Belshaw's World - a few very Sydney things

Note to readers: While I am taking a short posting break, I do want to maintain posting my column on the due date. This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express on Wednesday  24 February 2010. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the Express columns are not on line. You can see all the columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010.

Whatever my sometimes complaints about Sydney, there can be no doubt that this is a city of enormous beauty and variety, as well as sometimes ghastly ugliness.

Thursday last week we went to the St George Open Air Cinema at Mrs Macquarie’s Point. An annual event, the site sits on the edge of the water looking over the harbour to the city and bridge.

The gates open at 6.15, with the film starting at 8.30. Between these times, people eat and drink on the site or picnic nearby in the Botanic Gardens. As night falls, the screen is raised and the film begins.

Then, on Sunday, we went to a birthday lunch at the Boy Charlton Pool on the other side of Mrs Macquarie’s Point overlooking Garden Island and Pott’s Point. Not as visually stunning as the first view, but still very attractive.

I have known Sydney well and for a very long time, probably better than many who have lived in the city their whole lives.

Sydney is a very fragmented city, a sprawling patchwork quilt increasingly divided by geography, ethnicity and culture into individual domains that rarely meet even when together.

I love this diversity.

We used to live at Rosebery. For those who don’t know Sydney, Rosebery is just 6.4k south of the city centre, about ten minutes by road.

This was a small industrial suburb whose residents were primarily Greek migrants who entered the country in the first wave of post war migration. The house we lived in had older Greek couples on three sides, while one of the Aristocrat poke machine factories was just across the road.

Rosebery was in fact poker machine central when we moved in, with three major Aristocrat plants in a few blocks. Two other smaller poker machine suppliers had offices nearby.

Aristocrat’s location was quite convenient from my viewpoint, since at one point I was providing Front Line Management Certificate IV and Diploma level training to staff from Aristocrat’s R&D Division. I could just walk down the road.

Rosebery was also on the edge of shopping central, the collection of factory outlets that stretch down Botany Road and some adjoining streets. Sass & Bide’s head office itself was just down our street, with huge queues of girls stretching along the block each time there was a sale.

This location, from my daughter’s perspective, was a very good thing!

At weekends, the streets were sometimes clogged with buses bringing women from Sydney’s outer suburbs on day trips to sample the various factory outlets. I hadn’t seen this type of shopping tourism before, and found it quite fascinating to watch.

Over the nine years we lived in Rosebery, we watched the suburb change.

To the north, the wave of inner city gentrification and associated medium density development marched steadily out from the city. By the time we left, this wave had penetrated to a few blocks from our street.

Aristocrat closed its plants, moving to North Ryde, while the big RTA facility in nearby Rothschild Avenue closed.

House prices doubled as Sydneysiders discovered Rosebery’s convenience, passing a million dollars for a small three bedroom house. Rents increased by more than 50 per cent.

Eastlakes lies next to Rosebery to the south west, a ten minute walk from our old house. Now we enter a different world, for this must be one of the most ethnically diverse spots in the country.

The Eastlakes shopping centre is Chinese owned and comes complete with Chinese shops and script. There is a small Buddhist temple at the rear entrance.

In the park nearby, young Muslim men from the nearby public housing flats sporting mullet hair styles congregate in the park. There is much inspection of cars and engines.

On the benches inside the shopping centre and in the cafes at the front, older Greek men sit and talk, passing the time of day.

Inside the centre, the checkout operators at the Woolworth’s supermarket come from a dozen nationalities. Girls in headscarves operate check-outs next to Chinese or Indian staff.

An older Greek staff member chats in Greek to the aging Greek customers. A young Indian man tells me about his study plans.

Multiple worlds, all in one city in close proximity. Herein lies part of Sydney’s fascination.

A short break in transmission

I have decided to take a week's break in posting to allow me to catch up on some other things that I need to do. This includes catching up on my email traffic, a few personal things, as well as some other research and writing.

Back quite soon!

Round the New England blogging traps 13 - pastoral

Gaye had a very good post, The Pilliga after rain. The regeneration of our western country after rain is always a miracle. As I sometimes gardener, I also enjoyed My garden.

Leanne's World in Big Weekend carries a story of a family visit to Sydney. Back at the start of the year, she also carried a story about the regeneration of country near Tamworth after rain.

Look at the photo. That's some grass re-growth!

A Hunter Valley blog, Sharyn Munro's The woman on the mountain has recently had some absolutely  great wild life photos. I loved the shots of the wallabies.

A different type of pastoral theme can be found in 18th Century Historical Trekking,1680-1760 (Australia). This blog is a treasure trove of arcane information. One post that struck a chord with me was Primitive Camping, what I think it is and is not. I must write a full post on this one. We are so manicured and controlled today that we have forgotten what it was like to do things simply. At least that's my prejudice!

All for now.

The truth about the Yamba "riots"

Congratulations to Patricia Laurie, The Grafton Daily Examiner and North Coast Voices on this one. Patricia Laurie for putting things in perspective, the Examiner for running the story, North Coast Voices for promoting the truth more widely.

I little while ago I noticed a story in the Sydney about an outbreak of trouble at Yamba. It caught my eye because Yamba has always been a favourite spot for part of my family. Just to add visual interest, this is a shot of Aunt Kay and cousin Jamie at Yamba, 1961.

As is the way with the Sydney media, the story was somewhat sensationalised.  Now Patricia has provided a context.

Some years ago, there was a much bigger outbreak of trouble in Armidale's main street. My thought at the time was thank heavens this wasn't spotted by the Sydney press. Restrained local reporting allowed the matter to be worked through outside the type of sensationalised glare that comes from big city reporting.

And, for the benefit of non New England readers, you are actually far safer in Yamba than you would at the better known Bondi Beach in Sydney. It's not that Bondi is unsafe, just that when you have large numbers of people incidents are more likely to happen.

For those that want to know more, you will find the North Coast Voices post here.   

New England bushie

Just a family photo today. I feel quite written out.

This shot shows my grandfather, David Drummond, at Forglen near Armidale. Quite the bushy isn't he?

A few things to notice.

The cables going into his top right pocket are his hearing aide.

He became almost totally deaf as a young man. Yet he managed to enter politics when all he could use to overcome deafness was a hearing trumpet.

The dog on the right was Ben. As children, we played with Ben, riding on his back. He was then older and slower, with white streaks. We loved that dog, as did Fa.

Blowed if I can work out just what the shot animal is that he is holding in his hand. Perhaps you can help. 

Look at the dead wood in the paddocks, and the tussocky grass. The first was due to clearing, the second the original native pastures. The Northern Tablelands became much more manicured once the native grass was replaced by pasture improvement.  

More tomorrow.   

The fragmentation of NSW

This piece is something of a thought piece, triggered by some recent trends. While I do refer to past posts, I am not giving links. I am simply getting ideas down.

Background

When the NSW Government first released its State Plan, I gave it the credit to take it seriously. I first analysed social and economic trends within New England to create a framework for the analysis of the Plan itself. I then looked at the structure and detail of the Plan itself and compared this with my analysis of New England's needs.

While I gave the Government full credit for its efforts, I concluded that the plan was too bitsy, simply an aggregation of existing targets and performance indicators. Even if every target in the plan was achieved, my conclusion was that its practical effect in meeting New England's needs would be negligible. I note that the Plan is presently being updated. This may change my conclusions.

Subsequently, the NSW Government released a series of strategies focused on actions required to meet projected population growth in Sydney and along the NSW coastal strip. Again I analysed them. I concluded that they were mechanistic. I also doubted that that the population targets were achievable, given that the assumptions seemed to imply a continued drift in population from inland NSW that I thought was unlikely to eventuate. If anything, and taking inland NSW as a whole, I thought that pattern of decline was beginning to reverse itself.

Since I wrote, higher levels of overseas migration have changed the equation somewhat.

Population growth in Greater Sydney has always been heavily determined by the combination of overseas migration with emigration from the city. Sydney has always attracted migrants, although its share of the total Australian migrant intake is, I think, showing signs of structural decline.  At the same time, Sydney has been loosing population for many decades from out-migration to coastal NSW and to Queensland.

Sydney's overall growth depends on the balance between the two. An increase in the rate of natural population combined with very high overseas migration levels means that rate of population growth in Greater Sydney has increased quite noticeably.

Assuming no change to current high levels of overseas migration, no further change in Sydney's share of the total migrant intake and no increase in the rate of emigration from Sydney, the original population projections look more likely. However, I remain cautious.

  If you look at my comments to this point, I am obviously critical of the way the NSW Government approaches its role. However, in saying this I am also conscious of the way in which the progressive fragmentation of NSW, something unique to NSW, has progressively constrained the freedom of the NSW government. Sydney still tries to manage NSW as though it was a meaningful unit, whereas it is in fact a a political and statistical construct made up of increasingly disparate parts.

It is this issue of fragmentation that I want to address in this post.

The Marchland Concept

In looking at the geographic basis of support for the New England New State Movement, the geographer Eric Woolmington suggested that this was greatest where the relative spheres of influence of Sydney and Brisbane overlapped. Using catchment analysis based on population distributions, he defined a theoretical boundary. This placed much of the Northern Rivers and the Northern Tablelands within the Brisbane sphere.

He then used a variety of measures to identify the actual boundary of influence. This placed the boundary much further north, if south of the formal geographic boundary. He concluded that the strongest new state support lay in the geographic area between the theoretical boundary and the formal boundary, with support rising as the formal boundary was a approached.

Similar analysis can be applied to the Riverina, the other area of NSW with sustained support for home rule. In the case of the Riverina, there is a further rough measure that you can use, the sporting boundary between Australian Football and Rugby League.

With time, the spheres of influence of Melbourne and especially Brisbane have expanded, moving north and south respectively. Increasingly, NSW Government policy and service delivery has to take into account Victorian and Queensland needs and positions.

Rise of the ACT

The real kicker in all this is the rise of the ACT, a rise concealed in part by State based statistics.

The following map shows what is now called the Australian Capitol Territory region. This is the area now classified as falling under the influence of metropolitan Canberra where coordinated action is required between the NSW, ACT and local governments. To put numbers on it, around 351,000 people live in Canberra, a further 256,000 people live in NSW in local government areas classified as belonging to the Australian Capital Territory Region, 607,000 people in all.                

The ABS population projections based on various alternative assumptions suggest that by 2056 the ACT's population will be in the range 374,000 to 683,000.

The lower figure is simply not credible given a current estimated population of 351,000. Canberra will grow as the Commonwealth Government grows, even allowing for a spill-over of population into adjoining regions. If the ACT were to reach 683,000 and if the surrounding area were to grow at the same rate, we are looking at an ACT region population of around 1.2 million sitting just next door to the Sydney conurbation. 

Impact of Fragmenation

The overall impact of the processes that I have been talking about can be summarised in this way.

In the North, the Tweed and Richmond River valleys are increasingly affected by and to a degree integrated into the growing SE Queensland conurbation. You can actually see this in some of the language used by the NSW Government. The traditional term Northern Rivers has dropped from use, with the Clarence River Valley increasingly classified as Mid North Coast. For planning purposes, the NSW Government now classifies the Richmond and Tweed Valleys as Far North Coast, while the Clarence Valley is Mid North coast.

In the South East, Canberra has increasingly become the driver. However, there real oddities here:

• Sometimes, the NSW portion of the ACT region - the South East - is called the South East and seems to be classified as coastal in NSW official material, when the coastal strip itself only has 29.5% of the NSW region's population. This actually distorts statistics and approach.
• Then, for NSW planning purposes, the South Coast is defined as Bega and Eurobodalla LGAs (Capital Region) plus Shoalhaven to the North. This is pretty much the traditional definition of the South Coast equivalent to the old definition of the North Coast as the coast north of the Hunter Valley. Also for planning purposes, there is another regional classification called the Sydney-Canberra corridor which includes six of of the 15 or so LGAs in the Australian Capital Region plus an Alpine Strategy focused on the resorts. The missed country LGAs appear to fall outside the land use planning process.    

Then to the west of the ACT region we have the area along the Murray increasingly affected by Victoria. This is covered by a Murray Planning Strategy that does explicitly recognise the need for integration on both side of the river.

Even at this level of analysis you can see how confused, confusing and fragmented the whole thing has become.

If we look at the rest of the state land-use planning documents, there are strategies for the illawarra, Metropolitan Sydney, Central Coast and Hunter. This means that planning documents exist for the full coastal strip that generally follow traditional geographical boundaries except, as already noted, in the Northern Rivers area.

All of the state west of the Dividing Range is, with the exception of those areas actually covered by existing plans such as Murray and the Sydney-Canberra corridor simply lumped as Western with a plan to be developed. This makes no geographic sense at all.

This has become quite a long post and has taken a fair bit of time to write. I have a fair bit more material, but this can wait.   

Belshaw's World - losing country connection

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express on Wednesday  17 February 2010. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the Express columns are not on line. You can see all the columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010.

Given that I’m now living in Sydney, I get my Express’s with something of a lag, sometimes I don’t get them at all. It seems that someone in the postal system must like the paper because sometimes all I get is the wrapper!

This makes it difficult to respond to letters to the editor.

To John Bergin first.

At the risk of causing acute distress to my editor, if you write a letter to the editor setting out in more detail where people can find out information about the constitutional structures and implications of different Republican options, I promise to run it on my New England blog as a straight information piece. .

To Dr Fidlon who challenged my constitutional interpretation in Crisis in the Westminster System.

Now I may be wrong, but I think that you are confusing adjourn and prorogue. However, I need to check my own facts.

Turning to other things.

Each year at the start of the new school term I start getting hits from students on the various blog posts I have written on the poetry of Judith Wright. One of my posts drew a very strong response from an anonymous student. I quote:

“Judith Wright, writes about nothing, she created pictures not poems, and as a painter she seems to be rather shitty. I was googling for a school project, i ovbiously have my own opinions on her but this is just a load of bullshit, you think u can relate with her? she creates PICTURES of LANDSCAPE. you relate with a landscape? your a rock? or a fucking tree? or a wave, congrats.”

I limited my response to “City boy are we anon?”. However, it got me thinking further on a topic I have written on before.

I have a very strong sense of country and country side. It may not be quite the same as the Aboriginal sense of country because it lacks the mystic connection with place and object, but it is still very strong.

Growing up, I knew the precise point just to the west of Armidale at which the vegetation switched from Tablelands to Western Slopes.

Driving home to Armidale from the south over the years, suddenly, the cleared tablelands of Kentucky emerged at a particular hill. I was home in my immediate country.

In posts like the colours of New England - http://newenglandaustralia.blogspot.com/2009/09/colours-of-new-england.html - I have tried to capture and explain this sense of country.

When I look at anon’s comment, he (I assume that it’s a he) has captured the fact that Judith Wright’s poetry does indeed provide pictures of a landscape. However, given my sense of country, I then really struggle with his suggestion that one cannot relate to a rock or a tree or a wave. He seems quite alien.

In some ways and on some topics I may be a boring old fart. My family and friends quickly recognise and move away hastily when I fall into a particular lecturing mode.

Yet I do worry that, as a country, we are losing our sense of country.

Modern Australia is a very urbanised society in which the majority of people live remote from the countryside. I see this all the time because it affects every aspect of life and thinking.

At personal level, people’s knowledge of their country has shrunk. They lack the context to understand local events elsewhere, let alone key discussions that depend upon country knowledge.

At policy level, people pontificate without taking into account the almost infinite variety in life across the continent. Governments impose generalised national or state based solutions that simply cannot work given local variety.

Most importantly in all this, too many Australians have lost the joy that comes from actually understanding what it is to identify with the rhythms and detail of the country.

Sorry for the lecture on this. I told you that my family and friends move away when I get into this mode!

Postscript:

I have checked my facts on the points raised by Dr Fidlon in response to my column Belshaw's World - crisis in the Westminster system. I was wrong in my understanding of prorogue, although I don't think that it affects the substance of my argument. I have set the facts out as I understand them in a post on my personal blog, Problems with prorogation.

Continuing troubles at Bellingen Hospital

Just a very short one today.

I see that the problems faced by Bellingen Hospital have now made the Sydney Morning Herald. Reading this story and all the previous stories over recent months, I do wonder about the North Coast Area Heath Service.

I don't mean anything sinister by this, nor is it a criticism. It's a genuine question.

Looking back, it's an interesting case of a problem that seems to have spiraled out of control. The Area Heath Service has made several statements and has apparently sent representatives to Bellingen, but things just seem to get worse.

I don't believe that North Coast Area Health Service staff are either incompetent or uncaring, yet they really seem to have been blind-sided. In saying this, I accept that I am working from imperfect information.

The North Coast Area Health Service is a big organisation. I do wonder whether in trying to run a big system under financial constraints that effectively force them to rob Peter to pay Paul, the small Bellingen Hospital was simply so far down the pecking order that they couldn't focus until too late. And then they tried to temporise.

Looking at the newspaper reports on obstetric services, for example, the Area Health Service appears to have stated that it did not intend to close them, but were struggling to find trained staff. There were no reports that I found that explain what they were doing to resolve the problem. In the meantime, obstets at Bellingen has been effectively closed.

From the viewpoint of locals, there appears to have been a constant gap between official statements and the way that things are actually working out on the ground. The result is a loss of trust.

In saying all this, I emphasise again that I am working from limited knowledge. While I know a bit about the world in which the North Coast Area Health Service has been forced to work, I simply don't know enough about its internal workings to be sure of the dynamics.

Tamworth GPs close their books

The Tamworth Statistical District - this includes the main urban area and its immediate surrounds - had a population of 42,499 at the 2006 census, so we are not talking about a small centre.

The Northern Daily Leader now reports that existing Tamworth GPs have effectively closed their books, unable to accept new patients. The story takes place at the same time as debate about the future of Bellingen Hospital reaches a new peak (here and here). As an aside, the Save Bellingen Hospital Facebook page has now reached 2,440 fans!

The NDL story includes some very thoughtful comments from Graeme Kershaw, CEO of the North West Slopes Division of General Practice.

I thought that I might take Graeme's comments as an entry point for some comments of my own, focusing on the different elements of the complicated mess we have created for ourselves. These draw from my own experience as CEO of a specialist medical college, as well as later work force analysis.

Graeme refers to the monumentally stupid decision of the Federal Government to cut back on the number of places for doctors in training back in the 1990s. Then Minister for Health Michael  Michael Wooldridge concluded that there were too many GPs and that this was leading to over-servicing, increasing Medicare costs. Training places were cut as a result.

While this was a silly decision, Graeme is correct to suggest that it is only part of the problem. He says first:

“Many trainee doctors are going into the specialities like surgery and internal medicine – not surprising really; while they are training in hospitals they are taught by these same specialties that encourage them to follow in their footsteps”

“Even in doctors who are raised and trained in rural areas, up to 50 per cent choose not to become GPs.”

Let's disentangle this one a little.

In general, not always, specialists get more money than GPS and attract higher prestige, so it's understandable that doctors, and especially those with an academic bent, should be interested in specialisation.

The attempt to create a speciality of general practice has not, to my mind, worked very well. This "specialisation" has in fact added to the hoops that those interested in general practice have to jump through, without affecting the relativities between general practice and the more traditional specialities. To this extent, it may have actually reduced the incentive to become a GP.

I can't judge the validity of the comment on rural training without knowing the equivalent figures for metro trainees.

The extension of medical training at non-metro universities is actually quite recent. My feeling is that things such as the new rural medicine course run by the Universities of Newcastle and New England in combination will have a positive impact.

A central problem, one that applies even more to longer specialist training, is the interaction between partner and family formation and the location and length of training.

People acquire partners from those they are in contact with. As time passes, it is more likely that partner relationships will become long term, including marriage and kids. Increasingly, locational decisions have to take partner considerations into account.

It seems clear that metro born kids are less willing to move to regional areas than country kids. The longer the training in metro centres with their heavy preponderance of metro students, the more partnerships form, the less likely subsequent movement.

This actually affects less prestigious areas in the metro centres as well, with surpluses of doctors and other health professionals in some areas, major deficits in others.

Graeme continues:    

Doctors from the “baby boomer” generation received their medical education for free.

“Generations X and Y come out of their training with large HECS debts to repay and they won’t feel the same obligation to the give back to the community that ‘boomers’ once did,” Mr Kershaw said.

This one is hard to measure, although I suspect that Graeme is right. People are influenced by a sense of altruism and community obligation. If you have paid for yourself, the obligation is reduced.

Graeme then looks at service cut backs in local hospitals:

A lot of hospitals in small communities no longer provide obstetric services locally, so they won’t attract the type of rural doctor they once would; someone who wants to deliver babies as well as look after the diabetes and the heart problems.

This is part of the Bellingen Hospital case. Take obstetrics away, and you reduce the practice range of local doctors. However, there is a broader issue as well.

The "specialisation' of medicine in combination with changing approaches to medical indemnity has reduced the willingness and probably capacity of GPs to provide certain services. My tonsils were removed by a GP. Today my parents would have taken me to a specialist. That's fine, but doesn't help much if a specialist is not available.

Graeme finishes:    

“GPs are treating much more complex problems, often associated with long-term diseases, than they were 10-20 years ago,” Mr Kershaw said.

“They are doing this at a time when hospitals are developing therapies that mean that people are not in hospital as long as they used to be, and they are discharged back into the care of their GP.

“As a result, GPs cannot see as many people per day as they may have been able to 20 years ago and so, with less people seen and less doctors available, waiting times are increasing.

“GPs realise that they have an ongoing obligation to their existing patients and because of this, have to stop taking new patients.”

Again, I suspect that Graeme is right and the that the problem is going to get worse with an aging population. This adds to the complications, especially in inland areas with limited doctors and an aging population. 

ABC and music in country Australia

Paul Barratt had two very interesting posts on the role that the ABC played in bringing music to country Australia: The ABC and music to country Australia and Isaac Stern and the town hall piano.

As it happened, the print edition of The Armidale Express has just carried a story - it's not on-line - of the expenditure by Armidale-Dumaresq Council of a rather large sum of money to have the piano that Paul referred to in the second story restored to proper concert standard.     

Today is music is far more available than it was then. The impact of the ABC concerts was indeed quite profound. Unlike Paul, I am not an especially musical person, but I still enjoyed them.

As I read  the story, I thought of one of Paul's class mates at The Armidale School, Philip Bailey.    

After taking degrees in Agricultural Economics and in Education, Phil became a teacher. From 1974, he taught in Britain for two years before joining the staff of violinist Yehudi Menuhin.  Over the next twenty two years, Phil and partner Tim Coupland (Tim was in my year at TAS) served the Menuhins in various capacities. Between these commitments, they established an antique restoration business in London, an enterprise generously supported by both Yehudi and wife Diana.

The photo shows Philip Bailey with Yehudi Menuhin at NASA's Apollo lunar mission launch site on Cape Canaveral, Florida, during filming of The Music of Man television series.

Phil has just published the first, Yehudiana, Reliving the Menuhin Odyssey, of a two part series on the violinist's life tracing the Menuhin odyssey from anti-Semitic pogroms of late nineteenth-century Russia to 1947 on the eve of Yehudi's second marriage. 

When I look at my the people I knew at school, the different directions we have all gone never ceases to amaze me.