On my hallway wall, I have a framed canvas map of Melbourne in 1956, the year we hosted the Olympics, and the year before my mother arrived in Australia.

It’s a fascinating map. It is colour coded by municipality, according to the cities and shires which existed prior to the Kennett government’s council amalgamations of the mid 1990s, giving the viewer an idea of the ancient council areas of Greater Melbourne which are now long gone.

A close look at Footscray shows that the tram network in my home town was slightly more extensive back then, with offshoots down Barkly Street all the way to the West Footscray village and down Ballarat Road til Rosamond Road, and the main line zigzaging from its present day terminus in Leeds Street through Seddon until Williamstown Road.

My high school, from which I matriculated (yes, I like using a quaint term more accurate than ‘graduated’ in the context of high school education) over 33 years ago, is not on the map. There is a quarry marked on most of the land that was, the following year, to become that school.

The street where I currently live, in Avondale Heights, is not on this map. The subdivision did not occur until 1963, and most of Avondale Heights was still market gardens then (I remember there still being a market garden off Canning Street near the bridge in the late 1980s). Avondale Heights then was part of what was still known as the Shire of Keilor (it was not proclaimed as a City til 1961), so technically I suppose you could argue that where I am now sitting was still out in the countryside then, just past the outskirts of Melbourne.

Parishes and Counties, which have no meaning in modern Australia, but which were created in the original colonial division of the land in the 1840s, are also marked on the map. I already knew that most of Melbourne is situated in the County of Bourke (I think it is mentioned on my land title), but I had only a vague idea that my parish is Doutta Galla, and that Sunshine is in the parish of Derrimut. And there you were, thinking only that Derrimut was that bogan pub near Sunshine Railway station and that Doutta Galla was that other pub on Racecourse Road in Flemington….

The population of Melbourne in 1956 was a shade over 1,500,000 people, quite a lot under the 2,300,000 or so who lived here in the 70s and 80s, and far less than the 5,100,000 estimated to live here now, in early 2020.

The skyline of Melbourne has drastically changed in recent years. When I walk down Canning Street, I can see two tall apartment towers in West Maribyrnong, two kilometres away, as well as an abundance of skyscrapers further away, both in the Hoddle Grid which is the CBD and just outside it in Docklands. I do not know the names of most of those new buildings, which have sprouted like mushrooms in recent years. When it was completed in 1976, Nauru House was the tallest building in Melbourne (now it ranks 24th). Now, without fanfare, there is a slightly taller building nearing completion right next to it, where I doubted there was enough room for any further construction.

The Hoddle Grid and its surrounds have changed a lot. Approximately 200,000 people work there, and approximately 40,000 currently live there, mostly in recently constructed apartments. This is a far cry from 1984, when only 500 people lived in the CBD, mostly in loft apartments in older commercial buildings in the smaller streets and laneways.

Whilst predicting the future is an awfully difficult task (as my attempts to win the lottery ruefully attest), it is likely that Melbourne will overtake Sydney as Australia’s largest city in coming years – possibly as early as 2026.

What does all this mean? I am old enough now to realise that bigger is not always better. The median house in Melbourne costs something like nine or ten times the median salary, and more and more people are living in apartments and units, rather than in houses. People are increasingly becoming slaves to the mortgage beast for longer and longer.

Suburban backyards are disappearing, as housing blocks get demolished and subdivided into two or three townhouses, depending on the size of the block. This is not a great social development in terms of raising families – kids need space to play.

Nor it is great environmentally. Having land with trees around one’s house is good for keeping a suburb cool in the summer heat, and provides habitat for possums, fruit bats, reptiles, birds, and other creatures. A megacity with high population density housed in apartment towers is going to be more artificial and less healthy than a city where most denizens reside as I do, in a house with a front yard and a back yard. I enjoy complaining about possums and getting the creeps when fruit bats haunt my fig tree in late summer. Take out the suburban backyard and you lose a lot of the trees which absorb pollution and which make city life more bearable.

Melbourne has been considered, until very recently, the most liveable city in the world. Now, with the population and population density starting to rise rapidly, housing affordability continuing to diminish, and our transport and road infrastructure struggling to keep up, there is a lot to worry about.

And if that is not enough, remember that the last time Melbourne added a water reservoir was the Hume in 1982, when the population was less than half what it is now. True, it was a massive reservoir, as big as all the others put together, but more thought needs to be given to what happens when our population outpaces the water capacity we currently have.

I would much rather live in Melbourne than elsewhere, and I am particularly grateful for living in an intermediate suburb surrounded on three sides by the Maribyrnong River, especially as there are development limitations in my area which prevent high-rise from eventuating here (yet).

But if our town planners are not careful (and I am not optimistic about either planning ministers or local councillors making the best decisions) we are going to see a downward spiral in the quality of our lives in Melbourne. It could happen very quickly, given the rapidity of our population growth, the constant construction of taller apartment blocks in the suburbs, and the smaller size of housing blocks in housing developments in the new outer suburbs.

Where should I start when writing about the end of the world? Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut is a good place to begin.

You see, in the last decade of the Cold War, the 1980s, I was a teenager. One of my favourite cousins was an English teacher then, and hence influenced a lot of my reading. In the summer limbo at the end of 1986 and early in 1987 after my HSC exams, whilst I was anxiously waiting to find out whether I had passed my HSC and then whether I was accepted into university (the odds at my school tended to be rather long on either outcome), I borrowed an omnibus collection of Kurt Vonnegut novels from my cousin and voraciously consumed them. Mother Night. Slaughterhouse 5. Player Piano. Breakfast of Champions. The Sirens of Titan. And finally, Cat’s Cradle.

My relationship with the writings of Vonnegut is an ambivalent one. I am both compelled and repelled by his stated ideas. He seems to be both more pessimistic and misanthropic than I am, but then, I could be misunderstanding him. He had a very dark and ironic sense of humour.

Cat’s Cradle is the first of his novels (I was eventually to read most of his works, although it took a few years) which has overt eschatological themes to it. [His later work Galapagos arguably is a post-apocalyptic novel narrated by a ghost, so the eschatological themes are past tense.]

The doomsday device, inadvertently developed by an absent minded but equally selfish and amoral scientist, in Cat’s Cradle is Ice Nine. This is a reverse entropy water molecule that freezes all liquid water it comes into contact with, converting them into Ice Nine, which then freezes further liquid water into Ice Nine, and so on exponentially until the entire world’s liquid water is frozen and life can no longer continue.

And so too, we see the latest plague which threatens humanity, Coronavirus, something which it is feared will breach quarantine barriers through the difficulty of detection and spread exponentially, until everyone is infected and dies. Five years ago, Ebola was our big fear, and ten or fifteen years ago, it was SARS and bird flu. Seven hundred years ago, with a lot more grounds for concern (it did wipe out a third of Europe’s population after all), it was the Black Death.

Whilst this new plague is looming, we are beset by bushfires and an angry sixteen year old Scandinavian girl as emissary of climate doom, North Korea continuing to build bombs, Putin apparently building high megaton yield cobalt bombs and the Doomsday clock has been set closer to midnight than at any other time in its history (one hundred seconds to midnight).

I am not going to cry Fake News or Fake Science. The Cold War was a reality to me from when I was ten in late 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan at the same time as China skirmished with Vietnam whilst Iran held US diplomats hostage, right up til the Berlin wall came down in 1989 and I went the following year to a German reunification party (long before I developed my fondness for copious amounts of fine red wine). The 1980s was a far scarier time than now.

What I do want to observe is that we, in Western Civilisation, are long hard wired to expect Doomsday, and have been ever since the Emperor Theodosius imposed Christianity as the mandatory state religion on our pagan ancestors some 1640 or so years ago. Eschatology, the reasoning behind the coming end times, entered our collective consciousness and our thinking alongside the Book of Revelation.

How our ancestors felt about history before then was different. Pagan religion (unless you were Norse, and I doubt that many of my ancestors were that) did not have an end time, or eschatology. The Gods would frolic along in their hedonistic, rapacious and adulterous ways with nary a worry in the world. Ancient historians were interested in recording the past, as a way of keeping the memory of the great deeds of the mighty dead alive (think Herodotus), and perhaps of glorifying the living (Livy, whose patron was Augustus, springs to mind).

History gained its sense of progress from Christianity. In Christian doctrine, there is a sense of continuous progress from the time of creation and the fall from grace through to the first coming of the Messiah and then the end times, when, thanks to the nightmarish visions of St John, the Anti-Christ arises and then the final battle is fought, and then the Day of Judgement comes.

This sense of progress, or eschatological hard wiring, affects us both intellectually and psychologically in inescapable ways.

Intellectually, ideas expressed first by Hegel and then in modified form by Marx, present theories of human development and progress as iron laws of history, independent of God and religion, as if history is a force which is sweeping mankind along to an inevitable final state of being. The ideas of Marxist dialectical progress were countered in the 1960s with the End of Ideology argument advanced by Julien Benda and other intellectuals. Then, in 1989, those ideas were dusted off and represented by neo-Hegelian Frances Fukuyama as the End of History – that liberal-democracy was finally triumphant over all lesser political systems, and that now we had reached the end state of human development. (Well, how is that working out for you?)

Psychologically, and perhaps anthropologically, the foreboding of doom has been prevalent amongst the Hoi polloi a very long time, and with good reason. Soon after the imposition of Christianity Western Civilisation experienced the barbarian invasions which marked the fall of Rome, and then the dark ages, where they were constantly preached to about the end times and the Day of Judgement. And they were conditioned to expect it at any moment. With barbarian invasions, plagues, holy wars, and more invaders, the average villager in medieval Europe had much evidence to expect the end of the world at any moment.

We 21st century first worlders are, unsurprisingly, no different. We are more educated and informed (although we use our computing technology mostly to transmit or watch cat videos rather than for any more useful purpose), and far more materially prosperous than any preceding generations. But with over sixteen centuries of cultural indoctrination into believing that Doom is coming, we are going to believe it.

It might not be the Anti-Christ, although many (most?) Americans believe it will be. But it might be climate change, or an asteroid strike, or a cobalt bomb, or a more full scale nuclear war, or the exhaustion of our resources before human ingenuity has found a way to work around that.

I doubt very much that it will be coronavirus.

But in any event, we are conditioned culturally over a period of fifty consecutive generations to believe in Doomsday. And the lifting of our ignorance does not bring enlightenment. It just brings more threats to our existence, more potential sources of fear.

Fear is a crippling way to exist. I prefer to live in hope – I hope that we are able to find a way out of the various messes we have stumbled into as a species over the course of history. Whether that means I believe in human progress is debatable, but I expect it does. Escaping 1600 plus years of cultural hard wiring is as impossible as converting the world to speak Esperanto.

I was doing coffee yesterday with two of my colleagues, and somehow the topic got onto music. One of my colleagues, being a Western Australian by upbringing, once owned a rare busker tape by the dreadlocked John Butler, which he sold for a handsome sum. He also owns two copies of some rare vinyl pressing of John Butler’s music, which had been limited edition and sold out within a day.

Given that I have no love for the cacophony which is the whiny lefty sound which is John Butler and his trio (although I believe that contrary to his dreadlocked hippy demeanour, Mr Butler is actually a very good capitalist and aggressively defends his intellectual property against music piracy, as well as enjoying making millions from those poor misguided souls who like listening to his noise in concert) I suggested that my friend sell his rare records so that they no longer contaminate his music collection. There are many good things that he could do with the money – buy fine wine, a start on deposit on a Ford Mustang, a small chip off the mortgage, or even add to his already large collection of guitars.

I then was accused of agreeing with Andrew Bolt, the conservative columnist and commentator in the Murdoch Press. Apparently he once wrote a piece attacking the music of John Butler for having some sort of anti-civilisation or anti-life or anti-capitalist or pro-Satanic (that bit I am making up, I think…) theme to it.

That does sting me to the quick. Much as I share a lot of views that are not far off those of Mr Bolt, I get the general feeling that he is rather lacking in either authenticity or sincerity. (I promise you, this blog of mine is nothing if not authentic and sincere in my beliefs and my unique view on the world.) I also tend to see Mr Bolt as unnecessarily dogmatic and polemical, and also, occasionally, as a bit of a killjoy, especially where he decides to share his views about music.

So I pointed out to my colleagues that I enjoy the 1990s band Live (I own most of their albums on CD), and I also enjoyed Ultravox (ie Vienna – I once played one of their post-punk and pre-new-Romantic albums and considered it to be an undecipherable mess). That I like both is very material to this conversation as Mr Bolt had gone to the extent of devoting a column once upon a time to each of these bands where he expounded in great detail why he thought they were worse than awful – they had terrible values!

At which point, my other colleague chipped in with: “I bet he likes Bing Crosby!”

That, in itself, is a pretty good put down on which I might end this posting, except that I deliberately misnamed my blog ‘Lost for words’.

The question begs to be asked as to at what point do you criticise music on the basis of political motives?

Plato, whose political philosophy (which was derived from his epistemology) could be described as proto-totalitarian, wanted to either ban or highly regulate music, as all life, within his Republic, was to be regulated. Actual totalitarians of the past century, able to put their ideas into practice rather than leave them on parchment, have done something along those lines, particularly in the time of Stalinism. Such examples are extreme, but do need to be kept in mind.

After all, music (apart from to the artists who make their living or their riches from it, Ed Sheeran probably being the only busker in the world wealthier than John Butler) does not provide economic or material benefit. It does not result in the growth of food, or production of shelter, or clothing. Nor does it cure cancer. Nor does art or sport. And we do have Killjoys out there, particularly joyless people, who spend much of their time pontificating that we spend too much time celebrating our sporting events, or reviling the vulgar excesses of rock stars, whilst we face problems such as starvation and climate change.

But what music does provide us with, as with sport, literature and art, is joy. What is life like without joy, whether it comes from enjoying the music that fits your tastes, or the thrill of your team winning a sporting victory, or the resonance of a great poem, or gaping at an amazing piece of art, or from something else (love for example)? You can have material sufficiency, in a technocratic and mechanistic and over-regulated sense, and have a totally meaningless and miserable life. Such was the world Orwell presented to us in 1984.

Which takes me back to the issue of overly criticising the lyrics or lifestyles or beliefs of musicians. It is OK to disagree with a musician’s beliefs, or to find their music whiny or annoying or cacophony, or dislike their appearance (although I suppose, if dreadlocks are an issue, I still dislike the music of John Butler whilst I enjoy that of Adam Duritz, even if Counting Crows are way too retro these days). But to do a sanctimonious criticism of musicians based on the filter on one’s political perspective, well, that is a bridge too far, a step more than should be taken on the path to censorship and totalitarianism.

The only way we can function as a society (and indeed as individuals) is to respect our differences and disagreements. We do all need to get along.

And as an example of where I probably disagree with the political viewpoint of a music act, but appreciate their wicked humour and humanity and general creativity, how about you go onto You Tube and find the music video for Kisschasy’s song ‘Opinions Won’t Keep You Warm At Night’. (I bet you were expecting me to recommend any of the songs from Bob Roberts.)

I know very little about gridiron, that sport which Americans call football, and which seems to be a version of Rugby where they wear helmets and throw the ball forward instead of backward.

But I recently decided to adopt an NFL team of my very own, the Cleveland Browns.

I discovered them whilst reading Existential Comics, an online cartoon strip which presents philosophy in the form of cartoons. This particular instalment, ‘In Which Friedrich Nietzsche is a Fan of the Cleveland Browns’, greatly amused me (here is the link below):

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/273

It also touched me (and inspired me – Nietzsche is one philosopher I truly enjoy reading, which probably says something about the tenuousness of my hold on sanity). Being a Footscray boy, I have always barracked for the AFL team now known as the Western Bulldogs (but which I would prefer to call the Footscray Football Club). The Bulldogs are a team which, until the miracle spring of 2016, had not won a premiership since 1954, and had not even played in a Grand Final since 1961. I am very used to being a supporter of the underdogs. I am no fickle or fair weather fan.

And the Cleveland Browns are definitely underdogs. They have not had any success since the heady days of the 1950s, long before the Super Bowl existed. This further Existential Comics instalment points out that the Browns are a ‘factory of sadness’:

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/325

I wanted to express my new found fandom by buying an NFL jersey representing the Browns. So I went to the Highpoint Shopping Centre to the new shop called ‘Stateside’, which sells American sporting merchandise (mostly singlets for the various NBA teams) and I asked the American shop assistant if they sold NFL merchandise. He said that they didn’t normally stock it, but asked which team I wanted. When I replied ‘Cleveland Browns’, he chuckled and shook his head and said ‘No chance’.

But, just like my commitment to the Footscray Football Club, I live in hope for the Browns. We got our premiership miracle in 2016, and I was fortunate enough to see my home town come to life in celebration that night. So too, perhaps even the Browns can win a Super Bowl one day.

I went through my Leo Tolstoy binge when I was about 24. I finally bit the bullet and read War And Peace, and then backed it up with Anna Karenina.

I must say, whilst War And Peace is both epic on the grand scale and deeply moving closer to home, I think, as a novel, I much prefer Anna Karenina.

Similarly, when I turn to another Russian novelist renowned for her lengthy novels, Ayn Rand (whom I binge read at age 20), I must say to the dismay of her devotees (those commonly known either as Ayn Rand Freaks or Randroids, but whom prefer to call themselves Objectivists) that I much prefer The Fountainhead over Atlas Shrugged. The Fountainhead really does work far better as a novel.

Which meant that I was quite pleased this evening when, on dropping off a number of outdated tour guide books at the book exchange at the bus station at Highpoint Shopping Centre, I saw a copy of The Fountainhead recently abandoned there. Now my copy of Atlas Shrugged can have company on my shelf.

It is a Cygnet edition, just like the other Ayn Rand books I have bought over the years (distant years now), and in the middle there is a tearaway postcard where you can send away to the Ayn Rand Institute to learn more about her ideas. Please don’t do that.

I have met several Ayn Rand devotees over the years, and it is very hard to generalise about them, given the one I know best is a highly eccentric and individualistic character, more suited to leading his own personality cult, than to the worship of that other unique individual.

But what I suppose I could say is that quite a few, transfixed with the ideas of Ayn in their late teens, try to emulate, as best they can, what they think would be the behaviour of the heroes in her novels. That is, they repress their own emotions and become rather wooden and almost robotic in their interactions, as if that is the way that John Galt or Howard Roark would behave.

That is, I guess, they ask themselves ‘What would John Galt do?’

As Jerome Tuccille wrote at the start of his 1972 memoir:

It usually begins with Ayn Rand.

The young crusader in search of a cause enters the world of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged as though he were about to engage in unheard-of sexual delights for the first time. He has been warned beforehand. There is no need to search any further. The quest is over. Here is all the truth you’ve been looking for contained in the tightly packed pages of two gargantuan novels.

Whilst I am mostly sympathetic to Libertarian ideas (although, just like Ayn Rand, I vehemently dislike the term Libertarian), there is something both abrasive and wooden about Ayn Rand’s prose and general attitude such as to turn most people off her ideas, and turn her into an almost Dickensian caricature of a real political thinker and writer. (Of course, she is far more entertaining than Robert Nozick – Anarchy, State and Utopia is a great cure for insomnia.)

Looking back with the acquired learning and further reading of three decades, I think that the problem with Ayn Rand is that there is nothing original about her, except in the Walter White way that she has meth-cooked the raw ingredients that have been provided to her by other, greater thinkers. She has the politics of John Locke; the epistemology of Aristotle (interesting that she claims intellectual descent from him, the first empiricist, rather than from Plato, the first rationalist, given the importance of Reason in her oft repeated utterances); the economics of Ludwig Von Mises (who incidentally was a dinner acquaintance of hers); and the attitude of Nietszche (is it an accident that the climaxes of both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are a big explosion – literal in the former and metaphorical in the latter?). All four of those thinkers are far more interesting to read in the original rather than through her interpretation.

To all this, I could add that she has all the charm of the Marlboro Man. Her vehement affirmation that cigarette smoking is pro-life is something that brought her to a rather ironic but apt end.

Yet, there is still something fascinating and compelling about Ayn. It’s why, even though I do not really like her style, I have read a lot of her essays on top of her novels, and the two memoirs her former closest disciples, the Brandens, wrote about their lives with her.

But I guess I would give Jerome Tuccille the last word on Ayn Rand. Towards the end of the last chapter of his memoir, he recalls a TV appearance of Ayn Rand in May 1971 in relation to her views of the ecology movement as being anti-life, anti-man, and anti-mind. His paraphrasing of her words (and my editing of the page of text) appears below:

All of you out zere beyond the age of twenty-nine should get down on your knees every time you zee a smokestack.

Pollution is ze symbol of human achievement. Wizzout technolochy and pollution, man would still be living in ze Stone Age.

Trees, rocks and mountains are nonproductive elements. Zey just sit zere occupying space, creating nozzing of zeir own.

We are locked in a life-and-death struggle between nature and technolochy, between mindless rocks and trees and ze boundless genius of ze human mind.

We’ll build factories on ze beaches and highways over ze oceans. We’ll build a smokestack to ze moon.

It is quite easy to send her up, is it not?

As Tuccille then observes (although that chapter does not end there as the 21 year old me recalled it, but does go on for a few more pages):

Ayn, you sweet, lovable, crazy bitch. Don’t tell me it usually ends with you too!

I doubt that I would ever make a good music critic. A bloke at work whom I sometimes manage is a drummer, and one of the bands he was in happened to be ARIA nominated (he refuses to clarify which one exactly it was), and whilst one of my friends from the office assures me that this bloke is Australian musical royalty, I have heard of hardly any of the acts he has worked with (and of those that I have, I do not know the music of Tex Perkins nor Dave Graney).

I get great pleasure in stirring this brooding musician with overdone talk of my fondness for bubblegum pop like Nikki Webster (I don’t actually like that stuff, but it is good material for some good natured provocation), or the exciting news that Lindsay Lohan is about to release her third album (I actually did not know that she did anything of note anymore except take lots of party drugs in night clubs).

As I mentioned in a post a few days ago, I was in the Countdown Generation. I relied on Countdown for most of my knowledge of music in the 1980s, and I knew very little about anything that was not on Countdown or on 3XY radio.

Which is as good as way as any to segue into not really knowing anything about Jefferson Airplane until very recently.

I think, when listening to Casey Casem, the DJ formerly known as the voice of Shaggy from Scooby Doo, presenting the American Top 40 on Sunday nights on 3XY circa 1984, I first heard the name Jefferson Starship. Some song by them was played by Casey, but I paid it no heed.

It was the following year, when they dropped the Jefferson and became simply Starship, that ‘We Built This City’ with all its hard pop (or is it soft rock?) rhythms burst onto the airwaves, the first of several instantly popular (but inherently appallingly vacuous) songs that stormed the charts (remember ‘Nothing’s gonna stop us now’ or ‘Sarah’? No? Good!).

And that was how I first became acquainted with the music of Grace Slick, co-lead vocalist of Starship, and formerly the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, by then the distant ancestor of Starship, who had led the smooth slow moving wave of psychedelic rock in the late 1960s, around the time I was born.

Sad to say, I am not very musically curious. Because they were not played on the radio for some strange reason (I wonder why), I know next to nothing about the music of The Ramones, The Grateful Dead, Motley Crüe or The Violent Femmes. Likewise, I only really discovered psychedelic rock about five years ago, when a colleague dragged me along one boozy Friday night after work to an Ethiopian cafe in Footscray, crowded predominantly with late baby boomers, to listen to a local psychedelic rock cover band. They were good, really getting that elusive sound of psychedelic rock just right, making me feel like I had been at Monash Uni 20 years earlier than when I had actually studied there.

It also got me very curious to discover more about psychedelic rock. For that, Apple Music (which I am hopeless at navigating) proved to be pretty useful.

Which led me to White Rabbit, and the band that performed it, Jefferson Airplane. And inevitably to another side of Grace Slick, whom I only knew from Starship.

There are such darkly beautiful brooding lyrics in White Rabbit, like:

‘And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you’re going to fall

Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call

And call Alice, when she was just small.’

Sixteen years is a long time – from 1969 when that song was a hit, to 1985, when Starship burst out again with their insipid soft rock sound (although there was nothing insipid about Grace Slick’s strong vocalising, even then), was my entire lifetime to that point in time. We went from Apollo 11 to the eve of the Challenger disaster, from the bowels of the Vietnam War to the last few years of the Cold War. We went from a time of hippies to the age of yuppies.

And we went from the beautiful music that Grace Slick wrote and sang in her prime to Bernie Taupin’s formulaic hits.

I think it is really sad. Much as I am a very conservative person, I find it a tragedy that the hippies faded away the way they did, and that the troubadours and minstrels who sang the anthems of an angry generation at Woodstock then sold out and gave my own generation such insipid tunes.

Grace Slick never believed in singing into her old age. She retired gracefully, and her voice has not been heard in many years. Perhaps, it would have been better if she had stopped after Woodstock, long before Jefferson Airplane reinvented itself into the musical space wreak (morbidly apt given NASA in early 1986) that was Starship.

I’m what is commonly known as from Generation X. Here in Australia, we could also be called the Countdown Generation. Countdown was a popular one hour weekly music show on the ABC from 1974 to 1986, hosted by former music producer Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum.

It usually featured as guest host some popular musician or band, had at least one act pretending to perform live in front of the studio audience, a few music videos, a chartbusters segment, and, at the very end, the eponymous countdown of the top ten songs of the week.

Meldrum became well known for his interviews with various rock stars on the show. (His post Countdown interview over a decade later with a visibly stoned and off his face Liam Gallagher still makes me chuckle at the memory.)

In this era, when music videos were first coming into their own, and way before the internet was more than a rocket scientist’s private preserve (to borrow from Joseph Conrad, kids, ‘the darkness was here yesterday’), it was the main way that teenagers like me were to discover new music.

There were other shows too. Channel 7 had the 3 hour long Sounds Unlimited (from 1981 simply Sounds) hosted by Donny Sutherland, and there was a brief attempt on channel 10 in 1982 with something on weekday afternoons called WROK. I guess that music videos made for some very cheap programming options.

What I am getting at is that it is now, for people like me who no longer have a working TV set and haven’t regularly listened to conventional FM radio since the mid 1990s (I once tuned into Fox FM in the mid 2000s just after I had gone through a break up and was disgusted at the lack of empathy of the DJs with the silly fools who rung up to bemoan their love lives, such that I decided it was now far too toxic to listen to) it is hard to discover any new music.

When did I last adopt any new favourite artists? Tori Amos is so 1994, Alanis Morrisette is 1996, and Live is the late 1990s. I somehow missed Pearl Jam (when I first heard someone play a guitar based version of Better Man at a birthday party in 1999, it was totally new to me). I was never really a Spandau Ballet fan, but when they toured Australia ten years ago, it was the best concert I had ever been to (and there was no one under 35 in the audience – ha!). And I have seen Suzanne Vega and Kiss tour twice.

So how do I discover music now? In the age of the iGen, iPhone, iMac, iPod, iPad, iTune, people like me are dinosaurs, wondering about where to go to find a replacement for my kaput CD player. (Finding smart speakers for the lounge room to sync with my iMac or iPhone seems to be a bit beyond me.)

What brought this reflectiveness on, you might ask? Well, I was watching Dickinson this afternoon (episode 2 – I am savouring them one at a time) and realised that they did not stop making good music in 1996 (although I think I could safely say that Suzanne Vega did, alas). There seem to be a lot of very good artists out there producing music that I could really enjoy, and someone is finding it and putting it into the Dickinson soundtrack. For example, Mitski, whose song Your Best American Girl plays as the credits roll on episode 2.

But it is challenging. Music Video shows on free to air TV are a thing of the distant past, even if I were to own a working TV (I don’t anymore), and FM radio DJs are not the funny loveable jokers they were when I would listen to whilst doing my homework in late high school or whilst writing my essays at uni.

And one way or the other, Apple Music is not all that user friendly or easy to use.

Until this month, whenever I have walked around the city at lunchtime and noticed various international students wearing face masks to filter out the pollution, I have thought them rather silly. After all, this is Melbourne, not Kuala Lumpur or Beijing.

Guess who is laughing on the other side of his face now?!?

This morning, a push notice from one or other of the various news apps I have on my phone announced that today, Melbourne has the worst air pollution in the world, thanks to the bushfires.

I was not quite 14 when Ash Wednesday happened in 1983. That night, a big, thick, black cloud of smoke descended on Melbourne around 7.30pm, a frightening and unprecedented experience.

We have never had anything quite like that in my lifetime, including right now.

What is different is that the Ash Wednesday smoke cloud passed by and disappeared into history. We have now had about a week and a half of smoke and poor air quality plaguing Melbourne due to the bushfires.

And when I am not getting push notices on the air quality, the news apps are telling me that either the Prime Minister or one or other of the state Premiers is currently addressing the media on the sorry state of affairs.

In the case of the Prime Minister, it is a rather belated show of leadership (standing next to a four star general in a slouch hat is probably as good a way to recover as any from the image crisis of a Hawaiian holiday). You would think, given he is surprisingly good at reading the mood of the people and achieving electoral success, that he would have at least noticed how Jacinta Ardern in New Zealand shows leadership in a crisis situation – the rare times she does not show that disarming smile. [To say nothing of the prime minister we did not have, Bill Shorten, who used to be very good at looking very leader-like when members of his union were in life threatening situations.]

But when we put aside the failure of our Prime Minister and various state politicians (ie the emergency services minister of NSW) to put on the appropriate show of empathy and leadership in a crisis, the problem of the bushfires currently besieging the nation is a bit more complicated than whether to take a holiday at what most people see as the right time of the year.

Whether the Prime Minister was on holiday or not was not a good look, but it was not determinative of the fire crisis. Nor, 11 years ago on Black Saturday, was the absence of Police Commissioner Christina Nixon from the crisis centre determinative – although it was a symbol of poor leadership (something which the Brumby state government probably gratefully hoped would deflect attention from themselves).

The main problem is that there has been a total failure to address the root causes, real or potential, of the bushfires. That is where leadership has failed, and the failure was long before Scott Morrison booked his holiday in Hawaii. Nor is it a matter of his failure alone – his is mostly an uncharacteristic lapse in his ability to read the mood of the people.

I see three issues where we have put ourselves, as a nation and as individual states, in the predicament where we have such fires besieging much of our country.

1. Global Warming and its causes
2. Fuel loads and the lack of ongoing attention to fire risks in rural area
3. Equipping and supporting our country fire services

Taking global warming first, I must say that I am still a bit skeptical about it, but, as Rupert Murdoch once put it, I am willing to give the planet the benefit of the doubt. The Prime Minister and some of his cronies treating coal like gemstones triumphantly after the last election has become, during bushfire season, a rather tone-deaf gesture. But whether global warming has contributed or not to the bushfires, we need, as a community and not just at the behest of our leaders, to assume that it might and behave accordingly.

[What are you doing about your carbon footprint? I don’t drive, and see the presence of several cars in a drive way as rather obscene and wasteful. I compost and have a worm farm. I have planted many trees around my house, both front and back, and am looking at where I might perhaps plant some more. I don’t complain about rising energy prices. I looked into getting solar panels, but I was persuaded that they are inefficient on my roof orientation and I am concerned about the long term environmental impact of the waste produced by those panels.]

After that, there is the issue of fuel loads. Where there is fuel there will be fire. Much as I find the general tone of conservative political commentator Peta Credlin rather off-putting, I think that she did have a point when she wrote on the weekend in the Murdoch Press that in recent years, state and local governments sympathetic to urban Green politics have avoided winter back burning and the sort of low intensity fuel clearance needed to keep our bush and wilderness areas more fire proof in the summer. They have done so in worship of a misguided environmental agenda which has now, if you pardon the tragic pub, backfired. After all, have we learned nothing from Black Saturday 11 years ago?

[Or is the agenda here a but more sinister? Back in the late 1980s, a politics tutor of mine commented that in the UK, there were committed communists voting regularly for Thatcher’s Conservatives because they believed that only Thatcher in power was capable of forcing the proletariat to achieve class consciousness and rise up in workers’ revolution. Greens might be cultural Marxists, if such creatures exist, and perhaps some of them might be insane enough to think that they can achieve greater acceptance of their ideas by having policies which cause the fuel loads to grow (supposedly for the good of nature) to the point where bushfires are more ferocious than ever before. Just speculating, but I would not rule it out entirely.]

And lastly, there is the issue of properly equipping and supporting our fire services.

This is usually not a matter for the Federal Government. However, the decision of the Federal Government some 4 years ago not to fund a national fleet of aircraft specialising in fire fighting because it is a state responsibility seems to have been a smug and short sighted one. (After all, I think that the first federal politician to seriously put state rights in front of the growing powers of the Commonwealth has yet to be born, and probably won’t be until the second coming of Christ or thereabouts.) Big mistake, and one which right now is going to prove costly.

How we do organise, equip and support our country fire services is a state issue. Sadly, this is one which appears to have been either neglected, or subject to tragic political interference.

As a major case in point, in 2016, the highly unpopular reorganisation of the predominantly volunteer Victorian Country Fire Authority along lines proposed by the United Firefighters Union to the Andrews Government was a matter which tore the Andrews Cabinet apart, and caused the departure of several senior firefighters from the CFA. It also became a federal election issue in Victoria, one which probably cost Premier Andrews’ federal colleagues the 2016 election (although I suspect he would only shed crocodile tears over the failures of his factional opponents).

Aside from it’s electoral consequences at that time and it’s general unpopularity, has the CFA reorganisation had more serious consequences for their capacity to handle bushfires? I don’t know, but it is an example of putting petty politics in front of public safety. Are there other such examples in other states?

In any event, the Royal Commission into these matters will be interesting.

I had an email from Telstra the other day, warning me that I had used 85% of my 100 GB monthly data allowance on my internet plan, with more than 2 weeks to go til the end of the billing cycle. This is the first time that has happened in the year since I got my iMac, and can be explained by my binge watching various shows on Netflix and Apple TV since Christmas Eve. Firstly, I did The Witcher, then I got into Apple TV and tore through For All Mankind, an alternative history of the space race, and then watched all of Morning Wars (aka The Morning Show for the one reader I have out there in the USA).

And now I am into Dickinson, a somewhat steampunk retelling of the early career of mind 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, starring Hallee Steinfeld in the titular role.

I have read a lot of poetry in my time. From age 15 til about 9 years ago, TS Eliot was my favourite poet, and The Waste Land my favourite poem. Then, when going through a bit of an existentialist crisis connected to a health scare, I took another look, along with a deeper dive, into Dylan Thomas, and decided that he is my favourite poet, and that his work In Country Sleep is even more mind blowing than The Waste Land.

But sometime even before TS Eliot, I read Emily Dickinson. I always though of her as rather prim and proper, a frigid American answer to the spinsterish Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.

Mind you, the evidence that has come to light in recent years in her correspondence suggests, gratifyingly, that that impression was quite wrong, and that Emily was a much more interesting character than a repressed spinster secretly writing her poems in the parental home, til dying in stifling late middle age.

The Apple TV series Dickinson plays on this alternative revisionist characterisation of Emily Dickinson, presently her as an 18 or 19 year old rebel with the mores of the iGen (or, being a Gen Xer myself, I might say Gen Z, as I define the following generations against my own).

I have only seen the first episode so far, and I am savouring it (I did go into Telstra to convert my internet plan to unlimited data, but I am not sure it has triggered yet). We see an Emily Dickinson who swears, who ironically and drolly observes ‘How sexy!’ at the next suitor that her mother is lining up for her to reject (a pig farmer), and who confidently and conceitedly observes ‘I love it when people quote me’ to another spurned suitor and literary collaborator. And she kisses her brother’s fiancé on the mouth quite passionately (this is based on an interpretation of some evidence from letters that have come to light in recent years).

The supporting cast is hilariously wooden and intentionally two dimensional, with Jane Krakowski playing Mrs Dickinson with all the blindness of a Mrs Bennett, and black humour flying in all directions. And throughout the episode, as Emily struggles through the creative process to write the first verse of The Chariot (they don’t allude to the title as such, but I do know my Dickinson), we see it emerge line by line, til at the end she concludes, in a way very atypical of 1850 America: ‘Nailed it!’

Amway strikes me as a really efficient way to lose your friends and alienate your family. My only direct experiences of multilevel marketing are two separate instances where acquaintances and friends of mine got entangled into Amway and its Australian offshoot Omega Trends and tried to get me involved (out of politeness I heard them out and did not tell them where to jump immediately, although I did not sign up). I suppose my apathy about things I am not comfortable doing (rather than my skepticism) serves as my primary line of defence against getting involved in such schemes.

For some reason, whilst idly browsing the net the other day, I came across this link from the angry wife of a former Amway devotee. Do read it as it is Laugh Out Loud hilarious:

http://marriedtoanambot.blogspot.com

I suppose I could say more about my encounter with a would be Amway dealer (and acquaintance from Uni) and his mentor from 27 years ago, except that the above mentioned blog probably covers such experiences in much greater detail than I could be bothered writing.