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The Resident Judge does not always sleep well. But one thing that will send her nodding off within minutes is the sound of voices on the radio, especially when they’re talking about something that she’d really be quite interested in if she…didn’t…drop…off…halfway..thr…….

It is not really a practice to be recommended, though.  Not only do I wake with the wires to the ear-buds wound several times around my neck, but I find that I really have very little memory of what I have heard.  I think that the great plan of the 1970s to learn subliminally while playing information while you sleep was a pile of hooey- and certainly rather impractical if you had to wake yourself up to turn the tape over.

Unless ABC Radio National has something that interests me, I listen to the BBC World Service which is rather repetitive because it has a news broadcast about every 15 minutes, but given that I’m usually asleep by the end of it, what I miss this time I will catch up with next time as my sleep cycle turns around again.

It does lead to some rather garbled reception of what I’m hearing, though. Sometimes when I open the paper the next morning, I recognize a news story that I might have heard in snippets.  I sometimes remember small details, but am not really sure enough of them to be able to vouch for their veracity. And sometimes- like yesterday- I’m actually able to check up on what I thought I heard and what I actually did hear.

Early on Thursday morning, I heard what I thought was a fascinating workshop discussion about meditation in Christian and other religious traditions.  The speaker, who was a Christian, led a guided meditation about darkness: the way that when you are walking in the dark, your eyes gradually adjust and you’re able to see things more clearly than you would have thought.  I thought it was wonderful- I let him take me, and I was able to actually walk through the meditation with him. Then, I thought the Dalai Lama responded…and by now I was actually waking up, and I was so impressed with this guided meditation that I resolved to find out what the program was by looking up the Radio National website that day.

Well, that’s what I thought I heard.

So, I was fascinated to find that I was actually listening to a program called “Encounter” that came on at 4.00 a.m.  I was right- there was an interfaith component,  it was about prayer and meditation, and the Dalai Lama was a contributor to it.  But where was the guided meditation that so impressed me? Here’s what the transcript says:

Margaret Coffey: Paul Murray, who then took one of Johannes Tauler’s 14th century sermons to explore the Christian notion of searching for God in prayer. It was a sermon built around a reflection on a passage from St Luke’s Gospel.

Paul Murray OP: Today’s Gospel, Tauler tells us, tells of a woman who has lost a coin and lit a lantern and searched for it. The woman in her great anxiety, Tauler informs us, turns her house up side down searching for the coin. But what, we might ask, does this searching mean?

First of all it refers, according to Tauler, to the two most ordinary ways in which people seek God – an active way, which entails the external performance of certain religious practices and good works, and a passive way which entails a beginning journey into the innermost self. Tauler writes, we must allow ourselves to sink into our ground into the innermost depth and seek the Lord there, as he instructed us when he said the Kingdom of God is within you.

Up to this point in his sermon we have heard for the most part about our searching for God but Tauler now goes on to speak about another more important searching. Earlier he had noted that it is eternal wisdom itself which has lit the lantern and now, he says, as soon as we enter our house to search for God, God in his turn searches for us – and the house is turned upside down. He acts just the way we do when we search for something, throwing aside one thing after another until we find what we are looking for. All of a sudden then we discover that the object of our search for God and of our search for wisdom is not some kind of passive divine truth, something which we are able to assess and possess with our own minds and at our own pace, but is rather something literally uncontrollable, a mystery of love our minds can barely begin to grasp, an urgency of attention to our most basic human needs and wants, a divine compassion and care for that very aspect of our lives which seems most hopeless and most lost.

Where was my guided meditation?  The light was there, and the darkness, and the looking…. but what had I done to it in my half-awake state? And yet, I felt so sure that I’d experienced it as a meditation- that I’d actually done the walking and the looking and the searching.

Or maybe it was just a glass or two of wine too many before bed?

1.  That I live in UNESCO’s second City of Literature. I KNEW that there was a reason that I live here!

2.  That the Abortion Law Reform Bill might actually pass.

3. That St Kilda’s  stupendous Robert Harvey will have a send-off at Telstra Dome this Sunday- and I may just go!

Today’s real estate agents really can’t hold a candle to those of the 1840s.  Not only did they offer champagne lunches at THEIR auctions, but their literary and biblical effusions really do put modern billboards and advertisements to shame.

But they rarely mention the fact that perhaps the sunlit rolling plains and luxuriant growth might have been occupied by Aboriginal people previously.  Notwithstanding John Batman’s countermanded attempt at a treaty, the official policy promulgated by Governor Bourke at the time stated that aboriginal people could not sell or assign land, nor could an individual person acquire it, other than through distribution by the Crown.  Indeed, there was little acknowledgement that aboriginal people had even been on a particular piece of land. However, I did find this advertisement in the Port Phillip Herald of January that surprised me.  It’s for allotment 16, block 28 in Lonsdale Street (now part of the inner-city grid of Melbourne)

Who is there remembering Melbourne in her infancy…who knew Lonsdale-street as it was, so lately the quambi of the savage, would imagine that a period almost imperceptible would exhibit the same Lonsdale-street as the centre of the white-man’s comfort, as the spot to which all love to congregate, yet such is the fact, Lonsdale-street once the centre of savage orgies, with nought to break the silence of the forest, but the wild yell of the Australian Cannible, sheltered by his Mia Mia alike from the heat of summer and the chill of winter, now exhibits all the most fastidious could desire…

I have no idea what a ‘quambi’ is- wait- yes I do!  ‘My baby name’ website gives the meaning as Aboriginal for ‘shelter’ should you decide to name your baby boy Quambi, which is, after all the site’s 50584th most popular baby name.  But how appealing- the memory of ‘savage orgies’ in the location, and the ‘wild yell of the ‘Australian Cannible (sic)’. As they say, position, position, position…

In Saturday’s Age there was a full-page advertisement ‘Honoring the Life of a Great Australian: Ken Dyers 14 July 1922-25 July 2007’.  No doubt the anniversary of his death (it’s odd that there’s no word for that) has prompted this outflowing of emotion.

Apparently he was the founder of the Kenja Communication group (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenja_Communication) and he previously had links with Scientology. Kenja was named in NSW Parliament as a “sinister organisation”, and there have been suggestions of sexual abuse of children and a link between Kenja and Cornelia Rau’s mental state.  According to Wikipedia, for $130 you can undergo an Energy Conversion Session, where you sit opposite another person and stare into their eyes.  That would do it, I reckon.

Anyway, what interested me most about this advertisement was the list of the names of the people who signed, and I assume, paid for this advertisement.   During the Howard government, there seemed to be a string of letters by Eminent Australians castigating the government over treatment of refugees, climate change,  industrial relations legislation etc. etc.,  and a cynic would sniff that they were all signed by the ‘usual suspects’. I was interested to see if the ‘usual suspects’ had signed this one too. Certainly not.  There was not a single name that I recognized.

There did seem to be a preponderance of sports people and dramatists.  And how cute, people affixed their academic qualifications-  two Ph.Ds, quite a few Bachelors degrees and even  an Associate Diploma of Medical Reception Administration- there’s a qualification to conjure with!!  Several company directors, a few personal trainers, and even a “Mother of Five”.  But, thankfully, no-one I’ve ever heard of before.

I’ve been mystified by this THING that I’ve been seeing in the paper recently. What IS it???

Ah! So that’s what it is- a code for your mobile to take you to a website???? Obviously I’m not alone in my bemusement: there’s a website QRious.com.au

It really is strange seeing a new technology being ‘born’, and being puzzled by what it is at first. More often, technologies build on other pre-existing technologies and there’s not that same sense of ‘I just don’t get it’.

I can though, from my 50plus vantage spot, remember a few technologies being born.  Dad used to have a mobile telephone in his car in the late 60s/early 70s.  You had to call an operator, who would then connect you. I can even remember the phone number 0172 21522!!!  He also had one that he could take out of the car, but it was VERY heavy, and was literally the size and weight of a brick.

I remember our neighbours across the road, who were international travellers (unusual then) and early adopters (also unusual) who had the first microwave oven I had ever seen.  We all stood around it, watching as Uncle Eric boiled a cup of water.  They also had the first reel-to-reel tape recorder that I had ever seen, and we had great fun round the table listening to it and recording our voices.

And my first personal computer? A little Macintosh- a squat, oblong thing higher than it was broad. Until then, my only contact with computers had been pushing out the chads on a card with a pin in mathematics, aware that it was going off to ‘the university’ to a computer kept in a specially controlled room. To this day I don’t really know what it was all about- push out bits of cardboard with a pin? Hey, even I can do that!

I’ve always been a television child- Mum and Dad bought one for the Olympics when I was a year old. But colour television was something else again.  We lined up at the Royal Melbourne Show to shuffle in a queue into a tent to see colour television- coming soon!! And when Mum and Dad bought one, I can remember sitting just LOOKING at it- even looking at the test pattern once programs had finished for the night. I don’t know if  television even stops anymore- do they still have a test pattern??

And so to this little code-thingie.  I don’t know what it’s called. I don’t know what it’s FOR.  It might be dead in the water in a year’s time: on the other hand,  we might forget that we ever didn’t know what it was!

As part of tracing through the progress of the controversy over Judge Willis in Melbourne, I’ve been reading the Port Phillip Herald very closely. Of the three regular Port Phillip papers, the Port Phillip Herald is the only one that is available online, so I’m using it as the ur-newspaper, and just referring to the other two papers (the Port Phillip Gazette and the Port Phillip Patriot) on microfilm when I want to concentrate on a particular episode.

I’m struck by the high proportion of interstate and international news in each edition. Each edition was four pages in length, with the first page devoted largely to paid advertisements as their revenue stream. Pages 2 and 3 generally contained news from the other Australian colonies and local news from Port Phillip. Page 4, however, was generally devoted to extracts from overseas newspapers across the Empire and, to a lesser degree, from American papers. As might be expected, British news predominated and in 1841 (which is as far as I have reached so far), there is quite a bit of emphasis on China news and- rather disconcertingly for colonists on the other side of the world from ‘home’- shipwrecks! The selection of extracts wasn’t solely on the basis of their newsworthiness or interest: they could be used to make a political point. On 15 October 1841 when the Herald editor George Cavenagh was feeling particularly aggrieved at Judge Willis’ behaviour towards the press, the international news comprised an exegesis on the judicial character of Lord Denman the British Chief Justice, a report of the drowning of the Chief Justice of Sierra Leone, a romantic story of the female editor of a French newspaper who fell in love with one of her anonymous correspondents, and a humourous extract from an American newspaper about the perils of an editor working out what to print in his newspaper. There does seem to be a bit of a theme running through these extracts!

I was fascinated, and rather transfixed, however, by this rather ghoulish extract from the Port Phillip Herald on 29th October 1841:

WONDERFUL EFFECTS OF GALVANISM

The following, which is going the round of the papers, headed “Wonderful effects of Galvanism” is from an American paper, and we give it in illustration of the tone of feeling prevalent in the Model-Republic:-

“John White, convicted of the murder of Messrs. Gwatkin and Glenn, on board a flat boat on the Ohio river, was executed in Louisville, United States, on the 8^th ult, a little after six o’clock in the morning. The rope not “playing” well occasioned the knot to slip over the chin instead of being under the ear, so that his neck was not broken by the fall. Previously to his execution he wrote a letter to his father, in which he stated that he was present when the unfortunate men were murdered; that he did not participate in the act, but was compelled to beg his own life from two men who murdered them. He was cut down after hanging about 25 minutes, and his body given to the doctors for the purpose of experiment.

The Louisville City Gazette gives the annexed extraordinary circumstances attending an experiment with the galvanic battery:- The poles of powerful galvanic pile, which had been prepared for the occasion, were immediately applied to him, and, to the unutterable joy of all present, with the most perfect success. On the first application of the fluid to his body, which was yet warm and trembling, a universal tremor was seen to pass over his frame; on a sudden he arose from the bench to a sitting posture, and, with great eagerness and impatience, raised his hand to his neck, trying to grasp the scar with his fingers and tear it from his throat. He first snatched at it with great rashness, as though the rope was yet around his neck, and then continued some moments picking at the seam with his fingers, as though it was something that adhered to his throat giving him great uneasiness. But this symptom was soon forgotten, for almost the next moment he rose upon his feet, raised his arms level with his breast, and, opening his bloodshot eyes, gave forth from his mouth a most terrific screech, after which his chest worked as if in respiration in a very violent manner. Every one at this minute was as mute as death, when one of the surgeons exclaimed that he was alive. The excitement was too great to allow time for a reply to the remark; every eye was riveted upon the agitated and shaking corpse. The operator continued to let upon it a full quantum of the galvanic fluid, til the action upon its nerves became so powerful that it made a tremendous bound, leaping by a sort of imperfect plunge into a corner of a room, disengaging itself entirely from the wires which communicated the galvanism.

All immediately drew around the body. For a moment after its fall it seemed perfectly motionless and dead; a surgeon approached, and, taking hold of its arm, announced that he thought he felt a slight though a single beat of the pulse. The galvanic operator was just going to arrange his machine to give him another charge, when the surgeon exclaimed that he breathed. At this moment he gave a long gasp, rising and gently waving his right hand; his sighs continued for two minutes, when they ceased entirely. His whole frame seemed to be agitated, his chest heaved, and his legs trembled. These effects were supposed to be caused by the powerful influence of the galvanic fluid upon the nerves; none of these movements were yet supposed attributable to the act of life. It was considered that the animating principle of nature had left his frame and could never be again restored. In the very height of anxiety, the surgeon announced that he could feel feeble pulsations. A piece of broken looking-glass was immediately held before his nostrils, which was instantly covered with a cloud. The most intense anxiety was felt for some seconds, when the motion of his chest, as in the act of respiration, became visible. He rolled his eyes wildly in their sockets, occasionally closing them, and giving the most terrific scowls. In about five minutes his breathing became tolerably frequent, probably he would give one breath, where a healthy man would give four. His breathing, however, rapidly increased. The doctors began to speak to him, but he gave no indications that he heard a word. He looked upon the scene around him with the most death-like indifference. A young medical student approached him, and, taking hold of his arm and should, White rose upon his feet, took two steps thus supported, and seated himself in an arm-chair. His muscles seemed to relax, and he appeared somewhat overcome with the exertion he had made. A bottle of hartshorn was immediately applied to his nose, which revived him, but his life seemed to be that of a man much intoxicated. He seemed upon one occasion to try to give utterance to some feeling, but from an unknown case, an impediment probably occasioned by the execution, he was unable to give utterance to a word. His system was critically examined, and though he was pronounced by the doctors to be perfectly alive, yet he could live but a very few minutes, for congestion of the brain was rapidly taking place. Every method was adopted to equalize the circulation, and save the patient from the terrible consequence of so sad a catastrophe, but in vain. The blood vessels of the head were enormously distended, and his eyes appeared to be balls of clotted blood. His system was immediately thrown into direful spasms, and he died in a few minutes in the most excruciating agonies.”

I remember reading about the Tyburn executions in Britain, and the hanging traditions about three-times botched hangings that resulted in the victim being set free. I’m curious and somewhat amused by the “anxiety” evoked by the “catastrophe” of his death- he had, after all, just been executed by the state!

And so I start.  I’m not really sure whether I am doing this from the very best of motives or not. Is this just another form of procrastination to avoid REALLY putting fingers to keyboard, or is it- as I will attest- an attempt to think myself into the act of writing?  I wrote a blog last year while we were overseas www.wickhouse.blogspot.com and I found that I viewed the world differently- I was on the conscious look out for things that I could blog about.  And so, I am hoping that this blog might likewise encourage me to approach my research as a writer, and not just a reader only.  Time, no doubt, will tell.