THE EARTHRISE DIARY
(May 2013)
© text Don Diespecker 2013.
Guest writers retain ©
Don Diespecker
Give me books, fruit, French
wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do
not know.
John Keats. Letter to Fanny Keats,
August 29 1819.
May 5 2013. Sunday. Suddenly
it’s autumn and the weather these last few days has been magnificent: sunny and
mild to warm with flurried leaf falls like yellow snow and busy butterflies
flying missions and perhaps sorties over Big Lawn. I am de-constructing part of
the bathroom floor: river pebbles set in cement placed over floorboards nearly
30 years ago. This is hot and heavy work (and not forgetting the endless risks
to go crashing through the skeletal floor and the exciting opportunities for
snakes and other wild life to rise up from below). By mid afternoon and
frustrated by two recalcitrant nails holding an inaccessible length of steel
angled reinforcement, I need a garden break. These garden breaks are essential,
anyway, because they give me pause and time to be within the influences of the Outside. Outside is more than a location or place, as many I’m sure will
confirm. There are objects and events in built environments that detract from
or prevent us from breathing fresh air, feeling grass and the earth beneath our
feet, hearing birdsong mixed with the steady sounds of the river’s rapids, and seeing and feeling the ambience of the garden. The sun is still bright and
warm and I totter down to a bold sunny patch behind the belvedere and close to
an old white cedar tree and before I can set my chair in the wet soil I’m
happily aware of sights and sounds, and some brown butterflies scrambling from
the grass to get airborne. I must seem to the butterflies to be like an enemy
strike, a blitz from above. The drying grasses and chickweed that support the
little brown and yellow fliers are alive with insects making the most of the
day now interrupted by a bumbling human. For me, there are suddenly the
renewing aspects of arriving Outside that feel as profound as reflectively
pausing in cathedrals and chapels, national shrines, the Kings Chamber of the
Great Pyramid, a concentration camp or again standing in front of one’s house
of early childhood. Much recent rain has allowed the lawn grass and other
plants to grow undisturbed: had I been able to mow this wet lawn the
butterflies would not have had the use of it. Manicured lawns look good, but
they also deserve to be their natural selves: when allowed their expression of
growing vertically they may also look beautiful. Lawns that are severely
close-cut (some mowers I know insist on a daily
trim!) appear in my perspective as being equivalent to surgical mutilation.
May 26 2013. Sunday. Everything changes, of course. Following
further splendid sunny and dry days the rain arrives yet again: it muddies the
gardens anew, it turns the river an ugly grey and the sky is completely
cloud-covered. The high humidity makes the air miserably cold after having
being cosily warm. Now the weather has moved away from unpleasant to pleasant
again. Staring out the lounge-room window I look down and across the river to
the Bellinger’s Left Bank to see the tail of fine gravel and sand downstream
and there’s a tiny inches-high overhang bank that looks like miniature cliffs
as if seen from high on a mountain looking downward toward plains. I was
reading recently some of the descriptive terms used to describe and explain
structure and form in the USA: bajada,
for example (‘slope’ in Spanish; also a ‘sequence of alluvial fans spreading
into a desert valley at a shallow angle from a series of steep side canyons’);
or, ballena (Spanish for ‘whales’;
also …’cloudbursts send torrents of runoff down ravines cut into the flanks of
sparsely vegetated mountains… Flowing water may subsequently carve deep,
parallel grooves into the alluvial fans until all that remains of it is an
array of alluvial humps…’). –And
there’s a Spanish name for the tiny ephemeral cliff (a miniature version of
what I was idly staring at, (a barranca being
a cliff or precipice). The unusual book containing the interesting information
is Home
Ground. Language for American Landscapes and is edited by Barry Lopez
and Debra Gwartney. The book informs the reader, as an encyclopaedic dictionary
would, and its pages also have very wide margins to accommodate quoted writings
by well-known authors such as Cormac McCarthy. I’ve just read McCarthy’s No
country for old men (yes, the theme is murderous and gory, but the
prose is exceptional and lyrical: his favoured genre is the Western and his
descriptions of the landscapes of Mexico and Texas help to elevate his writings
into literature—or Western literature).
My cousin Jill recently forwarded a colourful photo collection of tree
tunnels and the more I looked at these trees and their accompanying
descriptions the more I realised that we are connected to everything on Earth
in one way or the other and therefore connected to everything else, too; or, as
Ken Wilber puts it, ‘The world is my body and what I am looking out of is what
I am looking at.’
For example, the cherry blossom tunnel in Bonn reminded me of another
city, Frankfurt in early 1951. I was hitchhiking and crossed the border at
Aachen, having visited friends in The Netherlands (both had worked for the
Resistance, one had infamous tattooed numbers close to a wrist), and walked
next to reinforced concrete tank traps as I entered Germany for the first time.
I walked considerable distances those days through a landscape less than six years
after the end of WW 11: it was a solemn experience because there appeared to be
little else other than debris and rubble in every direction and as far as the
eye could see. As I got closer I realised that the big cathedral and its spires
at Koln (Cologne) was one of the very few structures that remained standing. I
had never in my life seen such widespread and total destruction and can never
forget the sight. After Cologne I went on to Bonn: it looked like a country
town and was less damaged; there were no beautiful trees that I can remember.
The photo of Brazil’s green tunnel from Porto Alegro, Rua Gonçalvo de
Carvalho, is made by tipuana (Rosewood) trees: I planted one here at Earthrise
many years ago and the tree tunnel street also contains the name of an
architect friend who designed the house at Earthrise.
Similarly, and although I also planted several gingko trees here years
ago, my gingkos aren’t as big and splendid as those in Japan.
The 300-years old beech trees in County Antrim remind me hauntingly
like long-ago children’s books and scary fairy tales and I remembered, too,
site investigations in Ulster for London engineers and an occasion when the IRA
decided our equipment and an office box was worth blowing up.
Strangely, the Japanese Sagano Bamboo Forest reminded me of bamboo
groves in China, rather than in Japan.
The Jacaranda Walk in Johannesburg is magnificent and I wish I might
once have been there at the time of flowering, but have not. Flowering
jacarandas in the NSW towns of Grafton and Bellingen look good, too, but the
stands of trees here are not as extensive as the South African one.
The Japanese Wisteria Tunnel is stunning and reminds me of the wisteria
(also planted here years ago): it was overwhelmed by rampant local vines and throttled…
Now that May has rushed through most of its days and the weather is
again unsettled the urge to use the sunlight is compelling. By not very much at
all another flood has narrowly missed playing out here and the dreaded East
Coast Low has trundled off and into the Tasman. And everything is again wet.
For a few minutes as I stare out watching the light filter through the high
flooded gums the strong morning sun draws so much steamy vapour from the old
bloodwood next to the window that it seems to be smoking from a hidden fire.
The leaves of the liquidambars growing next to Darkwood Road are a warming
golden, the West African tulip trees are still flowering and dropping blooms
onto the muddy depression that now lights up: this is my favourite winter garden
reading place. Only 36 hours ago the same depression had grown from spattering
puddle in the rain to the big puddle or pond that appears in heavy rain here
(Lake Eartha); now the drying mud glistens. Best of all: the winter sunshine is
warm and the temperature will reach 21˚ today if the clouds will kindly sleep
in or stay away. I can comfortably take my jacket off and read for a while. Gilgamesh
follows my completion of No country for old men yesterday and
Annie Dillard’s: For the time being. If we want to call ourselves readers we
tell only half-truths when we read only one genre: I like reading more widely
when I read at all. This month there has been little reading time, only
bathroom rebuilding or renovating and labouring time. The fine weather is
excellent for building but hard on the back and other body parts; the cold rain
is good for fire-warmth and writing. I have an ever-increasing need to write
urgently, to get my TSS corrected and, there being no other obvious choices, to
self-publish the novels, novellas and essays while the goog is good.
Creative
writing.
Welcome again to my friend, Dr David Tuffley, who
lives and works in Queensland.
Satori in the Forest
David Tuffley
I resolved
some time ago to adopt an attitude of appreciating the many small things around
me as I went about my everyday life.
To most people, these small things seem so ordinary, so insignificant and
commonplace that they are easy to overlook, even scorn
Why then are these
small things worthy of our close attention? Because in their way, they are
perfect; and they have much to tell us if we stop and notice with a child’s
open mind. All around us there are everyday objects that have something of
great value to give if we would take a moment to receive it.
With this mind-set,
one day I noticed the humble moss growing in the cracks between the paving
stones as I walked along the road less traveled to my office at Griffith
University’s Nathan campus. Moss is a common sight in shady places where the
dew lingers, even in dry eucalypt forests like this.
Moss is
easy to overlook because we are often pre-occupied and it is so small and
common. It is just one of thousands of objects passing through our visual field
any day of our life. Choose one instance of this humble plant and look more
closely. With a macro lens on my camera it was revealed as a beautiful forest,
as lovely as any full-sized forest I had ever flown-over. (You can see it here:
http://www.ict.griffith.edu.au/~davidt/Griffith%20Moss.jpg
)
There is something
quite beautiful about moss when seen up close, this perfectly adapted survivor
on our planet for the past 500 million years. Getting down on my hands and
knees to see more clearly made me feel humble. It was mind-expanding to think
that this humble little plant had existed in its current form for so long. I
tried to stretch my imagination across such a vast span of time.
Having stretched my
imagination far into the past, I now tried sending it into the future by the
same amount. Now I had a billion year span balanced on the fulcrum of the Now.
This modest little plant turned out to have a big story to tell to anyone
willing to listen.
The moss told me that
my appreciation was the dream of the Earth realised, in the words of
Irish poet John O’Donohue. The same life force flows through us all, making us
one. That life force is becoming increasingly conscious.
Unlike the moss, we
humans will not survive a billion years in our current form. And when our
species has morphed into something else or become extinct, the moss will still
be modestly growing in the shady places: a living example of the power in
staying low.
This train of
thought, I realised, was a continuation of one that began decades earlier. In
1975 I visited an ancient forest in New Zealand. It was near the Southland town
of Te Anau. The glaciated terrain is like that of the Cadillac National Park in
Maine, or the fjord lands of Norway.
The forest here is as
it has been since the last Ice Age, perhaps 8,000 years, though this kind of
forest had probably grown here on and off for millions of years during the inter-glacial
periods.
The trees were
magnificent: tall, straight, and majestic in their ancientness. There was a
quality to the light filtering through the forest canopy that gave this place a
transcendent beauty. It was like being on the set for the movie Lord of the
Rings.
The moss
in this temperate forest grew thick on the ground and on the trunks and
branches. On the ground it was perhaps a meter thick. The moss was soft
underfoot. To walk on it was like walking on a soft and inviting bed. It
exhaled a sweet earthy breath when pressed. I felt an immense reverence for the
moss in that moment. I wanted to sink into it, be embraced by it, become one
with it.
As I lay on the moss
something in me resonated with the spirit of the forest and I was one with everything;
a Satori moment. (Visit the forest: http://www.ict.griffith.edu.au/~davidt/Te%20Anau%20Moss.jpg
)
Peak experiences like
this have a way of staying with you forever, a constant source of happiness.
Seeing the moss in Nathan forest had reminded me of what I already knew.
d.tuffley@griffith.edu.au David Tuffley likes to immerse himself in Nature and
listen to what it has to say. This ancient land has a profound story to tell
anyone who would listen.
Autumn.
The latter part of April and the start of May have been warm, sunny and dry.
When I turn to the window I see one of the old white cedars releasing a
lawn-wide cluster of spent leaves; they tumble and spin down in near still air
like a flurry of magical snow.
For
several reasons I turn now to the Bellingen Shire Council once more and include
below two very different aspects of the work done by the BSC. “Getting There”
is part of a continuation of writings, recently begun, that explore
possibilities that might assist the Council in their future planning. (I refer
specifically to the old Bellinger Valley timber bridges being replaced by
modern reinforced concrete bridges and viaducts—a hugely expensive possibility
and one that has to be faced as the population of Darkwood and Upper Thora
continues growing). “The Septic Tank” which follows “Getting There” is a
different look at the local Council and one that is proving troublesome for
some ratepayers like myself.
GETTING THERE (Part II)
Don Diespecker
I was
going to call this “A Leap of Faith: From Outmoded Low-level Bridges to
High-level Short Span Viaducts. Part 2,” but the title suggested bad essaying,
poor journalism and English that is less than wonderful.
There are
many bridges that I like or love, but the low-level bridges in the Bellinger
River Valley, for obvious reasons, don’t endear themselves to me. These timber
bridges are outmoded because they’re low-level and they all vanish beneath the
torrent when there’s a good rise in the river and in a high flood they’re all
impassable to all road users: their time is past. At best they might one day be
deconstructed or disassembled, taken to an open air museum and once
reassembled, be displayed and even admired: so much of their original
construction and maintenance has been the work of skilled Council employees
wielding broad-axes, even adzes and of course, chainsaws. Bridges like these
have been outmoded for more than 100 years (sorry, dear reader; I know that
you’ve read all of this previously).
I’ve got
nothing against old timber bridges; I’m opposed to the continued use of these
structures on the Bellinger River because the population of this beautiful valley and its splendid serpentine
river continues to grow. A bridge that becomes dysfunctional in every flood or
high rise of the river is useless: they are the notorious stimulus that in
flood times enables the media to refer to local residents as ‘isolated,
‘cut-off’ and ‘marooned.’ Here we are racing into the 21st century,
the planet facing innumerable problems and issues, the world population
burgeoning—and with a growing number of hugely smart people able to resolve
difficulties, create marvels of engineering and art and sculpture. My smart
phone has more computing power than was available to those who traveled to the
moon decades ago; my eyes have been so well repaired that I easily can see
spider silk drifting in the sunlight more than 50-m downstream…
We who
love living in river valleys seem doomed to be increasingly faced with being
marooned by our bridges—given that global warming and climate change promise
more extreme weather events, including horrendous floods. There are close to
1,000 of these outmoded low-level timber bridges in New South Wales: for local
Shire Councils the difficulties of funding repairs and maintenance are already
insuperable. Councils and ratepayers are faced with much more of the same in
this century unless we all choose to think outside the box.
We know
that radical thinking in our time is not only possible: it is achievable. We
also all know that bridges and viaducts are enormously expensive structures in
this day and age and as we browse and read and think majestically of our world,
we know that there are architects, designers, engineers who are profoundly
changing the world we live in because they are able to find ways to enable
modern structures, however costly, to be funded and constructed.
*
When
I started thinking seriously about the replacement of the outmoded low-level
timber bridges in the Bellinger River Valley I realised that several items
would rapidly become issues or problems: politics, for example; resistance and
negativity to change; and sometimes there might also be obstacles to my being
heard. Frankly, I’d be happy to see our old timber bridges deconstructed,
cleaned up, varnished and displayed in an open-air museum located on a Bellingen
Plaza or People’s Square. As relics and examples of skilled bridge building the
old bridges would have an honoured place in the community. Story boards,
legends and photographs would detail the history of each structure; tourists
would visit and take their own photos, and older members of the BSC would
assist members of the local Historical Society to discourse on old bridge
building stories and related yarns.
Thus, the BSC could enable a Valley Tourist attraction. As owners and
managers of a Great Square, a Museum and Gallery of the Old and the New, as
well as several new hotels and motels, the Shire Council could inspire ways to
attract tourists, accommodate them and simultaneously create revenues that will
start other new (and likely expensive) projects, viz, the design and
construction of lifts, cable systems and an ‘aerial tramway’ carrying visitors
into and through the beautiful Bellinger Valley. While many other Shire
Councils wait hopefully on ‘emergency funding’ our Council could be seen as entrepreneurial
and visionary.
When I remember other times and other places where I’ve lived, I often
remember bridges old and new. Having lived at Upper Thora for nearly thirty
years I know how vitally important are the local low-level bridges. These
bridges are now aging and need replacing—and many other Shire Councils face the
same hair-raising difficulties: how to find the money needed for bridges and
roads maintenance other than by seeking emergency funds following a local
‘natural disaster. Given that all Shire Councils, sooner or later, will have to
find reliable ways and means for replacement and repairs to bridges (and
replace some bridges with high all-weather viaducts), how will residents and
visitors get what they need?
One answer is tourism. The Council that can attract many tourists is a
Council that deserves to succeed in both tourism and business.
*
When last I visited Portugal I noticed an old stone arch bridge
standing in or on what had once been a stone-strewn riverbed. When I enquired
about the origin of the old bridge I learned that the Romans had constructed
it. The river had dried up and vanished, but the bridge—which had remained
intact for the best part of two millennia—was still standing and appeared to be
still serviceable.
I remember too the 1896 stone arch bridge (The Joubert Bridge) spanning
the Blyde River at Pilgrim’s Rest (Transvaal) close to my maternal
grandfather’s house and which I first saw in 1937 (to see this bridge Google
Joubert Bridge, Pilgrim’s Rest District.JPG).
It has always been a road bridge and the hard stone that dressed the
top of the parapet was roughly but attractively cut (shown in photos you can
Google). One of my playmates, Leonard Franck, was the only kid my age in the
old gold mining village with the nerve to climb up and calmly walk his way over
the river on the rough-cut parapet stones. He wasn’t a big brawny fellow
either; he was small and lightly built and looked skinny enough to blow away in
a gust of wind. Another of his claims to fame was that he was the best whip
cracker in the village: he had the knack and could casually produce a superb
swinging crack with a deft twist of the wrist. My grandfather, Lesley Drummond
Singer, a dour Scot, was a building contractor: he was well known as the mason
who inscribed and set in the Voortrekker Monument next to Joubert’s Bridge,
stone tablets describing the 1838 crossing of the Blyde (long before there was
a bridge there); he also was the mason who set two sculpted stone lions on the
front stoep (verandah) of President
Kruger’s house in Pretoria (the big stone lions were a gift from the Kimberley
financier, Barney Barnato; Barney
Barnato, born Barnet Isaacs, was a British Randlord, one of the entrepreneurs
who gained control of Kimberley diamond mining, and later gold mining on the
Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), in South Africa from the 1870s. Paul
Kruger had been a mighty hunter as a young man and was also a well known if not
notorious, flat-earth believer).
Further upriver the Blyde (bly
in modern Afrikaans or blijde in old Dutch means ‘happy’) at First Drift (a drift being a fordable river crossing)
had an all-weather suspension bridge that passed high over the river. Close by
there was a steel plate-lined water race that my paternal grandfather (Rudolph
Solon Diespecker) had constructed prior to WW I (Rudolph has many other claims
to fame, but those are all Other Stories). The suspension bridge comprised
steel wire ropes that supported timber planks. Crossing from the high hillside
on one bank was very downhill to the opposite bank and the bridge always swayed
alarmingly. We kids used to ride our pushbikes out to First Drift after school
in the days (1930s) when we were learning to fish for rainbow trout by fly
casting. Sometimes we’d leave our
bikes up on the hillside footpath and climb down to the scraggy riverbank,
slowly and carefully, then lie on our tummies so we could peek over the edge to
watch big trout hanging in the current over a pebbled riverbed, their fins
slowly waving. That suspension bridge was still in place when I last saw it in
1976. I have fond memories of Pilgrim’s Rest: my parents met there, my sister
was born there and the few years that I spent living there were great
opportunities to explore the Transvaal Middle Veld, the alpine country
adjoining the Drakensberg Mountains in the eastern Transvaal. I realise, as I
write this, that although there is no gold mining there now Pilgrims (as we
used to call it without ever acknowledging the apostrophe ‘s’) is presently a
tourism destination and tourism may also be one of the keys to the Bellinger’s
future bridges (and possible viaducts).
I touched
on some of this in previous Earthrise Diaries. I recently have discussed the
notion with Bellingen Shire Council officials and by email with the Bellingen
newspaper editor.
Today (May 29 2013) there is an edited op-ed
piece in the new Opinion page of the Bellingen Shire Courier-Sun (BSC-S) that I
recently drafted. My hope is that those words will also help to stimulate some
dramatic thinking in the Shire that will provoke ways and means for Bellingen
to build the bridges or viaducts that will be needed in the next few years. My
fantasy is that our Council will discuss ways of bringing tourists to this
area. Cable systems like ski lifts might be appropriate in the Valley. Can the
BSC own and finance the construction of a tourist enterprise, and use the
revenues to finance the construction of better bridges and viaducts? I believe
they can. The towers that usually support ski lift lines might also produce
revenue for the BSC if solar panels are attached to some of them; or if the
towers could also be used to support water wheels in suitable places (water
wheels driving turbines will produce more saleable electricity for the national
grid) and wind turbines (as separate structures) when Council-owned, will
enable the production of more electricity and further revenue…
The Septic
Tank
Don Diespecker
Warning: the following piece is dangerously
tedious, annoyingly political in tone and will be a great pain in the neck for
all those malcontents who from time to time strenuously object to being put
upon by bureaucrats. I present this alien-looking report here so that Diary
readers, especially those in distant places, who might one day visit the
beautiful Bellinger Valley, may if they wish, glimpse a possible issue that
might develop in this part of the world.
I
sometimes watch TV episodes of the Danish political thriller, Borgen, because
it’s interesting, well presented and I can easily follow the Danish sound track
by glancing at the accompanying captions (translations into English). ‘Borgen’
is a Danish nickname (meaning ‘the Castle’) that refers to Denmark’s
Christiansborg Palace that accommodates the three branches of the Danish
Government, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Supreme Court).
For those
of you who live Far Away and aren’t sure of our Australian political system,
there is Local Government, State Government and the Federal government.
Sometimes some of us have the feeling that we’re all rather over-governed. The
State Governments keep an eye on the Shire Councils and I live in New South
Wales that contains the Bellingen Shire. The BSC recently advised some of us
who live in the shire that inspections of our septic tanks were required and
that seemed no great problem.
After
purchasing the 10.2-ha or 25 acres of land that I now call Earthrise Jannelle
and I cleared a section near the river and we built the house--I had first to
apply to the BSC to become the ‘registered builder’ and that was no problem
either. An architect friend inspected the site and produced some plans that
were accepted and passed by the BSC. I employed sub contractors to do the
electrics and the plumbing and I hired an expensive crane and operator to move
and place the poles on the concrete foundations that we had prepared. Our near
neighbour Darcey Browning had selected and provided the (tree) poles, Jannelle
had done the math, and all of these poles were drilled and slotted and numbered
prior to being bolted into place after the crane had moved them from the lawn
to their foundations without mishap.
I
purchased a septic tank and it was located, positioned, set in place and
properly connected by the plumber. All of these items were inspected and
approved by the BSC.
Recently I
received the notice about the forthcoming inspection and in mid April the BSC
inspector arrived.
Although I
have lost count of the many floods here two are well remembered: that of March
2001 when the river reached to the top step of the house and the more recent
flood of late February/early March during which the river came halfway up the
front steps (when the Telstra landline was dead for 17 days). The flood caused
some damage here but nothing serious.
I was
pleased that although the most recent flood had reached so high it had not
affected the septic tank. When the BSC inspector arrived I pointed to the tank
and asked if he required me to clear vegetation from half of the tank top or to
open the inspection port; the inspector said no to both suggestions: he
required only to see that that the tank was in place, was connected, and was
functioning. I was surprised. The BSC had known, since 1985, that the tank was
correctly installed and was operational and their records would show, too, that
they had inspected and passed the tank as being OK.
On May 21
2013 I was sent a BSC letter the heading of which was, ‘On-site Sewage
Management System Assessment Advice.’ The letter stated that there had been a
Council assessment on the property and that was functioning correctly and an
approval to operate had been issued. Three other pages accompanied the letter:
an approval to operate a system of sewage management (from April 16 2013 to
April 16 2018); a recently composed Schedule of Conditions—Septic System
(clearly intended for a proposed new installation); and an invoice (for $!55)
for an OSMS audit inspection carried
out April 16 2013).
My
comment: there was no inspection. The inspector stood on my footpath at a
distance of 3- to 4-meters from the septic tank that had been properly
installed and passed by the BSC in 1985. I was amazed that the BSC would charge
me $155 for seeing a tank they had not inspected since 1985 and which I assured
the inspector was functioning properly. –And I remembered having successfully
completed a ‘course’ at the BSC offices (together with other ratepayers)
offered to those of us with septic tanks so that we could be judged capable of
managing such systems). A sentence in the covering letter added, ‘Please note
that failure to comply with the conditions will void the approval’.
I
complained to the BSC Mayor about this matter. The inspector’s visit was
brief; he was here for approximately 5 minutes and had a 'further two
properties to visit'. I had offered to clear more vegetation and debris and to
also open the inspection port on top of the tank. The inspector had said that
neither action would be necessary. He had made it clear to me that he needed
only to see that the septic tank existed, that it was correctly
located and was functional. I had assured him that the septic tank had been
correctly installed in 1985, was approved by BSC in 1985, and had remained in
place since 1985 and that all was well. The inspector had not approached or
examined or inspected or tested anything. I had discussed the excessive
'inspection fee' with others: the $155 inspection fee was seen by some of us
locally as dishonest exploitation by Council, i.e., as a rip-off. I had
respectfully asked that the decision (by BSC Council?) to charge a fee of $155
(for the BSC inspector to do nothing other than to see the top of
my septic tank) and requested that the fee be cancelled and that no fee be
charged (for no inspection). The fee was, I suggested, reprehensible, to say
the least. I had also pointed out that the 'Schedule of Conditions-Septic
System' was clearly intended for septic systems not yet installed, that mine
had been installed and passed by the BSC in 1985. I pointed out that Council’s
"failure to comply with the conditions will void the approval" was
inappropriate because the BSC had already approved the septic tank here. And I
had noted that the intended fee constituted a dark as well as a bad look for
the Council because ratepayers, some of them age pensioners like myself, could
not be expected to pay this relatively large sum of money which was not
justified; and that it was also a bad look for me because I was about to post
my monthly blog (I named The Earthrise Diaries) and that the May issue
would contain writings that would be both positive and also negative about the
BSC (the future possibility of the CBSC becoming a smart and entrepreneurial
Council that will find ways to bring tourists to the area, to design and
engineer cable systems and to use such income as the start of a fund that later
may enable the design and construction of bridges and viaducts to replace our
outmoded valley bridges versus the septic tank issue; also, I would probably
seem hypocritical writing about two BSC matters, one of which was positive and
the other negative, but that I would write honestly and that The Earthrise
Diaries was read in Australia, Canada, the UK, the USA, France, Germany and
Israel.
The Mayor
acknowledged receipt of my email the following day. He advised that management
would consider the matters I had raised and also copied his reply to three of
his colleagues. I queried one of the Mayor’s statements which I did not
understand (“The OSMS
inspection programme is deemed essential in regards to river health and the fee
was designed on a cost recovery basis” and asked
for clarifying answers to four questions:
1. Who
or what organization deems the 'OSMS inspection program' 'essential'?
2. How is 'river health' measured and has it been measured on or near my
property?
3. Who or what organization 'designed' the fee?
4. What is the 'cost recovery basis' and who or what organization benefits from
the recovery of the fee? (i.e., who finally receives and keeps the $155?
)
Stephen Taylor, the BSC Deputy General Manager (Operations) has provided
answers to the questions I raised:
“The inspections are to ensure that the
current systems are operating adequately without any ponding of effluent in the
disposal beds. At the same time an assessment of the risk profile is
undertaken to determine if the system is low, medium or high risk. This
risk profile determines if 5, 2 or 1 yearly (respectively) inspections are
required. As well as the onsite inspection this initial program is
requiring a significant amount of off-site administration to set up databases
for future inspection work.
“This needs to be established so
Council can fulfil its requirements under the regulations in the future.
In the past the inspection regime had been ad hock and therefore many
properties were falling through the cracks and not being monitored
appropriately.
”Answers to your specific
questions are detailed below.
”Required by NSW State
Government through the Local Government Regulations (2005).
“River health is generally measured
through faecal coliform testing at various sites although there are other
contaminants that can also be monitored.
“No it has not been measured by Council near your
property. We under[take] faecal coliform monitoring at various recreation
locations on the Bellinger River during the summer period.
“Councils are required to manage the
cumulative impact of sewage pollution in their local government area, which
includes approving the installation and operation of on-site systems.
“Bellingen Shire Council set the
fee as part of its 2012/13 Fees and Charges.
“The fee remains in the Council funds
and pays for the operation of the inspection activity. In 2012/13 the
OSMS account was budgeted to return a slight surplus due to the number of
inspections being undertaken, however the account is not directly charged for
the administration costs being undertaken in the office. In future years there
is likely to be a slight loss as the OSMS inspections go onto 1, 2 or 5 year
cycles.
“The attached page is a useful
reference.” http://www.dlg.nsw.gov.au/dlg/dlghome/PublicTopicsIndex.asp?mi=0&ml=10&id=10.
Reflections on Positive Writings and Negative Writings
Don Diespecker
If you, dear reader, have read everything that I’ve written above you
will know that the first piece I’m now referring to, Getting There (Part II),
is one of my versions of positive writing. My negative writing is featured in
the second of the two pieces, The Septic Tank. My concern here is not to bore
you with further examples of those writings but to ideologically slip some
neutral writing in to the Diary: right here.
For this writer it’s no fun being negative: I would much prefer to write
positively every time I sit down, either in front of the computer or outside in
the garden (surrounded by outside ambience). In the recent episode of Borgen
there was mentioned (in English), this notion: ‘Politics is warfare without
bloodshed; war is politics with bloodshed.’
Positive sentiments are accompanied by positive feelings. Writing
anything that touches on negativity is bad for my health and will probably do
little for the reader. If I read
Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale and type the first words of the poem as I am now
doing (‘O for a beaker full of the warm South,/ Full of the true, the blushful
Hippocrene,/ With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,/ And purple-stained
mouth.’ &c) I can cheerfully relate to that and maybe a majority of readers
will too. When I read what looks to me like a veiled threat, (‘Please note that
failure to comply with the conditions will void the approval’) I feel hassled
and my feeling of being hassled pushes my blood pressure up and that’s not
good: my emotional self wakes up grumpily and prepares for trouble: ‘failure to
comply’ has more than a touch of bullying about it and possibly some Schadenfreude,
too; it further implies, Be reasonable
and do it my way—or else! I’m exaggerating a little here, but I think you’ll
see what I’m getting at. Similarly with the words, ‘I regret to inform you
that…’ milliseconds of dread arise from my array of emotions.
I delight in reading and writing the last words of the unpunctuated
prose that end Joyce’s Ulysses (from the internal monologue
known as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy), ‘and then I asked him with my eyes to ask
again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and
first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my
breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I
will Yes.’
Do the words move you in a positive way?
I remind myself that I’m not a politician and do not wish to be, not
ever. For those that are: good luck. Having had both my +ve and my –ve say, I
look forward with pleasure to resuming where I left off a fortnight or so ago
to assist, as laborer, my registered builder: I was then nurturing (a good
word) some fictional characters in a sequel (titled ‘Overview’) to one of my
novels, The Summer River (now an eBook): the fictional Prime Minister,
Monica Stein, can not behave other than in a Ministerial way and in a rainforest
setting where four women are discussing the writing of anthologies after
witnessing an assassination, the PM is about to be confronted by a smoldering
ADF Officer, Major Sarah Hart, bursting to terminate her political leader by
strangulation while Elise Singer, a celebrity journalist avidly takes notes and
at a time, too, when the only happy member of the group, Mercedes Nunes, is
inclined to weep with joy because her book has just been accepted for
publication and—I might have to rewrite parts of this scene before something
emotionally explosive occurs… That’s what happens when the writer feels obliged
to be defensive, critical and yes, even emotional, and unwittingly projects his
or her upsets on to others who are simply characters in a story.
I can hear the great rotary presses stat to roll! More later or I’ll
miss my deadline!
Best
wishes to all Diary readers, from Don.
