A Quiet Protest For Tibet
TC and her Big Sis have made a small contribution to the protests surrounding the Chinese Government and their human rights record. I've taken the liberty of reproducing TC's post here.
I am very proud of what these two ladies have done. Please read:
Big Sis and I have been talking about the Save Tibet campaign lately. Everyone who owns either a TV, internet-enabled computer or radio would surely have heard about all the protests being carried out around the world concerning the Olympic Torch. The torch relay has successfully been hampered in many places by the protest of some very concerned people of the world, the most notable being the London and Paris protests. China has slammed these protests as being 'vile', even though they have been peaceful protests. Rather hypocritical of that particular government I say, considering the vile acts perpetrated upon their own citizens as well as the citizens of other countries like Tibet.
The protests have included one in which 37 people were arrested in London, and in Paris 5 were arrested including a local politician (kudos to him) and the torch was extinguished. The US protests were much smaller, but the most notable was the arrest of three protestors after scaling the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
Anyway, as old hippies both, Big Sis and I have been discussing these protests with great fervour. Our hearts go out to the peoples of Tibet, as well as the many Chinese citizens who have had to live with human rights crimes themselves. We are both appalled at the injustices that these peoples have had to endure from the Chinese government over the years, and are in support of the protests that are going on. These protests have been handled in the most noble of manners, as any protest should. The people involved have brought world-wide attention to the cause, and in the true spirit of peaceful protests, there have been no documented injuries.
Now, Australia is about to have our turn to host the Olympic torch. On the 24th of April, the Olympic Torch relay will be conducted in Canberra. Free Tibet activists tout the protests as "fantastic" and say they are "delighted with the protests dogging the Olympic torch". They are promising a strong but non-violent protest in Australia".
So Big Sis and I were discussing how we would both like to run off to Canberra to add our voices to those who will be protesting here. However, sometimes what we want is not always practical. I simply can't afford either the time (I have a job to do here) nor the money to travel to the protest. Big Sis is quite ill and as she is often in a great deal of pain, such a trip just would not be sensible for her to take. As such we have decided to make a small and quiet protest of our own.
We took the clippers to our own heads, then after donning our orange colours we made the greatest sacrifice of all. We stood in front of a camera!!!
Does my head look big in this?
Two beautiful blooms.
This was not a great sacrifice for either of us, though. At least we live in a country where we're allowed freedom of speech without the fear of being either arrested or shot in the streets. At least we're not being forced to live in squallor, suffering from famine and disease, and being denied the right to the most basic of aid. Nor have we been encouraged to give up our babies to die naked and alone in hospital, simply because they are unlucky enough to be born with a disability. Nor have we been injected with a saline solution that will slowly and painfully eat away at our babies because we have fallen pregnant more than once. Nor do our children have to live without a legal identity, and thus the access to the most basic of educations. Nor do we have to watch our elderly neighbours slowly starve to death because their one son has died and they have no financial support in their old age. I could go on, but I won't. I will however, provide you with
some links so that you can read about these and many more human rights violations in China.
Please show your disgust at actions such as these. Visit the
International Campaign for Tibet website and do some reading. Then follow some of
these links and voice your own protest.
Free Tibet.
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A Little Bit of Kingaroy
Posted at 23:45, Wed 9 April 2008
Spelling errors will be corrected when I get around to it...
Today started out to be a complete pain in the proverbial...
If you don't want to read about the start of my day, please scroll down to the picture of the Kingaroy Peanut silos. I met a man who has some history to tell that I'm sure you'll find interesting if you're into that sort of stuff.
Yesterday I had appointments with a psychiatrist (to see how crazy I was), my new GP (for a Medical Certificate to prove I was crazy) and Centrelink (to tell them I was crazy) in
Kingaroy. For those of you who don't know, I have been diagnosed with severe depression. I've been aware that I wasn't quite 'right' for a few years now, but was too proud (or stupid) to see anyone about it. I haven't worked for quite a while. In fact, the last job I had lasted three weeks, which was a miracle in itself. I sold almost everything I owned and got to the point where I was (am) what most people would call destitute. Anyway, that's another story altogether, but goes some way to explain why I spent yesterday and today in town getting things sorted out with a psychiatrist, my new GP and
Centrelink.
On with the show...
I had to be in town at 8:30 for a second Centrelink appointment, then at 12:30 I had to see the folks at CTC, a Job Network organization. For those of you who don't know, things are a little different nowadays at Centrelink. Back in the eighties, I was on Sickness Benefits due to a car accident. Back then, you got a medical Certificate and you fronted to Social Security as it was known then, and they gave you 'Sickness Benefits'. In this modern age of strangeness, if you do *not* have a job to go back to when you get better, you apply for Unemployment Benefits with a disability exemption. This means that you apply for the dole at Centrelink. They refer you to your chosen Job Network provider and book you an appointment. Then you go to the provider and you fill out more forms there and have another interview, and then, because you provided Centrelink with a Medical Certificate (it *must* be an official Centrelink Medical Certificate form, not just a Doctor's medical certificate), you don't have to do any Job hunting or participate in any job network programs. It all gets over-ridden by the medical certificate and you can then start getting payments (if you have all your ID and a separation certificate from your last employer etc etc).
Now, I can somehow understand why it is done this way...it saves having to go through all of the dole applications and Job Network interviews when you get better and you can get straight into looking for a job etc. However, for people who are suffering from a psychological condition or illness, wouldn't it be better to do all that *after* they are well, rather than have them have to go through all that rigmarole at a time when they are least likely to be able to cope with it? Wouldn't it be far easier for the client (that's you and me if you're not a Centrelink worker) to just apply for Sickness Benefits and worry about the other stuff *after*?
Here's what happened to me this morning. I got up at 6:30 am after a shit nights sleep as is usual for a lot of Depressives (3 hours I think last night because I have a wonderful case of insomnia). I got ready and drove the 60 odd kilometres to Kingaroy for my 8:30 appointment. When I got there, and went in to see 'K' from Centrelink, he said, "you'll have to participate in Job Search (or whatever it's called) because your GP has ticked the box that says you can work 8 hours or more week."
"He must have ticked the wrong box."
"You'll have to go back and get another certificate then. Oh, and your ATM statement isn't any good. We need you to go to your bank and get a balance that is stamped and signed (here is the form), and get a statement of your transaction for the past x amount of time."
I don't recall exactly how long he asked for. I'm not whinging about 'K', that's his job. He has to make sure it's all done according to Centrelink rules. Besides that, he seems like a nice bloke. In fact, everyone I've dealt with at Centrelink Kingaroy have been nice people. He said that if I could get this done today and get the paperwork back to them today I should be able to get a payment by Monday. I'm glad I agreed to have an early appointment with them, else things may have gotten a bit curly.
OK. So I walk up the road and front the receptionist at my new GP and inform her politely that Dr B had ticked the wrong box on the Medical Certificate and they need me to get another.
"Do you have the certificate with you?"
"No. Centrelink have marked the certificate as received and can't give it back to me."
With a look that said, 'time waster', she says,"Take a seat and I'll talk to Doctor."
Half an hour later, she calls me up and hands me a photocopy of the copy.
"Here."
"I haven't had to deal with Centrelink in a long time, but I think they'll accept a copy." I said.
"If they have a problem, tell them to ring the doctor. I've *never* been in there and going by the things I see in here, I don't want to either," was her reply. With that, she turned her back and started sorting paperwork. Funny thing that. I got the same cold attitude when I asked the Doctor for a medical certificate yesterday.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting their vibe. But I have a feeling that I may have to talk to the psychiatrist at my next appointment in six weeks (or my Psychologist sooner) and ask if he knows of another GP in town that bulk bills. I get this feeling that he and his part time receptionist think I'm some sort of welfare sponge. I didn't sell off everything I owned to become a sponge, I did it so I didn't have to become one...
Anyway...by then the bank has opened, so I walk down to the bank and get served by someone almost straight away (30 seconds wait!). I tell Sue (that's her real name on her badge) that I need a balance to be written and signed on the form that I have and that I need a statement as well. She is absolutely lovely and tells me that a statement will cost $2.50 but it will automatically be deducted from my balance. No worries, I had $3.06 in there so I was flush. She gave me a statement going back to February and I said good-bye and thankyou (she was nice...
CBA, you have a nice person working at Kingaroy) and I headed back to Centrelink.
When I got there, the bloke that gave me my prelim interview yesterday was at the reception desk and he took all the forms from me and said he'd give them to K for me. I didn't know if they needed to see me again, so he checked and all was OK. By this time it was about 10:30 and I still had two hours to kill before my interview at CTC. Now, normally, or should I say, for a 'normal' person all this would have been a breeze. But for a crazy person, it is bloody draining. I was knackered. Alright, the little voices in my head are telling me I'm not crazy. I know I'm not crazy, and no, little voices don't talk to me and I'm not taking this piss out of people suffering schizophrenia. It's just a coping strategy I'm using to deal with this depression thing.
A very good friend of ours whom we have never met face to face put some money in the bank for us yesterday, so I had some spare...well not really, but I was stuffed and my body said I needed to eat. I tend to not eat until my body yells at me. That's another thing that seems to be symptom of my condition. I forget to eat unless Tina tells me too, or my body warns me that I really need to eat. I lost about six or eight Kilos over the past five months, three of that in the past two weeks (unless the scales are stuffed).
I went for a wander up the street and found a cafe. The
'Busy Bee' cafe, which has been operating since the 1920's (there is a photo on the wall inside). This is a cafe that at one time in its life would have had booths down the wall with a jukebox at each one attached to the wall. Older folks would know what I'm talking about. Nowadays the booths are gone, replaced with round tables and no jukebox. It still has that olde worlde charm about it though.
I ordered a Coffee Thickshake and a Bacon and Egg burger and sat down and read the local paper. After a few minutes the nice lady gave me my thickshake, and about five or ten minutes after that my B & E burger arrived. If you are ever in Kingaroy, go to the Busy Bee and order a B & E burger. They are bloody excellent and cheap enough that you get better value than a 'plastic Mac' meal. I devoured the burger and sucked down the thickshake like a starving refuge on speed. Thankfully I slowed down on the shake and avoided a brain freeze.
Now, if anyone has bothered to read this far, I'll get to the story of what I wanted to tell you before I got side-tracked. I found the
Kingaroy Tourist Information Centre and Heritage museum by accident in the last hour and a half before my CTC interview. In there I met Wilf Young, the son of the man who is credited with starting the large scale commercial growing of Peanuts in Kingaroy, Harry Young. So, without further ado, here is a (hopefully) short story about the yarn we had and my little history lesson about the Kingaroy Peanut industry.
I wandered back up the road from the Busy Bee Cafe with the intention of taking a few photos of the silos up the road. Kingaroy is the Peanut capital of Australia (don't laugh). The processing plant has 99 silos!
Across the road is the
Kingaroy Visitor Information Centre and Heritage Museum, so I decided that I could waste some time in there and maybe pick up a map or two (I like maps).
I went inside and saw shelves and shelves of stuff you could buy but I couldn't afford, so headed to the pamphlet rack. A gentleman headed over and asked if he could help, and suggested I have a look at a short (10 minute) video that explained all about the
Peanut Company of Australia and how Peanuts go from seed to consumer. I watched the short doco and learnt something new. Peanuts are closely related to Peas (Duh!). But, the peanuts don't grow on the roots. The flowers self pollinate at night, then the stamen extends toward the ground, and then pokes its end underground and a Peanut grows from the end of that!
Oh, and something I just discovered while checking my links for this saga, the PCA names the cultivars it develops and releases after Australian Prime Ministers. I don't know why, but I found that to be as funny as...Peanut Politicians. Somehow I suspect that the idea may well have started as a joke.
After watching the movie, I was going to leave, but noticed a walkway to left of the front exit. Above it was a sign that pointed out that it was the way into the Heritage Museum - Free Entry. Cool, that would definitely give a trivia and history geek like me plenty of things to look at and read for the next hour.
Upon entering the museum I was greeted by an old bloke who looked about sixty or so (he's actually in his late seventies). I explained how I liked looking at things that related to the history of areas I visit and that I was here for a while. With that the conversation turned to the state of the modern word and our theories on why young folk are the way they are (the age of commercialism and stuff). During this yarn, he said that his father was a founder of the peanut industry in the Kingaroy region. Well, he had me then! This was a bloke that had some stories that needed to be told to me and wasn't gunna get away!
His name is
Wilf Young, son of
Harry Young, grandson of Ah Young, a Chinese Immigrant who came to Queensland with his wife. How he met his wife is a tale. Somewhere on the way to Australia, around the Great Australian Bight, the vessel they were on got ship-wrecked. He rescued her and nursed her back to health. They then travelled to the East coast where they married. If I recall correctly, they first settled around the Gympie area (Gold of course). They moved out Kingaroy way and planted their first Peanut crop in the Burnett region at Memerambi, just North of Kingaroy.
Wilf went on to tell me about some of the early machinery on display and explained how peanut crops were manually harvested and stacked, or made into '
stooks' to dry before threshing. As his story unfolded, he showed me an old Wheat thresher that had been converted to handle Peanuts, "it was a little small though and couldn't handle too much at one time", and casually pointed across to a much larger machine behind it, adding, "the bigger one made it easier".
As we yarned, I asked him if the smaller one was used on his father's farm. He said that it came from another farmer's property, but may well have been his father's old one because he had converted one at one stage and sold it to someone else "after he built the larger one behind it."
Well, I was like a kid in a candy store! Here I was, talking to this bloke whose father was the pioneer of the commercial Peanut industry in Australia and it was like he was talking as if it was just an everyday occurrance. I was talking to Wilf Young, a part of Kingaroy's REAL history!
We wandered in the direction of this huge machine and he went on to explain that it used to have more parts on it, but over the years he'd borrowed bits off it to build other things around the farm, so it didn't look quite like it once did. He diverged off the subject of the thresher for a bit and showed me photos of the 1951 fire that destroyed the timber silos and told me how he was out working the paddocks on his farm one day and knocked off early due to rain. As he was heading to the house, he noticed smoke over towards Kingaroy, but didn't find 'til later that it was the silos and thousands of pounds of Peanuts getting roasted!
Later on we got back to the thresher. He pointed out a small spot at the rear of the machine where a little boy could climb in and sit. "I used to climb in there when we were going to do contract harvesting. It was my stagecoach and I'd shoot Indians from there. Sometimes I'd climb up on top and shoot 'em from there, from the top of my stage coach." He showed me a sketch that his sister had drawn in 1995, on display in front of the thresher. "I asked her when she was drawing this if she remembered him building it. She said she can remember him in the shed, punching holes in sheet metal to make the separators, but not much else". He figured that she was about 2 years old then. The sketch shows the tractor, thresher, two trailers and the horse and sulky used to take them home at night when they were out contract harvesting. The thresher itself was in use right up until the fifties.
Wilf Young with his father's thresher. Click on image for a larger view.
We talked some more and he showed me the bolts that his father had made on their forge.
"He could weld with a forge. Him and a mate worked together. It was a tricky process where the metal was heated up to a molten stage. Fine sand would be sprinkled on it to stop it running and then they move the two pieces together, then gently tap them so they'd meld together. As the metal started to cool he'd beat the square shape for the bolt head on the anvil. He made a lot of his long bolts because they were to hard to buy back then."
By this time it was getting close to my interview time at CTC. He took me outside and showed me some Peanut plants they had growing for the tourists, then we went back in and had a look at a couple of aerial photos of the Peanut processing plant. Unfortunately it was nearly my deadline. Wilf was due to knock off at one o'clock anyway. I said good-bye and told him that I'd be back next Wednesday to say g'day again.
If you are in Kingaroy on a Wednesday morning and would like to meet a true gentleman and a part of the district's history, drop into the Heritage museum in Haly street, opposite the silos and say g'day to Wilf. He's a bloody nice bloke.
(The two B & W images have been copied from the Peanut Company of Australia website. These images are also on display at the Heritage museum. Permission for use has not yet been requested, but I hope that the society doesn't mind).
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