off. Taylor the activities of your organisation to make it easier for your volunteers to do what they have to do. Maybe volunteers are not volunteering for your group because there really is nothing in it for them!
Are you considering volunteering? There are really two sorts of voluntary organisations that need volunteers. Bestow your valuable time carefully.

1. An organisation that is raising funds primarily for the benefit of the organisations members.
2. An organisation raising funds for the community at large or specific cause with community benefit.

In this community there are still many individuals who work tirelessly for the community, filling many roles and in many ways. I would like to pay tribute and give thanks, on behalf of all of us, to all you people who volunteer.
This year has been the busiest for many years.
We have done a great deal and we have done well.
Keep the faith, keep volunteering and use your collective voice to keep your organisers on track and not wasting your time.
Happy New Year

People who put themselves up for election and people who are aspirational inside bureaucracies  feel themselves (often quite rightly) to be inadequate personally. In order to bolster there own sense of worthlessness they must exercise their power. They do this over the helpless and the vulnerable because they are not a threat. The reason for power is power.

We need a new paradigm!

REDUCE LANDFILL SHOP LOCALLY

Life is busy and fraught with incident.  There are many calls on our time.  For those  of us trying to apply the notion of sustainability to our middleclass, Australian, sophisticated 21st Century lives the pressure increases further. We are told to recycle, compost, mulch, reuse our grey water and watch our rubbish – the list goes on and on.  Here is an opportunity to stop doing something and  contribute hugely to the health of our local environment and by example possibly nationally.  I am talking about landfill.  I am talking about stuff!  In the end I am talking about shopping.   What got me thinking about this was Christmas. I was  in Melbourne contemplating the shopping madness and  thinking about Christmas Day

…….   The extended family gathered around the tree and presents distributed.  As they are unwrapped, depackaged, examined and exclaimed over one of the first things that strikes – none of the presents had any immediate everyday use,  most of them were made primarily from plastic, most of them would be broken before six months were up, some would be in the opshop or on Ebay within the week, nearly all of them were made in China or nearby and not one of them would have added significantly to the quality of life of any of the recipients.   Selecting gifts is often difficult as people usually already have  what they actually need and you have to find something that might grab their attention or pique their amusement gene.  Anyway, most importantly nearly all of them are on a pretty straightforward journey to rapidly becoming landfill from the moment they leave the shop. There are whole shopping franchises dedicated to the fulfilment of this journey.   Then there was after – the clearing up – large rubbish bags are filled with plasticized paper, packing and plastic bubble packs that went straight into the wheelie bin.   From Christmas to landfill.   If you apply the above statistically to Mallacoota – that is at least 600 bags of gift wrapping paper and packaging to the tip on the first pick up after Christmas.  Then over the year there are the presents or the items that the presents replaced.  Say between another 500 and 600 bags.

No doubt in retribution for some heinous crime in a previous reincarnation I found myself in Chadstone Shopping Centre.  In a vain attempt to find my way out I passed shop after shop that were selling things that no one really needed, made out of materials that couldn’t be easily replaced, whose manufacturing processes damaged the environment and available at prices most people could only ‘afford’ on credit.  Not only that but the items themselves were all designed and manufactured deliberately to ”wear out” rapidly, usually by the failure of some deliberately weak component (say a weak buckle on a shoe or a plastic pivot used on a moving part where it should have been metal) and  neither the designer, the manufacturer or the sellers had in place any economic or safe way of disposing of them.  They would go to landfill where their irreplaceable construction materials would be lost to our civilization and in some case leak noxious chemicals or exude toxic gases that are inimical to it and the rest of life on our planet.   There is also a simply huge amount of landfill manufactured as spinoff products from media, promotional and sports events .  I received a plug for the  sink as a promotional item from East Gippsland Water that leaked so badly I gave it to the dog to dispose of.  Have you noticed how most of those promotional water bottles given out for one thing and another always leak all over everything after a few trips in the school bag and have to be chucked?

Ever thought about pencils?  They are perfect.  Consider – the pencil is made of natural materials, it is simple to adjust to your specifications,  it is multifunctional  – you can write a novel, mark up some carpentry or draw a picture, it needs no special care, it takes minimum special skills to operate it, it disappears as you use it, it is completely biodegradable, there are no hard to use, unwanted and expensive designer frills or special features – though it will work underwater and upside down or even in perfect vacuum on the Moon (it cost NASA a million dollars to try and develop a pen that would work in outer space until someone pointed out the functionality of the pencil), you can buy it without special packaging  and it is cheap.  It doesn’t need batteries.  It’s one downside is the point will break if physically abused   Aren’t pencils wonderful?   Consider them in comparison with its technological alternative tool – the ball point pen.  It is made almost entirely of plastic, you cannot adjust its performance in anyway, the plastic refill and tube are constructed in a complicated way to deliver a few grams of toxic ink to an applicator that a prone to failure – most pens stop working before they run out of ink, if stored or carried carelessly they leak and/or stop working.  They are relatively expensive. Even if you buy a packet of cheap pens made in China the ‘run time’ of the whole packet will be similar to the ‘run time’ of one more expensive higher quality product and 10 times more landfill.  So, why would you ever buy a pen – except to sign checks?   What about setting up a ‘Pencil Standard’ on the items you buy.  Apply the pencil test to potential purchases in relation to its construction materials, manufacturing methods, functionality,  packaging, reliability, cost and importantly disposability.   Think of some of the everyday things people buy-

Soft Drink – if everyone in Mallacoota  buys one bottle of soft drink a week that is a 1,000 multiplied by 52 (The population of Mallacoota was recorded at 972 at the 2006 census and must have gone up by at least 28 by now) equals  a staggering 52,000 plastic bottles a year.  Multiply that by region, state, nationally and internationally and the brain explodes.  Consider the ‘pencil’ alternatives: cordial – reduces the number of plastic bottles used by about 75% and the cost by 90%.  If you make your own cordial costs are reduced by about 85% with all the waste organic.

Deli – we buy our deli in disposable plastic tubs, if each house-hold took in a container to put their deli selections in there we would save the use of approx 600 plastic tubs a week (Census figures  ‘ Family households accounted for 61.9% of total households’) – 35,000 tubs a year.  Similarly  meat and vegetables bought loose rather than in plastic trays,  food cooked from fresh ingredients rather than processed/frozen all reduce the volume of our landfill.

Gifts – this is tricky.  While it is amusing to buy someone a plastic wine cask carrier in the shape of a cow and gives the person who receives it a bit of a laugh.  Quickly the novelty value wears out and it ends up on the way to landfill.  It is common for these items to be manufactured in the tens or hundreds of thousands – sometimes in the millions – all of which quickly ends up in the rubbish.  So when buying gifts, especially ‘novelty’ items the ‘pencil test’ is very important if you want to reduce our landfill.  These days it is possible to buy non corporeal gifts – rather than buying someone a DVD buy them a download coupon to a web DVD shop , same for music – purchase the music from the website of the performer (this is especially important  for independent Australian artists – the money goes direct to the artist).  You can purchase software the same way.  Rather than giving a magazine subscription get an e-subscription that delivers the magazine to your friends computer in a searchable form – no storage problems, cheaper, a few less dead trees and no landfill.  Talking Books from Áudible.Com are a great way to enjoy books while you are driving.   For the person who has everything you can buy on their behalf a goat for an impoverished refugee or an education for a third world child.

Buy Local. You could buy a gift voucher from one of our gift shops – this would mean the loved one could choose what they would like and no wrapping paper to landfill.  If you think you are sure you know what they would like buy local and (if you are wrong) they can easily exchange it and save the gift from landfill. Why not give subscriptions to your local radio station 3MGB or the Mallacoota Arts Council? Season tickets to local shows, boat trips  from local boat charters or locally made art works, crafts or photography. You can buy gift cards for Itunes from the Post Office. Then of course there is always fruit, flowers or chocolate!

Packaging – More controversially in some European countries it is the ultimate responsibility of the manufacturers to be responsible for the disposal of their packaging which caused a major revolution in retailing in those countries. This is not likely to happen in Australia in the foreseeable future. However there has been a 5 cent surcharge on beverage bottles in South Australia for over 25 years which has greatly  reduced roadside litter and landfill there, when compared to other states in Australia.

Shopping bags – I believe there is some debate on whether the use of the “Green Bags” for  shopping is an improvement on landfill volumes  because the bags themselves do  not last long and take up the equivalent of a lot of plastic bags space-wise and they are also generally not biodegradable while some of the plastic film shopping bags are.

I seem to  have travelled a long way from Christmas in my ruminations.  I don’t want you to get the idea that  I am setting myself as some sort of environmental paragon or a mighty thewed eco warrior, I am not.  I am also not saying at all that shopping is bad on principle just – shop locally- shop carefully.   If we are going to continue our life style in it’s important aspects of health, education and communication then we have to make choices and priorities in how we undertake economic activity.  The thing that got me was how the numbers started to stack up when you went from, ‘What can it matter If I just do it to everyone in Mallacoota saying that.   If we apply ‘the pencil test’ to what we buy, especially for those ‘discretionary’ items, then we can really reduce landfill.   Watch out though. I hear that Apple Corp is planning on making pencils oval in cross section, covering them in pink plastic, calling them Ipencils and selling them for $1,000 each.