Bach Festival

I've remarked from time to time that Armidale has a rich cultural life. This week we have Wool Expo, an extravaganza of anything to do with sheep. There are professional fashion parades of the latest wool creations; sheep dog trials; lots of trade exhibits including sheep drenches and other chemicals for pasture improvement; sheep shearing exhibits; and so on. I go most years, but not this one, because by some remarkable coincidence the Expo coincides with the New England Bach festival, which has some marvellous events.

I can't recall any Bach festivals in the UK or elsewhere in Australia, yet a little town of about 22,000 people manages one! It involves some interesting Bach specialist performers like the Musica Antiqua Cologne, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Baroque Ensemble, and the Australian Baroque Brass. They perform a variety of organ music, cantatas, Brandenburg Concertos, and so on.

One of the most interesting events was this morning and it was free. Some local musicians - and Armidale has some excellent performers - staged a single work, Bach's Coffee Cantata, on the steps of a beautiful vaulted shopping arcade outside a coffee shop. The performance was excellent, partly because of the arcade's wonderful acoustics, and the performers wore 18th century dress, as the attached picture shows. I imagine that few places in the world could stage such an inspirational event.

What added to the colour was continual passing traffic of often young shoppers who didn't quite know what to make of bewigged singers and a chamber ensemble cheered on by a large audience including Dot and I aloft on the balcony. At one stage, the lead male singer came around and tapped eligible men on the shoulder to ask if they'd like to marry his daughter, and I rehearsed my best German to explain that I'm a bit on the old side. Alas, he never reached me to make an offer. I must have looked over the hill.

AS

Interesting Experience

I had an interesting experience this week - though not a first for me. The Commonwealth is having an inquiry into housing unaffordability. Australia has a similar problem to the UK in that housing prices have had a very strong run, and a Senate Select Committee (SSC) was looking at ways in which housing might be made more affordable. I made a submission a month ago, one of about 65 received by the committee. On the basis of that, I was asked to testify before the committee and have my words of wisdom incorporated in Hansard!

The interview took place on Wednesday by teleconference and I summarised my submission and fielded questions from the committee. By the way, I felt qualified to make the submission as I taught property development for 30 years and had prepared a paper on housing affordability for a major conference (The State of Australian Cities) held one week after my cardiac arrest in November last year. Needless to say, I didn't get to Adelaide to present it! But I did revise it for the SSC. The committee was looking for quick fixes, but I couldn't give them one, except to say that every property boom in Australia's history has self corrected in the longer term - often 5 to 10 years. This one looks no different. I did say that the recent boom, which is now cooling was caused by an extraordinary conflation of events, including a rapid rise in immigration levels, large scale interregional migration in Australia, changing household composition, a wealth boom lasting now 12 years in succession, globalisation, and so on. All those events raised demand against a background in which supply responded very slowly and at great expense because of government taxes and charges. I sketched how to restrain housing prices in the longer term with good public policies, but I guess I'll get ignored.

AS

On the Stage Again

I've just confirmed my next stage appearance! On 22 May - Brian, recognise that date? - I'm going to Hamilton in Western Victoria which is about 1500km from here. I can't drive that far in less than a week - there and back, so once again I'll take to the air. Unfortunately, Hamilton is a difficult place to get to by air. First, there's the trip to Sydney on a small turboprop (50-seater). There, I have to transfer from terminal 2 to terminal 3 for the flight to Melbourne's Tullamarine airport. On arrival in Melbourne I then have to make my way to Essendon airport for the final leg to Hamilton

The trip is to deliver a speech to a regional development forum in western Victoria on the evening of the 23rd and I'll travel back the following day. One of my former doctoral graduates heads up a regional development program at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's (RMIT's) Hamilton campus and we're supposed to be writing a book together. My presentation will be on the importance of visioning the future in regional strategy.

AS

Bridge Intermediate Class

I've become a Bridge teacher. Yesterday, Sunday, I ran my first intermediate class for players with some experience in the game, but wishing to hone their skills. I was expecting 20-25 people in the Armidale Bridge Club (ABC) rooms on Rockvale Road. Instead, we got 34! Moreover, they were very enthuiastic and I had a wonderful reception. So, the whole morning went very well.

To prove how much I've recovered, I talked standing up for 3 hours and felt no ill-effects. Indeed, I went for a walk afterwards and covered 7 km in 53 minutes at a faster speed than before I had my cardiac arrest! This was a speed of about 5 mph. If this appears fast, I'll concede that I ran part of it!

For the cognoscenti, my lesson covered both bidding and play. Topics included: accuarate hand valuation; disruptive bidding; and trump management.

Just three weeks from now, I'm giving my first master-class on the subject of squeeze play. It will focus on simple, double and repeating squeezes. For those who do not play bridge I have to correct a possible misapprehension. Bridge is not a violent game and executing a squeeze does no long-term harm to the opponents - except to deflate their egos.

AS

Another Trip to Newcastle

Dot and I were swinging from the rafters on Friday. I had an appointment with my cardiac specialist, James Leitch, in Newcastle and we decided to drive there and back in the day. That amounted to 9 hours on the road, with me taking the wheel for a few hours during the trip. So, I have had extensive driving experiences on some of the most scenic roads in the state. We went down via Gloucester and back via the New England Highway through Scone and Tamworth. Have you heard those names somewhere before!

It's a long way to go for a 15 minute consultation with a doctor, but it was useful. The scan of my defibrillator turned up nothing - it hadn't been triggered during the preceding three months or so. I received a copy of my psychometric test, which was interesting reading but showed nothing adverse, and we discussed medication. James wants me to keep taking the pills for now, which is OK by me. And we agreed to meet again in December, a long way down the track.

Alas, he couldn't help with nominating a travel insurance company that might help me and so, today, I'm taking concerted action to find one through unusual channels. I still intend to go to see Em in the US, but Dot is reluctant to travel without it. She's terrified that (a) I might end up in a US hospital and (b) suffer a large currency transfusion from my wallet. If I were alone I'd be off!

AS

A Minor Triumph

My cardiac specialist, James Leitch rang me late this afternoon to congratulate me on the results of my psychometric test. He said I was in the top 1% of the population for cognitive ability and said I could immediately resume driving and cycling as well conducting academic studies.

This sent my spirits soaring, but then I remembered that I've just had a tooth extracted!! Now for the painful task of not eating for a while and the feeling of pain as the anaesthetic wears off. Fortunately, it's bridge night and the cut and thrust of the game may spare some of my thoughts on the subject.

AS

Tidbinbilla

Another week, another place! We certainly get around. This time we could resist our craving for Max, so we took advantage of the ANZAC day long weekend to fly to Canberra to be with Max, and of course Beck and Rob.

He's a lovely kid - so active and inquiring at the advanced age of 3.75 - and rather large with it too. And we are regarded as a kind of perpetual Santa Claus. So, when we first went round to his home in the Canberra suburb of Waramanga on the Friday evening, his first greeting was "what have got me?". As it happened, the answer was quite a lot. In fact, we presented him with three robots: a fearsome looking character who looked like something our of starwars; a dinosaur; and a dog. All three items walked around the room on their own after a fashion, and Max was very taken with all of them, taking great delight in trying to get the dinosaur to bite em.

On Saturday morning, we went with Max to a friend's birthday party at a special kid's party room, called Kidszone, at the Belconnen shopping centre. The room contained lots of climbing equipment, slides, pits full of foam balls, and - most important tables where the kids could eat. He had a wonderful time with all the cake, fairy bread, and chips, and with the play equipment where he battled full-bore against his pre-school friends. The picture shows him with his best friend, Callan, who's the same age, but several sizes smaller.

After that we went shopping at the Belconnen Centre and had lunch ... well, Max wasn't too excited about lunch after all that fairy bread. He had a lovely time in "Socrates", which sells games for intelligent youngsters, trying out the various toys which he wanted to buy. In the end I bought him a flower garden where one sets up a cardboard landscape and pour in a chemical. After about 10 hours (overnight), the card soaks up the liquid and sprouds coloured crystals, much to Max's interest. He also tried out the plasma screens in the David Jones department store.

The following morning, we took Max to see Beck play her first soccer game of the season in the Canberra league. They lost 2-1 against a good side, so her team was not disgraced. Max spent to time watching the match, though Rob takes him to watch the Canberra Raiders (in the national Rugby League competition) and the ACT Brumbies (in the southern hemisphere's very very strong Union competition). The latter has teams from South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand ... and possibly next year Argentina. To put this in perpsective, it would be a bit like Ireland, Wales, and Scotland playing teams from Vladivostok, Chicago, and Tehran in a northern hemisphere equivalent.

Anyway, back to soccer in Canberra. Max had a great time rolling down a grassy slope, kicking a full-sized ball between me, Rob and himself, building a nest of twigs, and playing with a dog. In the afternoon, we took him out to the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve to look at a new wetland they had recently opened. It was very good, which is more than you can say for the weather. After a while, it poured, blew a gale, and the temperature plummeted 10 degrees. Snow was forecast for the Snowy Mountains further south and no doubt they got it. Anyway, Max had lots of fun and is convinced that he's seen a live dinosaur. Rob told him that a very large water bird called a Brolga was in fact a dinosaur. He was also fascinated by a black swan hatching eggs on a nest - which seems strange going into winter! Finally, we ended up at the Hog's Breath restaurant for en evening meal, which was a bit of a disaster. They forgot Max's meal ... which he eventually received free of charge!

Max now knows that he's going to see Aunt Emily in 10 days time. The excitement is mounting, though he has no idea that he's travelling in a very big plane for a very long period of time (the best part of a day). Still less does he know that he's heading to Disneyland on the way, stopping over at Anaheim in Los Angeles for a couple of days. I'd love to be there to see his response to all those challenges.

AS

Changing Season

During the last week the arrival of Autumn has become very noticeable. Daytime temperatures have plunged as much as 8 degrees (C) over a few days, and suddenly the trees have turned colour, from green to crimson in many cases. Given Armidale's concentration of deciduous trees, the effect is extremely attractive.

On the other hand, native vegetation is mostly not deciduous. The advantage is that our landscapes, especially the forested ones, always look green. Our garden has a balanced vegetation mixture, but that doesn't prevent a lot of work raking up of leaves as the deciduous trees are becoming mature. That task seems to fall (excuse the pun) to Dot - I seem to banned from most gardening tasks!

AS

Centre for Independent Studies

I'm late in reporting my visit to Sydney last week. Dot let me out on my own to fly to Sydney last Thursday for a day to attend a seminar late afternoon and evening. The Centre for Independent Studies, to which I subscribe, assembled an impressive array of professors to discuss the relevance of the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek to the 21st century.

This might seem rather esoteric and hardly worth the $500 it cost me. In fact, it was intellectually stimulating, and generated, for me, lots of new perspectives. Issues covered included the role of reserve banks, circumstances in which regulation is necessary, appropriate forms of regulation, trade, industry policy and tax-churning. Interestingly, some of the presentations traced the history of Hayek's ideas and his antecedents. I know of his debt to Adam Smith, but was surprised that he probably owed more to the other well-known Scottish moral philosopher, David Hume.

The best presentation was given by Chandran Kukuthas, a professor at the LSE. I know him quite well and he was at university with one of my very good friends, Paul Collits, who I expected to see there. Perhaps I should not have been surprised when he didn't show, since he now lives in Hamilton - about 1500 km from Sydney. Still, I'm off to visit Paul in Hamilton (Vic) at his expense on May 8th. That's not too far away. I'm going there as a visiting guru to enthuse the locals about new approaches to regional development policy!

More about that later after our visit to Canberra for the ANZAC day long weekend. What other nation would set aside a day to celebrate a major military defeat!

AS

Stepping Out

The Armidale district is home to maybe just 30,000 people, but recent statistics on spatial well-being put us in the top 10% of local government areas on a range of educational, occupational, and other indicators. These characteristics are behind our abundant cultural life, as reported in several postings. So, for example, we have:

• the Armidale Playhouse (AP) staging a series of ambitious amateur productions,
• occasional Shakespeare plays,
• opera in the paddock and concerts from at least three orchestras including the Sydney SO,
• an annual Bach Festival,
• brass band (like last weekend), bagpipe, and jazz concerts, and so on.

Well, a couple of nights ago, we went to AP's latest extravaganza: a performance of Richard Harris' Stepping Out! It's about a dysfunctional tap dancing club and its members' struggle not only to dance convincingly, but to relate to one another. I didn't know that anyone in Armidale could tap dance, yet alone 10 coming literally in all shapes, sizes, and age groups. Their teacher obviously had some idea, but she must have had an uphill job teaching the other 8 women and one bloke. However, the play culminates in stunning and snappy routines by a coherent and nattily attired group! It was very entertaining.

We await the next performance in two months with interest. They're putting on TITANIC in UNE's Lazenby Hall. I can't quite envisage the sinking of the Titanic on what is quite a small stage 1000 m above sea level. And, no doubt, we'll soon see a performance of Aida or Gotterdammerung and the local reconstruction of the Pyramids or Valhalla. And we're five months away from a realistic reconstruction of the Last Night of the Proms complete with all the old favourites in the second half with the audience armed with flags and streamers! The last are supplied by Armidale's "British Shop" which sells UK memorabilia.

AS