“I STARTED supporting Becky with her art eleven years ago. The first year we went to TAFE together and after that she worked with me in my studio. I could see that for Becky, art was a way of communicating, so I took over a mentoring role with her.

From an early age Becky’s mum taught her through the use of patterns. This is a process that involved putting words, numbers, colours, etc on the floor and Becky would crawl over them reading and learning as she went. The shapes and colours communicated to her even then. Becky’s Mum, one of the founding members of the Maleny Arts and Crafts Group enjoyed painting, so art was always around her. When Becky found she could paint and work with art, it was a way of decifering information and bringing it out again. “

Corrie has always been a career artist but at the same time has felt a need to commit to the broader community. She gained a Certificate IV in Disability and has worked with downs syndrome and cerebral palsy patients for 15 years. During that time Corrie has found that creativity has an important part to play in the disability sector because it offers a different approach to the way people learn.

“I believe that a lot of people with intellectual disabilities have a right brain approach to things. When I first met Becky, her way of getting information back out again was through her art. So we started using her painting as a way of learning. We started to tap into the other side of her brain that she needed.”

Sadly, Becky has other problems, particularly with her eyes. She has depth of field difficulties which make it difficult to diagnose. While this affects her art, it also impacts on the physical side of her life.

“When we started coming to gym Becky couldn’t even sit on a fitball because of a depth of field imbalance. But we started working with the trainers, Charmaine and April and now Becky gets on and off the fitball without any problem.

“One positive thing that Becky has had all of her life is her ability to say, I can do that or I will give that a go. I think that’s partly having lived in a family with six children and being treated as a normal child.

“In the gym Becky knows  that I am not just standing there to help her, because she can do it. I think you have to empower people to know that they can do it.

“April has been working with me on Becky’s programs and we are always targeting different things. At the moment it is Becky’s balance because her eyesight has declined considerably over the past two years. So exercises like balancing on the fitball and stepping up and stepping down are important. And with April, we have implemented a program that she can do at home too. It helps to give her confidence right now when her eyesight is not as reliable as it has been.

While care for the intellectually disabled is clearly demanding, the long relationship between Corrie and Becky has been sustained through a connection with art.

“We’ve gone all around the country doing workshops together,” says Corrie. “Becky goes into joint exhibitions and she has her own exhibitions. I am constantly surprised at the power of her art to communicate despite her intellectual disability.”

Maleny Community Gym trainers are experienced in tailoring programs for the elderly and disabled. Tel: 5429 6911

A humanist on thin ice
Science and the humanities, people and climate change

Tom Griffiths
Professor of History at ANU and an adjunct professor of climate research at the University of Copenhagen. His latest book is Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (UNSW Press, 2007)

It was ice that delivered the scary sense of urgency that we now feel about global warming. The oldest Greenland cores go back to the last interglacial, about a hundred and twenty thousand years ago, whereas the deepest Antarctic cores currently retrieve eight hundred thousand years of climate history. In Antarctica, there is less precipitation and seasonality and more compression of the layers of ice; resolution is traded for time. In Greenland the layers are clearer, because of the greater annual accumulation of ice. And so the more discriminating Greenland cores are essential to calibrating the longer, more condensed Antarctic archive. The polar ice caps therefore combine beautifully to give us detailed long-term climate data.

… In Antarctica, in the 1990s, a long 400,000-year ice core was extracted from the middle of the ice sheet near the Soviet station, Vostok. The Vostok core, which charted four full cycles of glacial and interglacial periods, established that the carbon dioxide and methane concentration in the atmosphere had ‘moved in lockstep’ with the ice sheets and the temperature. It also revealed that present-day levels of these greenhouse gases are unprecedented during the past four hundred and twenty thousand years.

… So it was really only from the late 1980s, as abrupt climate change began to emerge from the ice record, that there was urgency and anxiety – and this coincides with the fast warming of the ’80s onwards. This was the same period in which ecological science abandoned the idea of the ‘balance of nature’ and accepted ‘disturbance’ as normal in ecosystems. It was the same period when ‘punctuated equilibrium’ – the idea of sudden change – re-entered debates in evolutionary science. Today, especially following the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, we feel that we are responding to this crisis too slowly – and we are. Yet a clear sense of urgency among climate scientists is only twenty years old and a confident scientific consensus has been articulated only over the past decade. So the task of coming to terms with its social and political implications has barely begun.

… If a hundred years ago the defining Antarctic journey was the sledging expedition across the surface of the ice, and fifty years ago it was the tractor traverse that, with seismic soundings, measured the volume of the ice sheet, then the defining Antarctic journey of our own era goes straight down, with the help of a drill, from the top of the ice dome to the continental bedrock, a vertical journey back through time. And the ice core extracted enables us to see our civilisation in the context of hundreds of thousands of years of climate history. Right now, in Antarctica, the international race is on again – not for the South Pole, not for the first trans-Antarctic traverse, but for the first million-year ice core.

… ‘Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get,’ runs the old adage. But these days we hardly know what to expect. And what we expect depends less on statistics than on belief. The public debate about climate change is now not really about the science – even when it looks like it is. We are in the realm of competing ideologies and differing belief systems; we are engaged in politics. If you know your politics, it is easy to predict who will think what about the science. We need to wonder why, as Richard Hamblyn has observed, climate change may be the ‘first major environmental crisis in which experts appear more alarmed than the public’.

… Many previous scientific revolutions – the Copernican, the Darwinian, the discovery of deep time – have decentred and diminished the power and significance of humanity. By contrast, the scientific revolution of climate change reveals the cumulative, insidious, all-pervading power of people on Earth. This is not just a technical issue; it implicates and challenges our humanity.

… Australia is going to be at the frontier of climate change pain. As inhabitants of an arid continent in the grip of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, a land of drought and flooding rains, a place of escalating fatal bushfire, and with a small and embattled agricultural economy, Australians might have been expected to rush to sign Kyoto a decade ago and to have brought credible legislation for reducing carbon emissions to the Copenhagen summit. The growing Australian public rejection of climate change science may be merely another example of our southern isolationism. Or it may be further testimony to the power that American politics and culture have over Australian society. Or perhaps it is because, for two hundred years, the European colonisers of Australia have struggled to come to terms with the extreme climatic variability of the continent. Australia has a boom-and-bust ecology. Settlers have had to learn, slowly and reluctantly, that ‘drought’ is not aberrant but natural; they have struggled to understand aseasonal and non-annual climatic variation; they have had to accept a wilful nature that they cannot control or change. They are still learning. And now, suddenly, Australians are confronted by long-term, one-way climatic change for which they, in part, are held responsible. It challenges everything they have so far learned about their new land.

… Industrialisation has initiated a new geological era that historians like to call the Anthropocene, characterised by pervasive human influence on Earth processes. It is both awful and awe-inspiring that we are now crossing a threshold of geological eras. As a result of our own actions we may be leaving behind not just the Holocene, the past ten thousand years of relatively stable climate, but also the Pleistocene, the several-million-year period of cyclical ice ages that has seen the evolution of modern humans. We have collectively become a force in climate that is comparable to the astronomical causes of ice ages.

Monday morning in Mernda

Peter Mares
ABC Radio National presenter, author and adjunct research fellow at Swinburne University of Technology investigating issues of migration, borders and human movement.

As cities sprawl, infrastructure sags and politics stymies creative approaches to planning, public support is growing for a strategy that appears much easier to implement: rein in population growth. The thinking is appealing. Reducing the number of new residents will ease the pressure on transport, land, water and the environment. Fewer new people means less need for new housing on the suburban fringe. According to the rudimentary laws of supply and demand, this should also bring down prices and make housing more affordable. Such simple calculations fail to account for the effects of inflationary policies like negative gearing, a low capital gains tax, the privileged tax treatment of the family home and speculative land-banking by developers. But such complexities fade into the background against the allure of a simple population-based approach to our problems.

… Compared with other developed nations Australians are enthusiastic breeders, and this accounts for about a third of the country’s population growth. In 2008 Australia’s total fertility rate – the number of babies per woman was 1.97.

This is the highest recorded rate since 1977, and puts Australia ahead of some middle-income countries in the developing world like Brazil (1.83 babies per woman), Thailand (1.82) and Iran (1.78); substantially ahead of European nations like Spain (1.47), Greece (1.39), Italy (1.39) and Germany (1.3); and way ahead of rich Asian nations like Japan (1.26), Singapore (1.26) and Korea (1.22).

… In the long term, a fertility rate of 1.97 per cent would not, on its own, be enough to increase Australia’s population, were it not that, in the short term, we have got much better at postponing death. But no one lives forever, so barring an unlikely further sharp jump in fertility, natural growth alone would eventually lead to a stable or gently falling population.

This is why the population debate focuses on immigration, which accounts for the other two-thirds of Australia’s population growth. While there is no immediate, simple or direct relationship between reproductive choices and the introduction or removal of baby bonuses (or paid maternity leave, family allowances or tax breaks), the causal link between government-controlled migration levels and population increase appears obvious. The federal government need only pull the right policy lever and migration, and population growth, will slow.

… Successful in avoiding recession and in stoking the resources boom, Australia is drawing workers from around the world at a rapid rate. This is the ultimate irony – the population growth that ‘threatens our way of life’ is accelerated by the very prosperity that underpins it. The problem is not so much the escalation of our numbers but the escalation of our wants. Growing up in a house with only one bathroom did not mean my childhood was deprived. My parents were not unhappy because they lacked an ensuite and a walk-in robe. The average floor area of new homes increased by 40 per cent between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s, even though the average number of people per household fell sharply during the same period. Our homes are now the largest in the world, though the blocks they cover are no larger. Mernda, in the aptly named Plenty Valley, is just one of many sites of collision between our growing numbers and our ever inflating aspirations for ‘lifestyle without compromise’.

The greatest spoiler
Salvation in the cities

Brendan Gleeson
Professor of urban policy at Griffith University. His new book is Lifeboat Cities (UNSW Press)

Australia’s development history is, as the historian Geoffrey Bolton describes it, a tale of spoils and spoilers. White settlers unleashed a rough-handed growth model that saw the land as an enemy to be vanquished. Its original owners were not more than troublesome fauna.

… The population boosters dominating the Big Australia debate have assumed the mantle of realism. Their heralds are the business lobbies, sensible politicians and the experts paid to cherish their perspective with misty-eyed sincerity. Contrary views are forborne with an air of patient superiority. Whatever the arguments, the realists say, we are heading inevitably towards a bigger population. The debate, in their eyes, is merely a wash cycle, helping us to spruce up for a newer, larger Australia. And what of climate change, resource insecurity and the possibility of political reaction? To quote the cultural critic Terry Eagleton, these realists have clearly not been reading the newspapers.

In this most uncertain of worlds, a Western civilisation deprived of the certainties of ideology, faith and human identity, there is one thing we can be sure of: our species is already in transit to what the scientist James Lovelock calls ‘The Next World’. It will be a world dominated by a global climate shift that we cannot yet describe fully, but which is inevitable and approaching fast.

… According to James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies: ‘We have to stabilise emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade…we cannot wait for new technologies like capturing emissions from burning coal. We have to act with what we have.’

That was four years ago. For his part, James Lovelock sees humanity, in this century, battered to the point of near extinction and, at best, re-emerging from the crises as a changed and mortified species. He thinks a temperature rise of three or four degrees is unavoidable and will reduce the liveable surface to a few ‘lifeboat’ regions, now the cooler extremes of the Earth. Australia is not on his lifeboat register.

If we have just a few years to prevent the worst and prepare for what lies ahead, there is little point in considering the many palliative measures that bog down the climate and population debates. Until growth is rethought and reframed there will be no politics to support systemic climate response. In 2007 the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, pleaded: ‘I need a political answer. This is an emergency and for emergency situations we need emergency action.’ After Copenhagen, I think he’s still waiting for his answer.

… Taking to the lifeboats means abandoning the ship of fools that was the spoiler growth model. We will have to end the development game and all its entropic speculation and self-interest. An energised common purpose will be needed to bring us through the crisis. We must think about how to manage ourselves on a long voyage to uncertain shores. Rural and regional Australia will not be abandoned, but its fortunes will come largely in the wake of our cities.

… A challenge will be to define and practise what Lovelock describes as the ‘ethics of a lifeboat world’. These are ‘wholly different from those of the cosy self-indulgence of the latter part of the twentieth-century’.

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HINTERLAND TIMES

This is Stephen’s summary of key conclusions from the discussion.

eHealth panelists from left: Dr Richard Ashby, Medical Director, PA Hospital, Brisbane,Nigel Milan, CEO Royal Flying Doctor Service, Rosemary Huxtable, Dep. Sec. Dept of Health & Ageing, Kate Gunn, Director Balance Healthcare, Stephen Alexander, Strategic Industry Advisor (facilitator)

LEADING UP TO the recent federal election, both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott promised more money to bring the health service into line with the rapidly expanding demands on the system. They both wanted to reassure voters that all is well, despite the ageing population and growth in chronic disease across all age groups.

The report from our panel discussion suggests that this promise of delivering a sustainable health service for us all is actually unachievable.

My role as facilitator was to tap into the experiences of this leadership group to see if we could get some agreement on what actually works from a patient perspective, and where to best spend the limited money available.

We saw the challenge as alternatives – either reducing the damage that the health system does to patients or identify evidence that demonstrates a tangible value in acute circumstances, managing chronic disease or generating more wellness.

It is clear that an affordable efficient health service needs to be interconnected in order to deliver what is referred to as a “continuum of care”.

Take, for example, the annual diabetes check up where coordination between the various caregivers, medical testing and hospitals are so broken that patients and their information gets lost in the system.

Early in 2010, Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd admitted that over 30% of hospital beds in Australia are filled up with patients who are direct casualties of the broken system of managing diabetes.

A recent examination in a Queensland region supported this finding and identified that 100% of GP referrals to hospitals had to be duplicated along with the medical testing because the information did not follow the patient. This also occurred in 40% of the referrals to the average of five specialists per patient per year is costing the Medicare system millions of wasted dollars.

Any proposed solution must also take into account the global trends. These include: healthcare costs going up;  demand for services also going up; people’s expectations are going up; there is no more money; there is at best limited success from the large information projects; there is a growing shift towards community or home care rather than hospital; and finally, the whole health system will have to migrate towards a patient-centric model rather than the current mix of administration and clinician- oriented service.

The Australian Treasury has announced that on current projections (which does not include the cost of new treatments), state governments will spend over 100% of their entire revenues by 2040?. No mention was made of when the tipping point would occur; where the rationing of health services would have to be introduced.

The general conclusions from our discussion were in line with those of the UK’s Sir Muir Gray, Chief Knowledge Officer National Health Service (NHS), who says that funders should put the “squeeze” on health and not throw more money at it.

This would encourage innovation, make the health systems actually work, and find other ways to deliver services via latest technology. This is in keeping with the core trends of patient-led innovation, the harvesting of clinical evidence and the creation of common systems for service delivery rather than the ad hoc approach of today.

Our group made three basic recommendations: to ensure wise investment of limited dollars; to ensure a patient-centred, community / home delivery model, and to encourage greater self-responsibility and self-management of chronic disease.

So what would this mean to health outcomes on the Sunshine Coast? Well new high tech hospitals have to be built and old ones maintained just to meet the current demands. But this will not fix the current escalating problem of managing the ageing population or the explosion of chronic disease.

Kate Gunn of the Super Clinic in Cairns, indicated that the Medicare funding procedures were in part to blame as they encourage a high rate turnover rather than encouraging GP practices to manage patients through the system, and to act as honest brokers between the various specialists. Her experience was that when this can occur patients get better faster as they can coordinate with a wider range of specialists including allied health care workers.

Here on the Range, Maleny already exhibits a great deal of collaboration between the various medical fraternities including medical testing and pharmacy, plus allied health. But this works because of the level of trust between the various parties where informal communications can fill in for the lack of an electronic transaction system.

Because of its size it’s also possible to keep track of patients. However, as Maleny grows it will start to experience the problems facing the Sunshine Coast health region where if you, as a patient, do not know as much or even more about the system and your own particular condition, then you run the risk of becoming a victim of the very health system that is funded to protect you.

So, the new federal government will need to increase funding for electronic health records.

Dr Ashby of the Princess Alexandra Hospital said that we need to spend another$6.5b and not the $1.5b currently on offer just to make available the basic information about a patient to each party in the form of a health record.

An e-health record is a means to an end, where all the parties at a regional level can establish, and then publish agreed procedures for all the key chronic conditions, treating patients based on the evidence of what works from the collective experiences of the clinicians.

Greg Moran, organiser of the Australia eHealth conference, said that the cost is falling for the collecting, storing and sharing of trusted medical information in a secure manner, along with the informed consent of the patient.

Greg predicts that by next year many individual medical practitioners and patients will have information on their own phones and devices like iPAD’s and Blackberries, irrespective of government guidelines.

“The discussion should now move away from eHealth issues and challenges”, said Greg, “and more on how we can adapt and align these latest advances and adoption of technology to benefit the health system.”

Greg also said that we could learn a lot from the UK NHS. For example, the Sunshine Coast region could take advantage of initiatives like the UK’s Expert Patient Programme. This programme has helped chronic disease support groups across the country train up their own members to better manage their condition.

Despite the initial apprehension of some medical practitioners in the UK who supported a more paternal approach, the results demonstrated that these selfempowered patients with chronic diseases reduced their hospital visits by over 40%, their stays by over 35% and visits to the GP by over 40%.

The Sunshine Coast region could profitably explore what it can do to reduce the burden on the health system and at the same time improve wellness in our community.

But like the key question in our recent federal election, where is the leadership? Who will show the initiative and be sufficiently focused on the health consumer to overcome all the self interests that have so far kept a lid on these empowering initiatives?

Ever the student of old and new ceramic skills, Johanna has just returned from a four week workshop at China’s Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute. She was awarded a rare study grant to China’s premier university for ceramics, to study the ancient technique of overglaze enamelling. She has returned enthused with ideas that will take her in new creative directions, and she spoke to the Hinterland Times about her trip.

Jingdezhen is ceramic city with decorated porcelain lamp-posts

Johanna’s constant search for new sources of inspiration has led her to study ceramic techniques throughout the world. These studies have taken her to Delft, Royal Copenhagen and Stoke-on-Trent, and to participate in workshops at Meissen and Royal Monaco. A prestigious Churchill Fellowship took her to Europe in 2001 to study lustre glazes.

Johanna’s ceramic vessels combine an eye for modern design with a timeless classical quality of form and visual lustre. It is no surprise that one of Johanna’s vessels was presented to Her Majesty the Queen during her 2000 royal tour and why, in 2004, a magnificent work entitled Rebirth featuring a butterfly was presented by the Governor-General of Australia as his personal wedding gift to Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark and Mary Donaldson.

Jingdezhen City, in the north-east of Jiangxi Province is known as China’s Porcelain Capital. Johanna was housed in the international section of the university and, while facilities were basic, she could at least switch on her laptop and Skype her family in Australia.

The long communal kiln is a feature of ancient Chinese ceramic tradition

This town of 1.5 million people has produced pottery for 1700 years, and its history can be seen everywhere in the city. Even the traffic lights and the lamp-posts are made from porcelain, says Johanna. They have weekly antique ceramics markets in the city and no ceramic piece is wasted. One amusing example is the creation of little walls, made up of lots of old rejected ceramic pieces, as a parody of the Great Wall.

As we all know there are fundamental changes going on in China, no more so than in ceramic arts. The Chinese ceramic tradition is for the firing of work in huge communal kilns. No-one has ownership of individual pieces – one person throws the clay, another shapes a pot, another glazes, another fires and another paints designs.

It all comes together at the communal kiln but no single person owns or signs the work. Even the renowned porcelain works of the imperial Ming and Tang dynasties were made in this communal way. That situation is changing says Johanna with new graduates eager to set up their own studios and launch careers as individual artists where they see both fame and fortune.

Johanna stands beside a small wall that is a wonderful mix of ceramic odds and ends.

“What’s still impressive are the high levels of skill of those involved in ceramics,” says Johanna. “So the porcelain painters are extremely skilled, the carvers are skilled, the glazers are skilled. But when you put them altogether and get one person to complete the whole work, you don’t get the same level of skill. It’s changing but it will take time.”

Johanna went to Jingdezhen to learn the traditional Chinese techniques of overglaze enamelling-decorating or painting over the top of the fired glaze. The work is then refired at lower temperatures to produce beautifully controlled designs in rich enamel colours.

Johanna was taught by a professor, following the traditions of tracing ancient motifs, mixing colours and how to hold a paint brush, Chinese-style.

a young Chinese potter uses the unusual standing posture to throw a pot

“I’m not very good with a paint brush,” says Johanna with a smile. “So I had to get used to holding a brush with a steady hand so that it holds the volume of paint within it.

“At the moment my decorative surfaces are limited to using lustre and gold, sand-blasting, and raised enamel dotting. I wanted to get back to the grass roots Chinese ceramicists, and use the brush in a painterly way. I have now been able to teach myself how to apply broad areas of overglaze enamel colour.

Johanna DeMaine’s painstaking attention to technique and design tradition reflects her first career as a high school teacher in languages, economics and geography. Not only has she brought back from China several enamels, some of the oils and many different brushes, but she is researching the techniques she has been shown.

“The Chinese are very secretive about the techniques they are prepared to give away,” she says with a smile. “I was told things that I haven’t seen in print. Now I am researching some ancient Chinese texts to see if what I have been shown matches up with the theory.”

We can expect, in the future, some exciting new ceramic art directions from Johanna DeMaine who always returns to the inspiration of the Sunshine Coast hinterland and the Glasshouse Mountains. Her latest exhibition is called, All that is Sublime and is at Art on Cairncross, Cairncross Corner, Maleny from August 7-29.

Adrian Butler of the World Fire Safety Foundation holds up a dangerous battery-powered ionisation smoke alarm

THIS documentary exposes the fraud and corruption that has led to millions of people around the world installing the wrong type of smoke alarm in the mistaken belief that they are protected from fire.

ABS figures reveal that every year there are over 10,000 house fires in Australia, causing more than 1,500 injuries and 110 deaths. Enright’s film exposes the marketing sham of ionisation alarms for detecting smoke fires.

Peter Enright has collaborated with the World Fire Safety Organisation to produce this hard-hitting and confronting film. He interviewed numerous families who had lost loved ones, particularly children in house fires and was horrified to learn that these tragedies could have been prevented if the correct alarms had been installed.

For over 30 years, smoke detector manufacturers have deliberately created a false sense of security by claiming that ionisation smoke alarms – the most common type – will alert us in time to prevent death, injury and our homes destroyed.

Because burning toast, cooking fumes and other household vapours instantly set these alarms off, we are falsely led to believe that these units are also sensitive to other kinds of smoke.

Sean and Anita Cohen who lost two of their own children and two of Sean’s brother’s children.

The reality is that the ionisation unit is activated by tiny particles of a specific size, not the smoke itself, whereas photoelectric units detect a change in the light level and respond much faster.

The most deadly house fires occur at night, usually caused by electrical faults and produce toxic smouldering fumes that are inhaled by sleeping occupants. In most cases, this type of smoke will not activate ionisation alarms until the house is well alight and by that time it is too late to save people, possessions or property.

Ionisation alarms have a demonstrated failure rate of 75%!

Test room set alight for the documentary film

“With the correct knowledge, fire deaths are entirely preventable,” says Peter Enright. “Everyone thinks that it will never happen to them, including every family that I interviewed for this documentary.

“I aim to reach as many people as possible about the urgent need to replace their ionisation smoke alarms with photoelectric ones, the type that actually work. My ultimate goal is to have ionisation alarms banned in Australia.”

Even though there is a 15% increase in the past two years of the installation of fire alarms across Australia, the number of fire deaths has not decreased, making it abundantly clear that changes in smoke detector standards need to be made.

The film also highlights the health risks posed by the radioactive material contained within ionisation alarms and the urgent need for an environmentally responsible policy for the disposal of these units.

‘Stop the Children Burning’, is being screened across the Sunshine Coast over the following months.

Alternatively visit the website for full details www.planetfiresafety.com.au

Win a Free DVD!
Be one of the first ten people to contact the Hinterland Times to win a DVD copy of  Stop the Children Burning

One-on-one support can make all the difference. Teacher John Mays with Jaimi

THE MALENY Flexi School is located in the town’s new Neighbourhood Centre. It has the support of Education Queensland which provides teachers for the school as well as access to Maleny State High School facilities and resources. The school also relies on services and resources provided by the community.

Flexi School students can opt for subjects through distance education, link to the high school, complete programs developed at the Flexi school or develop independent projects. Teacher Brad Owens is also embarking on a mentor program in conjuction with United Synergies so that young people can gain some knowledge of potential career and job prospects from locals with experience in the workplace.

Flexi School students, RikkLee and Bryce are working on individual programs according to an agreed work rate calendar.

On the day that the Hinterland Times visited the Flexi School a group of students was having a barbecue and meeting representatives from United Synergies, an organisation running programs to support people facing challenges in entering or re-entering the workforce.

Tasmin is a Year 10 student who has just started at the Flexi School. After a year away from formal study she has decided to try again – through the Flexi School.

“I just wasn’t getting on with the people at high school. None of the teachers wanted to help me and I ended up doing no work. So I quit school. Then I decided to come here. I thought it would be better for me.

“There are better opportunities here,” adds Tasmin. “Teachers listen better. They help you more and they have more one-on-one contact with you. I am starting out with easy Maths and English and then I can work up.

Brad with Carol (right in red) and Flexi School students.

“I may come back here next year or get a job – maybe get a traineeship or apprenticeship in hospitality. You need good maths for measurements and so on in cooking.”

Brad Owens is the head teacher at the Flexi School which over the last 12 months has provided support for more than 40 students. Brad is assisted by part-time teacher John Mays and teachers’ aid Carol Ferriday. The school is very much a part of the Maleny High School system and they have a lot of support from the high school teachers. They understand that Brad and his team are providing a service which makes their job a lot easier.

“The majority of students here realise that the Flexi School is another chance for them”, says the quietly spoken Brad Owens, who is clearly the antithesis of a heavy-handed authority figure. “The ones who find it hard here are those who have no idea where they’re going,” adds Brad. “So we provide a safe environment where they can continue to do schoolwork while they’re still sorting themselves out.”

The new Flexi School provides a comfortable space for students and staff to work together.

Part of the Flexi School rationale is that students who have dropped out of the high school system need to be coaxed back to study via a sense of security, and having their personal learning needs met. The Flexi School provides that place where students can get the attention they need, and, as Brad says, they do not simply disappear off the radar.

Since the start of 2010 RikkiLee has been at Year 12 level. She is another example of someone falling through the cracks of the traditional school system.

“I didn’t get along with the teachers at my previous school], says this articulate young woman who feels she is now on a better life track.

“The teachers here haven’t got so many students so they can help you more. I want to finish Year 12 now and not muck around. I want to do a childcare course at TAFE in Maroochydore and I need Certificate 3 to get there.”

“There is a point where some kids give up,” stresses Brad.

“It’s usually when they are not understanding something or can’t keep up with what’s going on. Sometimes it can be that a one-on-one session can get them past that block. But it is difficult when you are in a system to get the personal attention when you need it.”

Each student at the Flexi School has to agree to an individual learning contract. Attendance requires a minimum number of hours a week and the need to get work material completed. There is a calendar for every student so they can quickly see whether they are up to date. The focus at the school is to get each student through their particular program.

Brad says Flexi School success is measured by having some kids simply attend, particularly those who have a history of truanting. “It’s then a matter of how well they progress in terms of their academic studies, but also in terms of the bigger picture of having some idea or plan of their immediate future,” he adds.

“One thing I have learnt is that all kids are different,” says Brad. “Here they have no sense of group identity common in the traditional high school. They are very much individuals, and they all have their reasons for coming here.

“Some are very dramatic and wear their hearts on their sleeves. Others are very quiet. They are a reflection of their home life. I like to think that despite what happens outside of the Flexi School, they are able to feel good about being here.”

Local Queensland MP Andrew Powell recently returned from his personal Kokoda experience. It stretched him to his physical limits and helped reshape his view of war.

THERE WERE several reasons why I wanted to walk the Kokoda Track. As a politician I quickly realised that one of the most important days for any MP is ANZAC Day. It’s certainly one of our busiest. And as a Generation Xer I have always struggled to understand what it was like to serve on a front line in a war zone. So I have found it very challenging to stand up and address an ANZAC Day crowd without any real appreciation of what war was all about.

I had two grandfathers who served one in the Australian army and one in the American army. Both served in WW II in New Guinea, although not at Kokoda. They both died when I was quite young so I never got to talk to them about their contributions in that war. And as times goes on we are losing those personal stories between the generations.

I also had a goal to keep fit because you lead a very sedentary life as a politician and in hindsight, I haven’t done nearly enough exercise.

Andrew’s trekking group surround the last of the Fuzzy Wuzzy angels, who helped injured Australian soldiers to get medical treatment along the Track

Very quickly on the Track you got a sense of how hard it must have been. I thought about that small CMF force that was basically holding the Japanese at bay until the AIF arrived several weeks later. People slammed the CMF as choco soldiers who would melt at the first sign of action. But they didn’t. The stood up monumentally to the Japanese and held them at bay.

I wonder how many Australians today appreciate the predicament they were in. Here were several battles over a number of months when the Japanese came as close as seeing the lights of Port Moresby. When you stand in the Japanese trenches on Loribaiwa Ridge you realise how close they got. They literally had one ridge to go. That puts everything you trekked through into perspective. If the Australians hadn’t decided on a fighting withdrawal, every step of the way, and lost good men in the process, then the Japanese could have kept coming.

Exhaustion is part of the modern-day experience of walking the Kokoda Track. For Andrew Powell, it was a time to think seriously about getting fit.

You can still come across battle sites and there are relics all along the Track. There was one site we came to at Eora Creek where there were shells, ration materials, helmets, rifles – and you stand there and realise more clearly what it was like. A lot of the villages along the Track now have museums where you can pay to go and see these relics. It all helps with the income of their community.

You can see where the Australians tried to cross Eora Creek and where they were slaughtered because the Japanese had such a strong defensive position. This is one of the places where you have a real sense of sadness and futility around war. And I say that knowing that a lot of people had no choice but to fight, because it was a decision made by higher powers.

At the end of the trek I think I gained a greater respect for anyone who had served during that campaign and that war. Even though at times I had a hard day along the track, I wasn’t being shot at, I didn’t have dysentery or malaria, I was drinking sanitised water, and I had someone carrying a lot of my gear.

I was well fed and relatively fit yet I still found it hard. I don’t know how those soldiers put up with what they did, although there were moments on that trek when you realise that your body can always do more than you think it can, if it has to. The reality is that those men had to. You also realise the importance of mateship. Many soldiers only survived because of the close bonds they had with others in their units.

The discovery of war relics along the Kokoda Track is still a surprise to trekkers 60 years on. They are a stark reminder of the horror once occupying this tranquil environment

A most poignant memory that I will always remember is the service we held on Brigade Hill. We were fatigued but we all realised we were standing in part of Australia. One hundred brave Aussies had died up there. We held a minute’s silence and there were tears because, despite the wonderful scenery, emotionally you could not divorce yourself from the history of the place.

One of the most sobering experiences of the whole trip was at the end of the trek when we were in the bus on the outskirts of Port Moresby. We were pretty cock ‘a hoop having finished the trek and we arrived at Bomana War Cemetery. We were suddenly confronted by 3000 white headstones and the bus went instantly silent. Someone let fly with an expletive that was incredibly appropriate at what we had suddenly witnessed.

Most of us went off by ourselves and stood, frustrated at how many had to die, and knowing that the headstones represented a small percentage of those who had died elsewhere in that war.

Walking the Kokoda Track was very hard. Will I do it again? I might, with my wife or my children if they wanted to. That was really my first trekking experience – nine days out in the bush – and it has increased my interest in more trekking, but perhaps in different locations.

I have studied history, but what this trek gives you is a sense of the man on the street who volunteered to fight, and the personal hell that they would have gone through. Studying history is several steps removed from reality. War is very much in your face when you walk the Track.

Has it turned me into a pacifist? No, because I still expect that there will be times when war is necessary. One of the American presidents said that sometimes war is a necessary evil and I think that sums it up perfectly.

But my Kokoda experience has changed my perspective on things. It has made me more reflective about war. I can now look beyond the glamorisation of conflict. I have a better appreciation of the human spirit, and its abilities to rise to the challenges war brings. But now, more than ever, I’m also conscious of the cost, the senselessness, of war. And it’s that which will leave the most lasting impression on me.

Sharne Hobill and Alex McKean

Sharne Hobill and Alex McKean are professional lawyers with Maurice Blackburn and are two of the many volunteer lawyers providing free legal advice as part of the Suncoast Community Legal Service.

Hinterland residents can make appointments on Monday evenings to see a lawyer at Morris House in Landsborough or at the Maleny Neighbourhood Centre.

The two lawyers specialise in medical negligence and workplace injuries with Maurice Blackburn, a firm also known for its interest in social justice matters.

Sharne told the Hinterland Times that people are encouraged to take advantage of the service which helps to point them in the right legal direction.

“It’s really an opportunity to tell people what their legal rights are,” said Sharne, “and what long term pro bono services are available beyond their initial Suncoast Community Legal Service appointment.”

“People always need legal help,” added Alex. “It’s whether or not they know the service is there. It’s getting the word out.”

On the Hinterland the Service provides an initial 15 minute interview. If you can’t get help in that time then you can be referred to one of the full time lawyers who work for the Service.

“People often don’t know what their rights are or what process they need to go through” says Sharne. “We hope to provide people with guidance, particularly as people come in with multi-faceted problems and they may not know where to start.”

People with any kind of legal problem are encouraged to access the service. The kinds of legal problems the service has seen are motor vehicle accidents where an insurer says a person is at fault, neighbourhood disputes, say over a dividing fence, the rights of tenants, criminal offences and a summons to appear in court, contractual disputes, family property disputes, wills, injuries, bankruptcies, employment contract queries and people who have been discriminated against in their employment.

“People are often simply looking for someone to listen to their side of their story,” says Alex. “Their voice is not being heard. For us it’s issue identification. We are there to listen to their story, explain the range of services available to them, and then direct them towards taking the right course of action.”

“As lawyers we’re very good at asking the right questions,” adds Sharne. “We know how to get to the bottom of things.”

This married couple met at QUT where they majored in human rights and ethics, and both see access to the law as a human rights issue.

“I feel passionately about ensuring people know what their rights are and the legal remedies they are entitled to,” says Sharne.

Alex sees pro bono work as a matter of career motivation. “It depends on whether or not you see the legal profession as a vocation or a career. If you see it as a vehicle for your own personal wealth then you probably won’t volunteer for community level services. If you see yourself as someone who actually has knowledge which should be used for the good of everyone, then you are more likely to want to take it to as many people as you can.”

Alternate Monday evening consultations with the Suncoast Community Legal Service are available at 6pm at Morris House in Landsborough and at the Maleny Neighbourhood Centre.

Call 5443 7827 to make an appointment.

Graham Moon from the Nambour Museum sitting at a manual exchange

FORMED by a group of businessmen in 1907 to promote and develop the town, the Nambour Progress Association was a driving force behind the arrival of the telephone. With a reliance on the rail service for mail and the use of morse code for telegraph transmissions, one can only imagine the delight of townspeople at the thought of conversing with each other over a telephone line.

Locals wanted it located near the railway station in the centre of town but railway officials would not release land to the Postmaster-General. Shire Chairman J.T Lowe’s old residence in lower Currie Street was offered as interim rental accommodation and this allowed Nambour to become established as a trunk line telephone office on 5 February 1908.

Finally, on 1st July 1910 the new purpose built Post Office building in upper Currie Street was officially opened along with the long-awaited manual telephone exchange.

This Swedish Ericsson wall telephone became the Australian standard in 1901.

According to the editor of The Nambour Chronicle, the new exchange opened with 25 subscribers. He also commented that, “It is early to judge, but we may say that we have made a number of calls already, and with full

satisfaction in each case. We are beginning to wonder how we could have done without this modern convenience for so long.” (02/10/1910).

The manual telephone service remained in Nambour until 24 May 1969 when an automatic service was finally introduced.

Australians have always been quick to embrace new technologies and in many rural and remote areas, in particular, party lines were established to increase the availability of telephone service to ever more homes. As the name implies, the party line provided no privacy of conversation as two or more subscribers shared the same common line back to the exchange.

Another feature of party lines was the rather basic form of line construction. The aerial lines were erected on timber poles and/or suitable trees and the responsibility for erecting and maintaining the line rested with the individual parties where the line traversed their own property and the collective group where the line was common to all parties.

Generally, the party lines serviced farming communities and families but one particular party line provides an interesting insight into the importance placed on the telephone service after its arrival in Nambour.

In 1933, telephone service “Nambour 58” served an astonishing eight parties. They shared the same line which ran from the Nambour telephone exchange via Diddillibah to Maroochydore. The overall length of the line was long compared with other party line construction in the Nambour area and this would have exacerbated the usual signaling, privacy concerns and management issues associated with party lines.

All this makes you smile when you walk along Currie Street one hundred years later and note people walking and talking interstate and overseas on their mobiles and iPhones. If you have any old telephone memorabilia, the Nambour Museum would be interested in receiving contributions. Contact Graham Moon Tel: 544 13121.