Australia is a world’s smallest continent and a developed country as well located in the Southern hemisphere. Indonesia, East Timor and Papua New Guinea are situated to the North of Australia. Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia are located to the northeast of Australia and New Zealand is located to the southeast.
Name of the continent/country is derived from the Latin word Australis which means ‘Southern’. The geographical history of the Australia can be found back to the Roman times. At that time it was a common place however, it was not recognized and documented as a continent until Spanish arrived traveling through the Pacific Ocean In 1521. It is believed that Australia is originally comes from a Spanish man called Pedro Fernandez de Quiros. He came closer to the land and named it as ‘Australia del Espiritu Santo’. Later, in 1638 Dutch East India Company made use of the land and named as ‘Australische’. The word Australia was used in English for the first time in 1693.
The eastern half of the Australia was colonized by the British in 1770. With the growth of population in that land resulted in exploring of new areas. Thus, five further self governing crown colonies were formed in the 19th century. With the passage of time, these colonies formulated a federation and it was being called commonwealth of Australia.
In its current territorial structure, Australian has six states which are called New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia. There are two major territories, known as ‘Northern territory’ and Australian Capital Territory shortly ACT. In general, these territories also function like a state.
The capital city of Australia is ‘Canberra’ which is located in the Australian Capital Territory. Rest of the state’s capitals is called Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. After becoming a federation, Australia keeps a stable & liberal democratic political system and comes under the commonwealth domain. Each state and territory possesses their own legislature. There is unicameral system in the Northern territory, Australian Capital Territory and Queensland whereas, bicameral system in the rest of the states. Under their political system lower house is called ‘House of Assembly’ in the South Australia and Tasmania and ‘Legislative Assembly’ in the remaining states. The upper house is called ‘Legislative Council’ overall. The Premier is the head of the Government in all the states and Chief Minister in each territory. The Queen represents as Governor in each state and Administrator in the Northern territory whereas, Governor General in the Australian Capital Territory.
The cash-rich Indian Premier League has lost much of its sheen before it has started as foreign stars are being forced to drop out due to injuries and Test commitments.
Team owners will save millions of dollars in player fees since Australians and New Zealanders will only make a two-week appearance in the 44-day, 59-match multi-billion dollar Twenty20 extravaganza starting on April 18.
The West Indians will be absent for the last stage, including the final on June 1, and only a bit of arm-twisting from worried hosts prevented Pakistanis and Sri Lankans from missing a share of the pie.
The tournament created a frenzy after corporate bosses and movie stars, who own eight city teams, signed the world’s best players for massive sums at an unprecedented auction in February.
But the International Cricket Council’s refusal to create a window for the IPL in the overcrowded calendar has left players short-changed and fans disappointed.
IPL rules stipulate cricketers will be paid only for the matches they play, which means Australian Andrew Symonds will earn a fraction of the 1.35 million dollars bid on him by the Hyderabad team.
Symonds and his Test colleagues — captain Ricky Ponting, Matthew Hayden, Michael Hussey, Simon Katich and Brett Lee — are needed back home by May 1 for a training camp ahead of the West Indies tour.
It makes them available for only four of the teams’ 14 league matches each, hitting their fees badly.
Lee was bought by film actress Preity Zinta’s Mohali team for 900,000 dollars, while Ponting, Hussey and Katich were in the 200,000-400,000 dollar range.
The Australians would have missed the entire first season of the IPL if their scheduled Test and one-day tour of Pakistan had not been postponed for security reasons.
Five New Zealanders — captain Daniel Vettori, Brendon McCullum, Jacob Oram, Ross Taylor and Kyle Mills — are lucky they are playing even four matches.
New Zealand Cricket allowed the five to miss their team’s opening two first-class matches of their upcoming England tour so they could take part in the IPL until May 1.
McCullum, the dashing wicketkeeper-batsman, stood to lose the most among his team-mates after being signed for 700,000 dollars by movie star Shahrukh Khan’s Kolkata franchise.
He can now hope to pick up 8,500 dollars at the most.
Three West Indians, skipper Chris Gayle, Ramnaresh Sarwan and Shivnarine Chanderpaul, must get home ahead of the first Test against Australia in Jamaica from May 22.
Left-hander Gayle, who has a 800,000-dollar contract with Khan’s Kolkata, said last week he was yet to decide about taking part in the Australia series.
Sri Lankan and Pakistani players must have said a silent prayer after their proposed one-day series in April-end was put off indefinitely, reportedly at the behest of the Indian cricket board.
Australian Nathan Bracken and Lasith Malinga of Sri Lanka, who had no Test commitments during the IPL, may miss the entire tournament due to knee injuries.
Any meaningful foreign participation in what is essentially an Indian domestic competition will be confined to 11 Pakistanis, as many Sri Lankans, eight South Africans and one player each from England and Zimbabwe.
IPL boss Lalit Modi insists Test commitments will always take preference over the league, but fans are not impressed.
“Why would I pay money to watch our own cricketers play against each other?” asked Shaumik Bose, 16. “This is just a glorified domestic tournament with lots of money.”
Just two years ago, Central Banks appeared triumphant. Inflation, the scourge of the 1970s and 80s, appeared dead, the financial crisis of the Tech Wreck had been contained, economies worldwide were booming, and stock markets and house prices were spiralling ever upwards.
Then along came the Subprime Crisis, and we received a rude reminder of why Central Banks were created in the first place: to ensure that the world would never again experience a Great Depression.
We are not in a Great Depression–not yet anyway–but a key pre-condition for one has developed right under the noses of Central Banks: excessive private debt. In fact, debt levels today are twice as high as in 1929, which is why this financial crisis is causing far more carnage than 1929 did.
At the time of the Stock Market Crash of October 1929, the US’s debt ratio was 150%; today it is 290%. Australia’s ratio was 64%; today, it is 165%. The regulators who were supposed to keep us from the jaws of The Beast have instead led us closer towards its belly.
Figure One
USA and Australian Debt to Output Ratios 1920-2008
This was not, of course, a conscious decision. It has happened because Central Banks are run by economists, and the dominant “Neoclassical” faction within economics ignored the real lessons of the Great Depression.
The false lesson that Neoclassical economics preaches is that the market economy is fundamentally stable, and the Great Depression was caused by the monetary authorities tightening credit in the aftermath to the Stock Market Crash, rather than loosening it.
The real lesson of the 1930s is that a credit-driven market economy is fundamentally unstable, and a Great Depression occurs when debt-financed speculation results in excessive private debt at the same time as inflation is low.
Central Banks, under the misguidance of conventional economic theory, ignored the role of private debt in the economic system. They instead reinterpreted their charters–which emphasised full employment–as a mandate to keep inflation low.
As the RBA put it in its most recent Annual Report, its:
“duty … to ensure … the stability of the currency… the maintenance of full employment … and the economic prosperity and welfare of the people of Australia… has found concrete expression in the form of a medium-term inflation target. Monetary policy aims to keep the rate of consumer price inflation at 2– 3 per cent, on average, over the cycle.” (Annual Report 2008, page 5).
With its Neoclassical eyes fixated on the rate of inflation, it ignored the expansion of private debt–as did its equivalents at Central Banks around the world, as did government Treasuries, and as did international economic agencies. This is why the sudden collapse of the world economic order took economists by surprise. They were looking at their mathematical models, which ignore private debt (and indeed money!), rather than at the real world, where debt is king.
Nowhere was this more obvious than with the OECD–the organisation whose imprimatur the Australian Treasury seeks. The following are the unabridged opening two paragraphs from the Editorial to the OECD Economic Outlook from May of 2007 (with the really funny bits in bold):
“In its Economic Outlook last Autumn, the OECD took the view that the US slowdown was not heralding a period of worldwide economic weakness, unlike, for instance, in 2001. Rather, a “ smooth” rebalancing was to be expected, with Europe taking over the baton from the United States in driving OECD growth.
“Recent developments have broadly confirmed this prognosis. Indeed, the current economic situation is in many ways better than what we have experienced in years. Against that background, we have stuck to the rebalancing scenario. Our central forecast remains indeed quite benign: a soft landing in the United States, a strong and sustained recovery in Europe, a solid trajectory in Japan and buoyant activity in China and India. In line with recent trends, sustained growth in OECD economies would be underpinned by strong job creation and falling unemployment.”
Yeah, right. Just three months later, the financial crisis began.
It should by now be painfully obvious that conventional economics cannot be relied upon to explain where we are, how we got here, where we might end up, and what might work to avoid the worst consequences. To understand it, we have to go back to the economist who got it right, but was ignored by the economics profession: Irving Fisher.
The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions
Fisher had been an academic cheerleader for the financial bubble of the Roaring Twenties–his main claim to fame one can find on the Internet is that he uttered the fateful prediction that “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau” the week before the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
Four years on, chastened and effectively bankrupted, he reflected that a Great Depression ensued when too much debt was accompanied by falling prices. He christened the phenomenon a “debt-deflation”.
A key aspect of Fisher’s reasoning was that, though economists of his time modelled the economy as if it were permanently in equilibrium, the real economy would always be in disequilibrium. As he put it, even if the economy did tend towards equilibrium:
“ new disturbances are, humanly speaking, sure to occur, so that, in actual fact, any variable is almost always above or below the ideal equilibrium”
He also argued that the forces that gave rise to a Depression were innately disequilibrium in nature. The two key factors that caused a Depression, he argued, were excessive debt and falling prices. Though other factors might lead to a crisis (such as overconfidence or excessive speculation), debt and deflation were the two key forces that turned a garden-variety downturn into a Depression. As he very poignantly put it (since he himself was a victim):
“over-investment and over-speculation are often important; but they would have far less serious results were they not conducted with borrowed money. That is, over-indebtedness may lend importance to over-investment or to over-speculation. The same is true as to over-confidence. I fancy that over-confidence seldom does any great harm except when, as, and if, it beguiles its victims into debt.”
Fisher then laid out the sequence of events that follows when a financial crisis ensues in the context of excessive debt and low inflation:
“(1) Debt liquidation leads to distress selling and to
(2) Contraction of deposit currency, as bank loans are paid off, and to a slowing down of velocity of circulation. This contraction of deposits and of their velocity, precipitated by distress selling, causes
(3) A fall in the level of prices, in other words, a swelling of the dollar. Assuming, as above stated, that this fall of prices is not interfered with by reflation or otherwise, there must be
(4) A still greater fall in the net worths of business, precipitating bankruptcies and
(5) A like fall in profits, which in a “capitalistic,” that is, a private-profit society, leads the concerns which are running at a loss to make
(6) A reduction in output, in trade and in employment of labor. These losses, bankruptcies, and unemployment, lead to
(7) Pessimism and loss of confidence, which in turn lead to
(8) Hoarding and slowing down still more the velocity of circulation. The above eight changes cause
(9) Complicated disturbances in the rates of interest, in particular, a fall in the nominal, or money, rates and a rise in the real, or commodity, rates of interest.”
After the Crash of 1929, when business debt was dominant, many firms found themselves with debt repayment commitments that they couldn’t meet out of cash flow. They undertook “ distress selling” to try to raise the money they needed— and because everyone dropped their prices, prices fell across the board. Even firms that managed to pay their debts down in nominal terms found that their revenues fell even more than their debt, leading to “ Fisher’s Paradox” that:
“the more debtors pay, the more they owe. The more the economic boat tips, the more it tends to tip. It is not tending to right itself, but is capsizing.”
That phenomenon is strikingly obvious in the historical data, which shows the rate of inflation falling from trivial levels (of between 0.5% and 1% p.a.) to minus 10% p.a. between 1931 and 1933.
Figure Two
Inflation Rates 1920-40 USA and Australia
Economic growth also came to a shuddering halt as the ensuing credit crunch cut spending levels, and as cash-strapped businesses sacked their workforce. That decline is also evident in the data, with the rate of real economic growth falling from 6% before the crash to minus 8% after it–and as low as minus 13% in 1932.
Figure Three
Rate of Economic Growth 1920-40, USA and Australia
The decline in both output and prices meant that the debt to GDP ratio continued to rise after the Stock Market Crash of 1929–even though credit was tight, and anyone who was in debt was trying to reduce it. Notice on Figure One that debt ratios continued to rise until 1932–from 150% to 215% of GDP in America, and from 64% to 77% of GDP in Australia.
The effect of this decline on employment was so severe that it has remained etched into humanity’s psyche. When the Stock Market began its collapse, the level of unemployment in America, as recorded by the National Bureau of Economic Research, was 0.04%–one 25th of one percent. Three years later, it reached 25%. Australia’s unemployment rate blew out too, from a higher initial level of 9% to a peak of 20% in 1932. The world had suddenly moved from The Great Gatsby to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Figure Four
Unemployment Rates 1920-40, USA and Australia
This calamity, which economic theory said could not happen, both discredited conventional economic thought, and gave credence to the then unfashionable views of John Maynard Keynes (Fisher, with his reputation in tatters after his false assurances that nothing was amiss in 1929, was largely ignored–even though Fisher’s explanation of how Depressions occur was superior to Keynes’s). When the world emerged from the World War that followed the Great Depression, so-called Keynesian Economics dominated the profession, and the once supreme Neoclassicals were ignored.
However, one of the most prophetic observations that Keynes ever made concerned the likelihood that his new ideas would fail to be truly accepted by the economics profession. In the Preface to his General Theory of Employment, Money and Wages, Keynes observed that:
“The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”
So it proved to be. Though calling themselves “Keynesian”, most academic economists continued to cling to the preceding “Neoclassical” ideas (especially in the area of microeconomics, which Keynes did not address).
As the experience and the memory of the Great Depression receded, academic economics produced a hybrid of Keynes’s macroeconomic ideas grafted on top of Neoclassical microeconomics that they called “the Keynesian-Neoclassical Synthesis”.
Unfortunately, the ideas were incompatible–and over time, wherever there was a conflict, academic economics rejected the Keynesian graft, rather than the underlying Neoclassical microeconomics. After fifty years of this, Keynes’s ideas were completely ejected from the economic mainstream, the Neoclassical belief that the economy is self-correcting became dominant once more, and economists trained in this belief came to dominate Treasuries and Central Banks around the world. They ignored levels of private debt, championed deregulation of finance, and virtually encouraged asset price speculation.
Now we have twice as much debt as caused the Great Depression, and inflation so low that, were it not for unprecented factors (the rise of China, global warming and peak oil), deflation would almost be a certainty.
Having thus unlearnt the real lessons of the Great Depression, the economics profession may yet make us relive it.
END OF COMMENTARY
Comments on the Data
It appears that Australia’s debt to GDP ratio has peaked at 165% of GDP. It could still turn up once again if deflation takes hold, but for the meantime, this seems to be the top of the bubble.
Now as debt levels start to fall–firstly relatively to GDP and then, ultimately, in absolute terms as well–the macroeconomic effect of the bubble’s bursting be felt.
This is because aggregate demand is the sum of income plus change in debt. For the last decade, the latter factor has been adding to demand–and aggregate supply, asset prices, and our import bill have adjusted upwards to suit. But as the change in debt drops and ultimately turns negative, it will subtract from demand–and supply (read employment), asset prices and imports will follow it down.
If Australians decided to reduce their debt to income ratio by 10% each year–to get back to the 25% level that applied back in the 1960s (before this long-term speculative bubble took off)–it would take roughly 15 years to get there.
Chart One
Monthly change in Debt, Australia
Chart Two
Contribution to Demand from Change in Debt, Australia
Table One
Agggregate Debt Summary Australia
Disaggregated Debt Summary, Australia
Australia’s 1964-2008 Debt Bubble
Australia’s long term addiction to debtTrends in Disaggregated Debt, Australia
Monthly changes in disaggregated debt, Australia
Late last year on SBS News, when Stan Grant asked me which way the RBA would move rates in 2008, I replied “Up, and then down”, Stan quipped “Spoken like a true economist–an even handed answer!”–to which I replied “More down than up”.
I expected the intial rate rises because of the RBA’s focus on the rate of inflation, and a subsequent fall, not because inflation would be heading down, but because the economy would be–and the RBA rate would be forced to follow it
That day seems to be imminent, with the “surprise” 1% fall in retail sales, and the first signs of a tapering in credit demand as well. The RBA is now no longer focusing exclusively on inflation, but also on an apparently stalling economy. All market economists have now joined with me in expecting a rate cut this month–despite inflation still being above the RBA’s target range.
Until last month’s surprise announcement by the National Bank, it seemed that the only thing that wouldn’t be heading down was the mortgage rate. Now, especially after Wizard’s pre-emptive cut on Sunday, it’s fairly certain that all lenders will pass on Tuesday’s expected RBA cut. But there are good reasons why this is unlikely to be the case for subsequent cuts.
The idea that there is some stable relationship between the RBA rate and the mortgage rate is a furphy. When the RBA attempted to manage the economy by trying to control the money supply, the gap between the average mortgage rate and the RBA’s overnight rate fluctuated wildly between minus 5.5 percent and plus 2.5 (see Figure 1).
Figure 1
Margin between average mortgage rate and the RBA Rate
After the RBA abandoned targetting the money supply, and instead adopted a policy of trying to control short term interest rates, a stable relationship of sorts did develop. The gap settled down to about 4 percent, once the economy recovered from the 1990s recession.
This was roughly equal to the historical average gap between the rate banks charge for loans and the rate they offered for deposits–and banks, after all, make their money out of the spread between loan and deposit rates. Interest rate targetting “worked” because it controlled the banks’ costs of funds–as is evident from Figure 2, which shows that the 90 day bank bill rate has been very stable relative to the RBA rate since 1990 (though even this link is breaking down now–the margin between bank bill rates and the RBA rate is an indicator of how much banks trust each other, and they trust each other rather less now than in the recent past).
Figure 2
Margin between 90 Day Bank Bill and RBA Rate
The gap between mortgage and the RBA rate plunged from 4 percent in 1994 to 1.8 percent by mid 1997, as competition over market share broke out between banks and the new wave of non-bank securitised lenders.
It should now painfully obvious to everyone that this was not necessarily a good thing.
Those lower margins were driven primarily by lowering lending standards, rather than efficiencies, or the much-hyped wonders of competition. It therefore stands to reason that the margin will now rise, as the worst excesses of subprime and “low doc” lending are being driven from the market by the credit crunch.
The margin has already risen to 2.35 percent, as banks have increased mortgage rates above and beyond the RBA’s recent rate rises. But even that margin is still a long way short of the 4 percent gap that applied before lending standard plummeted with deregulation–and even of the 3 percent margin that applied at the time of the Wallis Committee.
The odds are that this margin will rise back to at least 3 percent, and possibly even 4 percent, as the RBA is forced to cut rates as the economy falls into recession. So the RBA may have to reduce its rate to 2 percent to ensure a mortgage rate of no more than 6 percent.
The RBA’s dilemma is trivial compared to its US counterparts, however. US mortgage rates have risen in the last year, even though the Federal Reserve has reduced its rate from 5.25 to 2 percent (see Figures 3 and 4). The Federal Reserve has become almost impotent with respect to loan rates–and that impotency has got more extreme with time.
Figure 3
US Interest rates and the Federal Reserve rate
When the Fed cut its rate from 6.5% in 2001 to 1% in 2004, mortgage rates fell from 8.5% to 5.5%–so just over half of the rate cut was passed on to mortgagors. This time round, the Fed has cut its rate from 5.25% to 2%, only to see mortgage rates barely move–from 6.7% to 6.4%.
Much the same story applies to corporate borrowers. Aaa corporate bond rates now are the same as when the Federal Reserve rate was 3.5% higher. The US Fed can do something to restore the profitability of financial institutions–by increasing the gap between lending and borrowing rates–but it can do precious little to take the financial pressure off US householders and corporations.
The danger for banks of course, is that their long run profitability depends not just on the spread between loan and deposit rates, but on borrowers actually meeting their commitments. A profitable spread means nothing if your borrowers are sending you jingle mail rather than money.
Figure 4
US interest rates–the last 5 years
It thus appears that one other casualty of the Credit Crunch has been the capacity of Central Banks to
manipulate the market interest rate. They can still control the short term rates–things like 90 Day Bank Bills here, and the Prime Short Term Business Rate in the USA (see Figure 5)–that set the banks’ cost of funds. But they have lost their capacity to influence long term rates, the price that banks charge their lenders. The days of interest rate targetting by Central Banks may well be over.
Figure 5
US Interest rates minus the Reserve rate
The US Federal Reserve is starting to appreciate this, as official rate moves have done bugger all to reduce lending costs–in contrast to Australia’s record, where mortgage rates have until recently closely tracked movements in official rates (see Figure 6).
Figure 6
Mortgage rate margins above Central Bank rate, USA and Australia
But after this month’s compliance, lenders will start to use some of the future falls in the RBA rate
to restore their margins between loan and deposit rates. Imprudent lending drove the margin down to unsustainably low levels, and it has to rise in future to make responsible banking profitable once more.
Figure 7
Australian interest rates
Figure 8
Margins above RBA rate of mortgages and 90 Day Bank Bills
Comments on the Data
The turnaround in credit growth seems to be underway. Though the monthly data is volatile, and subject to revision–last month’s preliminary figures of credit growth have been revised upwards, from 5 billion to 22 billion–there is clear evidence of a break from decades of debt growing faster than income, to debt growing more slowly than income.
Monthly change in private debt (business+household)
Though this is necessary in the long term to wean Australia off its debt dependence, in the medium term it will cause a substantial slowdown in the economy–and it will push the economy into a deep recession.
This is because aggregate demand is the sum of income plus change in debt. For the last decade, the latter factor has been adding to demand–and aggregate supply, asset prices, and our import bill have adjusted upwards to suit. But as the change in debt drops and ultimately turns negative, it will subtract from demand–and supply (read employment), asset prices and imports will follow it down.
Contribution that the annual change in debt makes to aggregate demand
It seems probable that the Debt to GDP ratio will peak at about 166% of GDP. If Australians decided to reduce their debt to income ratio by 10% each year–to get back to the 25% level that applied back in the 1960s (before this long-term speculative bubble took off)–it would take roughly 15 years to get there.
Australia’s 45 year long debt bubble seems to be reaching a peak of 167% of GDP
Australia’s Debt to GDP ratio–the long term view
A logo I just designed for recently formed Californian hip hop duo Rootbeer, aka Pigeon John and Flynn Adam. These guys have been kicking out some rocking tunes so I was easily inspired to come up with something for them. Check out their latest at the official Rootbeer myspace.
Gday Gday I’m Cybster DJ.Well it’s time for me to get back in the saddle and produce a show for you, so here comes CybsterSpace session 52. Welcome to the show.
There is just so much great podsafe music out there now, it was really difficult to choose which ones to play. As a result this show may just be a little longer than usual. So get ready to boogie…. here we go!
PLAYLIST
Erika Jayne - Roller Coaster
Snow Crash Girls 2
etrangers - Midnight Tonight
AMYTHYST - Into My New Skin
Karmyn Tyler - Luv Me So (Cybsterized)
IIO - Rapture (Riva Edit)
Kirsty Hawkeshaw - It’s a Fine Day (Kirsty Hawkshaw vs Kinky Roland)
Simian Mobile Disco - It’s The Beat (Luke Vibert Mix)
Striking Smith - Playa
U~Gene - SunLight Euphoria
Crazy Q - Pink Phunk Monster
Sonic Radiation - Zenith
Theory In Motion - The Devil’s Playground
Wylde Bunch - Ain’t No Love In The Club
Thulin Sounds - Sunset
Yuzzy - Dream of a Princess
Theme music derived from Ariaphonics - Steve Jobs on Microsoft Remix
—-
Download the Enhanced version of this show. Yes! Interactive Album covers and links.
http://www.cybsterspaceplus.com
Be my friend at Myspace
http://myspace.com/cybsterdj
Be my friend at Virb
http://virb.com/cybsterdj
Dig me at Mevio
http://cybsterdj.mevio.com
Digg the show at
http://digg.com/podcasts/Cybsterspace
Leave voicemail: USA +1 (206) 339 9087
Technorati Tags: cybster dj cybsterspace electronica podcast free download brisbane queensland australia—-
DJ’s… Get played on the show… email me mail[at]cybster.dj for details.
If you’re looking for some holiday reading, here’s an intriguing description of Greg Day’s The Patron Saint of Eels:
The narrator, Noel, and the rest of the rural town of Mangowak, wake one morning after heavy rain to find the ditches around the roads of the town full of eels that had been caught up in the overflow of the nearby lake and swamp. The plight of the displaced eels is resolved by Fra Ionio, a 300 year old monk, the Patron Saint of Eels. Ionio calms the eels down so they can return to their habitat at the bottom of the lake.The eels and Ionio capture the dynamic of forced displacement mirroring the displacement of the ‘old’ town by ’seachange’ urban-rural migrants and tourists, and the uncanny experience of the ageing process as one is displaced from the life of one’s younger self. Day’s antidote to this uncanny sensation of being displaced as the world and one’s self changes is to recognise the magic of the world. Not the extraordinary magic of the supernatural, but the extraordinary produced in the ordinary, the magic of the everyday and the overlooked dimension of the familiar world.
More at event mechanics.
- Anne
We have relocated to Northeast Australia where the weather is warmer (eighty degree highs instead of seventy). We are staying at the Sheraton Mirage Resort⎯another overpriced hotel I am willing to patronize because I could cash in Starwood points and get free accommodations. 
Sheraton Noosa 
Sheraton Mirage
I liked the room at the Sheraton Noosa resort better. It had more of a beach feel. The Sheraton Mirage tries too hard to be opulent and as a result comes off as tacky. The four acres of saltwater crocodile-free swimming lagoons are nice though.
Yesterday, we took an incredible trip to snorkel the great barrier reef. The reef is thirty miles off the coast. 
Australian Continental Shelf Here is a picture of the edge of Australia’s continental shelf taken from the boat. We toured with Wavelength Cruises. We chose this boat because they only carry thirty snorkelers and go to three different sites. I highly recommend them. Some of the larger outfits carry 400 snorkelers. Sounds a bit too crowded for me.
The variety of coral was amazing. The fish were also stunning, although to see larger fish, I think one would have to dive at the edge of the continental shelf. Wavelength rented an underwater digital camera so we were able to capture some shots of the reef. Here are a few of the better ones.
This afternoon we drive north into the Daintree rainforest for a few days of backcountry living. I am certain they don’t have internet access, and electricity is by gas generator only, so we won’t be posting any entries until at least Thursday or Friday.
Ah, another day, another exquisite trip with Cityrail
I was greeted at the door of my train by my personal hostess, who escorted me to my seat and supplied me with a freshly squeezed fruit juice.
What I love about the evening trains is the in-trip movies - full dolby surround sound, free popcorn and complimentary foot massages.
Tomorrow I’ll be in the breakfast carriage, fresh muffins and hot coffee here I come!
Okay, maybe not, maybe it was more like this:
- Train two carriages short.
- Had to sit in the aisle
- Watched a bad movie on my laptop (’God’s and Generals’)
- Sore butt / leg cramps
- Got a seat after 1hr 20min
- Home 30 minutes late
Hurrah for public transport! Down with cars!
April 25th is ANZAC Day in Australia that remembers the ANZAC soldiers of World War I along with other Australian soldiers of the past and today. ANZAC stands for the Australian New Zealand Army Corps that was formed in response to the British Empire’s request for troops to fight in World War I. The ANZAC’s most memorable battle was on the shores of Gallipoli in modern day Turkey where the Australians took massive losses in the blundered attack. However, the shared suffering and bravery of the attack resignates with the Australian character of mateship and is thus remembered on ANZAC Day.
In rememberance of the ANZACs most Australians attend a dawn service and recite the ANZAC Oath:
They shall grow not old as we are left grow old. Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them.
Lest we forget.
Here is short video honoring Australia’s heroes:
Another ANZAC tribute can be found over at Blackfive.