Christmas Shadow

    Christmas sucks! Yes, I know you are not supposed to say that, but I wish to make a case that for some of us it does. It does so, personally, socially, culturally, ethnically, psychologically, and every way except for the market that force, stronger than gravity which runs the whole show.
    My own reactions to 'The Festive Season' are so anti social that I cannot express them to many friends and relatives because they are part of the problem.
    Should I say I dislike or am quite uncomfortable with Christmas several reprisals follow. An early response can be to question my mental health.
    There is an imperative to conform. 'Of course, you are not serious?' 'How could you not like Christmas?' 'But you must admit...' And there follows an explanation you know is defensive and one where I am the problem. If you dislike what the majority likes you must be deficient, suspect even, because you see things so differently. You are treated as was the first person to dare to say that the earth circles the sun.
    Even though the vectors driving belief in the Season are illogical or bogus or outdated and such that many of the proponents only half believe what they are advocating, they seem to feel duty bound to persuade you to change your heretical ideas.
    I own this stance is deeply personal, offensive even, and in the opposite direction from the popular procession. Personal scars of trauma contribute to my position. Yes. When I was ten on Christmas Eve, I had been trying to catch a cicada as a tangible present for myself for Christmas. I fell out of a tree and landed upside down on a sharp stump. I was terrified when I saw the muscle or tissue or fat poking out of the wound as I limped home.
    I knew my parents felt obliged to do the Santa thing and that they did not have a lot of money to spend and worse, that they would choose age inappropriate presents for me. They would miss the mark but would have fulfilled the Christmas gift injunction.
    The pain in my thigh kept me awake that night. I heard my parents arguing about the quality and quantity of the Santa drop.
Mum was accusing Dad of being niggardly and because I held a similar view it was squirmingly painful to hear.
    Next morning the bundle of disposables at the end of the bed included an orange coloured ten shilling note. It concretised Mum's judgment of Dad; her victory and their scale of values and Dad's having to pay for his humiliation.
    That event was underpinned by the epistemological
 or identity problems of who Santa was and why the ruse should exist at all.
    Most parents seem to enact without question the validity of the culturally supported ruse. Santa is written to, visits an impossible number of houses, enters via a chimney, parks a sled with reindeer team in all insolence-eats and drinks festal offerings and moves on to the next house. No wonder we have an obesity problem in Santa countries. He does all this after arriving from some Nordic location via shopping mall photo ops.
    Folklorists dispute the emoluments of the season; the tree, the music, the snow, the revealed theology of the day and the national variations-which are of course Eurocentric.
    There is no common sense nor veracity in nostalgia. And nostalgia operates at much deeper levels than what is visible or logical. It is excellent preparation for believing 'false truths'.
    Familiarly Christmas is like putting on an old boot. The younger the wearer the better the fit. Then there is a divide between those who find reassurance in an aged pair of archaic slippers and the ache of misshapen feet bunions and all shoehorned into what once worked comfortably.
    Forget, for a moment, about those who echo the regressions to childhood or the joy of giving an appreciated present. Think instead of the others who quake at the annual reenactment , those who have neither the money, the desire or friends and relatives with whom to meet. Or those non neo-europeans who have their own feasts and rituals. For the bereaved there is the reminder of painful ongoing losses. For the lonely the pain of isolation and being radically different as well as resenting those who mindlessly glide through.
    
    Then there are those like me who try to conform, pull on the old boot without too many audible aches and groans. Those who try to do their best while knowing how thin is the veneer of conformity so as
to please someone else.
    There is an old story of two adolescent youngsters of noble Italian families who declared they wanted, beyond all else, to be married and live happily ever after. The story goes that the adults consulted a wise old bishop (Yes it was a long time ago). His grace advised handcuffing the ardent pair to each other and to a comfortable large bed for a few days. The elders followed the advice and the deflated youngsters saw more than the light.
    And the connection with Christmas? Psychologists, sociometrists and historians, with a capital H and anyone with a memory know a Christmas gathering is fraught. Just look at it:a group of sibling rivals, a squark of generations, an array of injured, hurt and damaged relationships, a mob of people who never see or visit one another throughout the year, with a stack of unfinished business the size of colonisation are supposed to sit, eat, drink together in some magic social balm swallowing any hypocrisy. Until on the way home when they can take the strips off the attendees confidentially.
    Our Irish mob was would never let a family relationship get in the way of a cutting remark.
    Many times I have heard from a combatant about physical fisticuff boil overs which followed the pudding or the game of backyard cricket liberally fuelled by the lubrications of the liquid spirit of the season. Which outbursts, though alarming carry an authenticity greater than the enforced saccharine social endearments and blistering kisses.
    Yeah, Nah it's really only the merchants who profit from Christmas. Even if they have to forego a bit of repriced hard to shift produce for the Boxing Day sales. They don't give a rat's whether it is a gift to a beloved or a tick the box token. A sort of have to because it is expected part of a transaction. Which this kind of stuff, come to think of it, is not a gift anymore than are taxes, or rates gifts we love to give.
    Usually days of national celebration accrue from a major proud victory or death or national achievement. Sometimes these events have a religious origin. Which is fine if you are religious, preferably of the same theological flavour as the event or are willing to adopt the dress, customs, tucker of that group.
    If you are not you can use the event like the Italian second hand car dealers in the Boston St Patrick's day parade who sit in open top convertibles decked in green and sporting oversized green rosettes.
    What is bothersome for the purists is when the annual recall celebration has lost almost any connection with the foundation it recalls. Celebrating by gift swapping of non essential items, spending energy on lights at Christmas seems to have lost a foundation in reality if it is based on a poor couple, unable to get accommodation other than an animal shelter where she brings forth her first son.
    The closest group to this family are starving refugees who would be mightily helped if even a proportion of the Western World Christmas expenditure were allotted to these deserving helpless people. 

    Cultural appropriation of snow and decorated trees are now endorsed as seasonal necessities. It can be tricky. In a Japanese attempt to join in; Santa, in red and white, has been depicted nailed hands and feet to a cross. A sort of covering all bases messianic icon.

    
    Are there seasonal survival mechanisms for refugees of this seasonal behaviour? There are at least two. One, banish reason, common sense, social conscience, past hurt and offence and go along for the ride.
    Two, get out of town, to another culture if you can, or go walking in the bush,Yes, sing to yourself if you like and write.

Michael D. Breen

 Geometer Dreams   by Peter Byrne.


    In Geometer Dreams Peter Byrne showcases landmarks and trig points of a distinguished forty year career as a geometer. He eschews the title ‘surveyor’.
        ‘Surveyors, having so much difficulty in defining themselves,                 should not be surprised that their profession, its wide scope, its             importance, is not commonly understood’
    The author recognises that readers may be misled by their preconceptions of ‘surveyors’. Men with tripods on the pavement looking at other men with long white calibrated sticks. So Byrne uses the term Geometer whom he observes in the third person.    
    At the conclusion of the hundred vignettes the reader is so much the wiser even if a constraining definition remains elusive.
    Peter Byrne is ‘old school’ in spirit and appreciation. Though he is happy to embrace and master new technology as it arrives. Nonetheless he is happy to value rather than spurn the old such as a wheelbarrow or World War 1 heliograph, four cylinder Land Rover, The Curta Calculator or
Tellurometers
    Like the cabinetmakers who mastered hand tools and moved to electric tops or the artist who mastered sketching before oil painting the author’s career saw small and large changes which reduced the arduous field labours and improved accuracy. Devices in the right hands of course.
    The dreams move from cadet journeyman to master practitioner and businessman to standard bearer for the profession and for professionalism with the Institution of Surveyors, federally and The International Federation of Surveyors.
    Then a turn into mediation and dispute resolution where he surveyed and unearthed vectors and connections of people stuck in conflict and inaction.
    So what is the spirit the elan vital the underlying driving force linking the adventures, jobs, trips, challenges, appointments and leaps of this geometer?
    Leonardo, or was it Einstein, said that genius is mostly in observation. And our greatest preventer of observing or learning is what we know; what we believe to be the truth about the way things are.
    The Geometer is an ongoing lifelong learner. And you can feel his delight when he achieves a new learning.
    This requires courage, civil courage and ego management. Changing bearings and direction requires the bereavement of banning the familiar and embracing, often uncertainly at first, what was anathema. It is challenging. It is uncomfortable  and then liberating.
    The Geometer’s learning and explorations often were presented by peers, clients, and opponents. So from a swamp of confusion, progress in geometer dreaming moves to as absolute a precautionary accuracy as humans can produce. That is a map.
    The Swedes have a Museum of Failures, established as a source of learning. The Geometer often slows things down to learn rather than hurry up to avoid shame and keep ‘looking forward.’
    Without escaping the discomfort and anxiety the Geometer accepts a second opinion with a wry smile and a good grace. Not easy when dealing with anxious, bullying or greedy clients and organisations.
    The Geometer is smart and witty. His humour is like a Zen Koan which breaks through situations to reveal a new, an enlivening viewpoint. He only just evades the label ‘smart arse’ by being able to give grin and take.
    In Australian and international professional bodies the Geometer led conservative forces to change with the times meshing with other bodies in the landscape
    Meeting the characters in the stories and in the bibliographical notes the Geographer presents those with whom he shares his path. You see whom he valued, respected and befriended. They edified (built) one another.Their dates of birth and death show that not many are still going. This is an historical document.
    So what function might this almost quirky compendium perform? War stories register? Nostalgia? Celebrating less visible professionals of one man and his mates? Were I as an educator asked to prescribe essential reading for students of surveying and kindred vocations such as engineering, town planning, architecture etc I would set Geometer Dreams as a readable potent and humane handbook on professional practice of an essential service.

Michael D. Breen organisational psychologist consultant to AAM, the Institution of Surveyors and The Association of Consulting Surveyors and a State Surveyor General.
    
Geometer Dreams
First published in 2022 by
PETER BYRNE
Maylands 6051
Western Australia
byrne.peter@optusnet.com.au

Copyright  © Peter Byrne.
ISBN:978 064547 860 0

 Following World Health Organization webinar on Creating AgeFriendly Co0mmunities.Toolkit for assessing an AgeFriencly community

The Tuft of Flowers > ROBERT FROST

>
> I went to turn the grass once after one

> Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

> 
> The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
> Before I came to view the levelled scene.
> 
> I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
> I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
> 
> But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
> And I must be, as he had been,—alone,
> 
> ‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
> ‘Whether they work together or apart.’
> 
> But as I said it, swift there passed me by
> On noiseless wing a ‘wildered butterfly,
> 
> Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
> Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.
> 
> And once I marked his flight go round and round,
> As where some flower lay withering on the ground.
> 
> And then he flew as far as eye could see,
> And then on tremulous wing came back to me.
> 
> I thought of questions that have no reply,
> And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;
> 
> But he turned first, and led my eye to look
> At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,
> 
> A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
> Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
> 
> I left my place to know them by their name,
> Finding them butterfly weed when I came.
> 
> The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
> By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
> 
> Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
> But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
> 
> The butterfly and I had lit upon,
> Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
> 
> That made me hear the wakening birds around,
> And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
> 
> And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
>
> So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
> 
> But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
> And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
> 
> And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
> With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
> 
> ‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
> ‘Whether they work together or apart.’

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Booklaunch: Shaking the Family Tree & When the Bough Breaks.

  “When the Bough Breaks” and “Shaking the family Tree”

Margaret McMahon.

Book launch.

       Good evening all and thank you Margaret for asking me to do this important job launching not one but two results of your hard work and courage.

       First a permission. In a town just west of Burrowa an unprepossessing local was to address the citizens in the School of Arts about his overseas travel. The mayor gave an overheated introduction and your man commenced. “G’day everyone.” Mumbled unenthusiastic “G’day.” “Can youse all hear me?” “Emm” mumbled. “Can you down there hear me?” Pointing. “Yes I can but I am willing to swap places with someone who can’t”. So feel free to do such a swap.

       “When the Bough Breaks” and “Shaking the Family Tree” cover similar areas. The genres of autobiography and family history are vulnerable territory. It is also an impregnable area as no one can deny or contradict a writer’s reaction to incidents.

       Margaret’s territory is also pegged by her father Barry’s writing, and that of her sister and her brother. So unsurprisingly there is a tinge of having to justify the writer’s unique version.  

              “When the Bough Breaks”

       Takes two little children from the care of their mother, to their maternal grandparents, to their paternal grandparents and then to a blended stepfamily. That is a lot.

       But it is further contaminated by the grandparent asking a child to promise not to love her new stepmother. That seems to block the possible nurturing warmth from a new maternal person.

       Barry, Margaret’s father, must have been shattered by the death of his wife while he was a new enlistee in the army posted to Western Australia. Adding to his pain was the charge that he was just trying to get out of an army for which he had volunteered. One doubts if Barry ever really grieved for his wife or instead used denial, workaholism and whisky. Perhaps too he was terrified of losing a second wife’s affection and so gave priority to his new family over Margaret and her sister. Work is such a respectable defence against living a fully human life. Philosopher Joseph Pieper, in “Leisure the Basis of Culture” talks of work; negotium in Latin as the negation of otium meaning rest which is our default state.

       “Strong women” or tough women surrounded Barry. He physically sparred with his daughters. Margaret laments his underdeveloped feminine side. Whence though would he have had the models to be more feminine? Margaret’s ambivalence toward her semi absent father, who was scant protection against his second wife, is evident. But he was the only parent she had to love and she did.

       Her mother Bunty dying young achieves canonization along with priest Uncle Robert.

“Shaking the Family Tree”.

       The second launch is “Shanking the Family Tree”.  Margaret is still a bit behind Kim Jong-un but this is her fourth launch in two years.

       Convict ancestor James Barry emerges from the family mist like the convict in the opening scenes of the film of “Great Expectations”. He looks scary but becomes more human as we get to know him. Margaret provides details of Irish history and nineteenth century occupied Cork. This is the landscape from which James Barry moves to primitive Australia.  (And there are still Barry families in Cork).

              Governor Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane said of people like James, “…every murder or diabolical crime, which has been committed in the Colony since my arrival has been perpetrated by Roman Catholics. And this I ascribe entirely to their barbarous ignorance. And total want of education, the invariable companion of bigotry and cruelty as well as the parent of crime”. A bit rich coming from a Scot who left his country to join the British Army and who collected his wife’s name to enhance his status. Governor Brisbane calls the Irish Roman Catholics ignorant. It was the British government who forbade them their schools from about 1695 though they conducted illegal “hedge schools” a risk they took because they valued education. The British also made it a punishable offence to speak their own language. As in our days with Aboriginal people? Asylum seekers? Punishment for the effects of what we have done to people?

       James had two children with his wife Margaret Barry who died aged 24 from tuberculosis in 1853. Margaret McMahon’ sympathy for the two bereaved children Margaret Mary and William patently parallels her own loss of a mother at as a little child with a younger sister.

       Outside the family and intermingled with family perceptions is the cultural context. That context is as fickle as fashion. Cultural norms are like good glasses they change focus and are imperceptible to the wearer. Just think how society’s views on gender have shifted in the past thirty or so years.

       There are also the pervasive social barbed wires of family/religious judgments based on societal norms. Often the connections one has with a respectable person can be redemptive. But should not always be relied on.     

My grandfather, who was asked to change his German name during two world wars, had a story of a well-known Sydney identity that was chairman of the water board. The said identity got into an argument with a tram conductor. At full charge he demanded, “Do you know who I am? I’m so and so. I’m connected with the water board.” The unphased conductor replied, “So’s my dunny”.

       These days you can cut corners for social renovation. You can be a criminal banker and use your gains to enrol children at private schools thereby elevating  your and their status.

       Religious intolerance, which threads through both books, has declined along with religion itself. However, racial intolerance in our multicultural society is alive and well. It is a highly inflammable seam of gas ready for politicians to ignite for their own benefit. 

       Reading, “When the Bough Breaks” and “Shaking the Family Tree” I enjoyed what I learned about nineteenth century life, rural life in Ireland, in Australia, about the Hunter Valley and its prominence in the Colony. About Mudgee, and the goldfields their miners and suppliers as well as learning about moves to the city and back to the bush again. At times I could smell fresh cow’s milk or leather dressing on harness or saddles or the smell of a horse. Or I could imagine the view to the side of a bush track curtained with thick flora now gone.

       Margaret’s work is impressive. It is the grinding, lonely unsure work of writing. Her children and their grandchildren can be grateful they have so much to go on.

       Margaret deserves our attentive reading and appreciation for sharing her paths, and that is why we are here

Michael D. Breen,

Newcastle,

May11th 2018

      

Graduation Address UTS May 1st Kate Kamkong Breen

Graduation Occasional Address UTS   Tuesday May 1^st 2018.

Catherine Breen Kamkong

Deputy Representative

United Nations Population Fund

I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land upon which the UTS campus stands, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. My respects also to Deputy Chancellor, Provost, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President, University Secretary, Associate Dean of the Faculty, Chair of the Academic Board, staff, family, friends and graduates.”

What an honour it is for me to be with you all here today to celebrate the end of your foundational education as nurses and the beginning of the careers that lie ahead of you.

I wanted to share a little bit with you about the lessons I have learned on my journey since graduating with my Bachelor in Applied Science, Nursing back in 1993, not because I feel that what I have done is anything outstanding  or significant but more because I want each of you to believe that the world is at your feet and there are infinite possibilities which lie ahead for each of you , huge contributions that each of you have the potential to make …….and need to make.

 Mother Teresa once said that Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.

Nursing is much more than a job. It offers the opportunity to be a vocation and one where you support people at critical moments in their lives. What each of us might consider small can make a big difference to a person’s experience of pain, fear, loss and life itself. I remember once at St Vincents here in Sydney when I was working in the oncology ward. There was a women from the Solomon islands who had been brought to St Vincents with uterine cancer that had metastasised. Her prognosis was poor. She was away from family in a new environment and culture. I remember one night doing rounds of the wards, and was startled to find her on the floor. I assumed she had fallen out of bed. She cried and told me she was lying on the floor as she wanted to feel the healing warmth of the sun from the earth. There was no sun heating up the 10^th floor of that old building at St Vincents.

 I sat with her on the floor, crying also as I saw the pain she was in, her loneliness, her prognosis, and the lack of what she needed to bring her comfort..  That moment has stayed with me ever since – as I learned many things – I learned that there are often moments when we want to help and make everything better but the best we can do is just to be with that person and show them that you care. No clinical procedure at that moment could help. It also taught me to understand how important Respectful care is, and the importance of understanding difference..

During my experience working in a public hospital in Sydney, a Tibetan refugee camp, with refugees from Myanmar, with street children in Vietnam, young adolescent mothers in Nepal or rural women in Cambodia. The lesson for me has been the same  –  try to do Small things with great love.

The second lesson I have learned and wanted to share with you is of the importance of gratitude and finding a way to express that gratitude. Sometimes one has to experience something else to really know and understand the privileges one has.

 In around the year 2000, when I was working in a Burmese refugee camp on the Thai Burmese border training community health workers, I was struck by the desperate situation faced by these people and why it is that some in life must suffer so much. That health worker said to me that it was the “lottery of birth” and that though we are all given the same chance in life – a lot depends on where we are born, when we are born and to whom we are born. The race of life starts at the same place but all of those things have a very strong influence on the path after that.

I was so lucky in the lottery of birth to be born as an Australian, in a good family and to have many opportunities including the chance of a wonderful education. The foundational base that studying nursing here at UTS gave me has really created so many opportunities for me and it is that opportunity that also has motivated me so much to give back whatever I can and to contribute to making the lives of those not so fortunate a little more dignified and for their right to health to be somewhat realized.

And this leads me to the final lesson that I wanted to share with you.

The importance of finding your purpose. 

I had a good job in critical care at St Vincents Hospital back in the mid 1990s and the prospects of saving enough to put a deposit on a small place in Balmain. Yet I remember feeling that there was something more that was calling me. I handed in my resignation, bought a ticket to Ho Chi Minh , Vietnam and went volunteering as a nurse to a clinic in an orphanage where babies and small children were being brought in after being found abandoned on the streets and found dumped in garbage bins. I used to come home and cry, feeling helpless, homesick and upset at the plight of these children and also the way the other health professionals treated these babies . It sparked something deep within me though that I wanted to do be able to do more. This searching took me to India where I continued to volunteer and had to draw upon everything I had learned at UTS and in life!  Just being from Australia, and trained as a nurse led me to be called upon to assist in all sorts of situations I felt unprepared for –  women giving birth in a small hut in fields in the mountains of Himachel Pradesh,  Tibetan refugees children coming to me with totally burned hands from lighting the fire to cook in their house, resuscitating a newborn of a refugee women in a health centre at night with no light and no other equipment than my mouth and 2 hands . I became passionate about refugee health and global health and have continued on this journey of trying to harness all my brainpower and capacity to make a small difference.  I studied further and  worked even more in humanitarian settings after cyclones and also ethnic conflicts in Myanmar, post conflict in Nepal and then to Cambodia.  I became passionate about trying to make sure that no woman dies in pregnancy and childbirth and that every baby that is born has a chance of more than survival. That is why my work has taken me to the United Nations . None of this is important in itself but what I am trying to impart on you is that I found my purpose and I encourage you to find yours also. I love the words of Eddie Woo, the amazing mathematics teacher from Cherry Brook high school who gave an address on Australia day. He explained -  

“If you’re a young person trying to find your way in the world, I don’t think you need to follow your passion. I think you have to become passionate about following need”

So if you will allow me, I would like to ask each one of you to think about these words and the lessons I shared.

Do small things with great love. Look outwards at the world around and find what matters to each of you. Consider all that you have and try and give back to others some of what you have learned and taken away from your studies here at UTS. Make a contribution in whatever way you can to some of the needs of our people here in Australia and in our shared world. Put your heart, soul and all your skills and capacity into that and you will have found your purpose!

I wish you the best of luck in all your endeavors and congratulations.