ink marks on a blank page thurs 26thfeb

That I am a full, rusted on Anglophile is of no doubt. I owe this allegiance to many factors, one being that growing up in the era I did we were always asked "when are you going to visit the Mother Country" (meaning England). So it was during this period when TV in OZ was in its infancy the picture one got of life in England was of row after row of dismal terrace houses and grey days followed by more grey days. I did know that this wasn't the whole picture of the UK but most of my contemporaries had that fixed firmly in their minds. Relatives in the UK would send 'snaps' of themselves cavorting on the pebbly beaches or picnicking somewhere and I would dutifully hand them around to much guffaws from my immediate circle at work whilst colleagues who were English migrants would stare wistfully at the scenes and then precede to tell everyone that the tomatoes don't taste the same here in OZ as they did back 'home'.
They don't either, fruit and vegeteables do taste better in Europe ,as the growing conditions are much kinder, ie soil and water etc. Some of the products that we have here in OZ that are on the supermarket shelves in the UK don't seem to be the same either when made up here in our kitchen. Birds custard powder is just one I can think of quickly , in the UK it has a fuller richer taste, always seems different here. Yes indeed I know that this could be just another manifestation of robbi bias, possibly, but the potato difference is just one that is glaring.

When we lived on the farm we knew the president of the Potato board of South Australia quite well and it was I believe in 1991 that we had just come back from a lovely 3month trip to the Old Dart, when we went to our Royal Show here in Adelaide. This is primarily an Agricultural show which is held on a yearly basis where all types of locally grown products are shown to the public. Like all such things all over the world there are rides ,machinery, log chopping and all sorts going on.
For some wild reason that totally slips my mind we found ourselves in the potato growing pavilion deep in conversation with the then president of that society. I remember saying, in my normal non-confrontational and not at all 'picky' manner, "why is it Bill that you only have 3 varieties of spuds here on display, in the UK there are at least 15 or twenty sorts" . I then went on to regale him with a word picture of the last market(UK) we had been to where there was a fruit stall and on one trestle was a large mound of rich brown dirt and behind the dirt was a lady with bright green rubber gloves on pulling fresh Jersey spuds out and weighing them up. "God man we don't need stuff like that here, we have three sorts and that's enough. One for frying, roasting and a general purpose variety which is a cross between the two, then we grow a seperate lot for the chip business."

Now all that might sound a little mundane and icky picky, true it does but then you have to look behind what was said and you then get to the mindset of lots of Australian thinking at that time. We were terribly parochial and set in our ways, couldn't see the wood for the trees, that applied across the board into just about every field of endeavour. Every carpetbagger, snake oil salesman worth his or her salt had come over from the US and seduced us to the detriment of our own culture and growth. Most home-grown Australians don't know that we were amongst the first to have a full length narrative movie made , even before America, or that Australians invented the stump jump plough and a mechanical harvester. The first photo copier and the 'black' box which every aircraft in the world is fitted with. Every rat-bag scheme that had been tried elsewhere in the world and failed was trotted over here by successive Governments and flogged off as the new 'miracle' cure for what ailed the Education/ Health or other process that a particular department had sent folk over to study. By about the very late 1990's we had begun to slowly understand that home based things just might do the job as well as rubbish imported from overseas so we began to 'grow OZ' and be proud of just what we had here. So much so that now on the supermarket shelves we have so many different varieties of spuds it's hard to make a choice. But with the last federal election some new ideas began to creep in, most notably was the Education minister wanting to import the Education model that is used in New York. Our Minister is very much taken with this process and has gone as far to have invited the architect of that scheme to come here and show us how it works. I would respectfully inform her that most Australians do not live in areas that resemble downtown New York city and that just one major concern of Education in this country, that of Aboriginal Australia, is not remotely like New York City in any way shape or form. In all of this I am not advocating a return to an island state mentality but we should be adult enough to use our own expertise to develop an Education model that will fit our schools across the whole of OZ to educate our future children for the 21st century and beyond.

Oh yes Hortense the robbi got well and truly sidetracked there didn't he. Started out to tell the good folk all great things and with the intent of showing just how green and verdant England is, then got stuck into Julia Gillard's grand Education designs.Again you really do not need to sit there with that po face you pull so firmly fixed on your dial. Justified you say, uh okay, this time I grant that it is but next blog I promise that there will be no diverging from the original intent and to that end there will be some green and luxuriant pictures posted on the next blog.
Sorry old girl , no cocolat this week, but come March old bean.....yea har, full on.