Friday, May 31, 2013

THE EARTHRISE DIARY (May 2013)


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!
Pleas see Russell Atkinson’s blog at www.theoldestako.wordpress.com      
Best wishes to all Diary readers, from Don.














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