for Alain @oceanpacific0

Sunday afternoon

July, mid winter.  darkness hugs the car as it rounds the sprawling cemetery where so many lie, this close to the city.  with all their paraphernalia - dead flowers, cracked vases, faded portraits.  a great sea of stone.  architectural, the way we codify the dead and shut the living out.  ghosts flicker in the wing mirror of passing cars, eyes stay fixed ahead - we miss them.  further on, out towards the park the traffic's tail, red eyes click on, and off.  play follow the leader all the way to Mass at five o’clock.

lights glow, warm against the dark and cold.  a coming home, and, to a death inside.  not mine, not yet, but death always threatening.  'what rough beast, its hour come round at last'.  Yeats, surely a revelation is at hand?  some births loom large, present in their absence, and without a name.  they don't cleave to this life.  Buddhists call it karma, and wonder why we celebrate birthdays when they return us to suffering.  it's more powerful to imagine what might have been, than to live with the very ordinary weight.  of this life

--Amanda Surrey

ds the sprawling cemetery

where so many lie, this close to the city. with al

l their paraphernalia - dead

flowers, cracked vases, faded portraits. a great s

ea of stone. architectural,

the way we codify the dead and shut the living out.

ghosts flicker in the wing

mirror of passing cars, eyes stay fixed ahead - we

miss them. further on, out

towards the park the traffic's tail, red eyes click

on, and off. play follow the

leader all the way to Mass at five o

’

clock.

lights glow, warm against the dark and cold. a com

ing home, and, to a death

inside. not mine, not yet, but death always threat

ening. 'what rough beast, its

hour come round at last'. Yeats, surely a revelati

on is at hand? some births

loom large, present in their absence, and without a

name. they don't cleave

to this life. Buddhists call it karma, and wonder

why we celebrate birthdays

when they return us to suffering. it's more powerf

ul to imagine what might

have been, than to live with the very ordinary weig

ht. of this life

#ALLA2016conf, Day 2

Day 2 of #ALLA2016conf kicked off with a discussion on social media and blogging. Michelle De Aizpurua from Monash University's Law Library and Andrea Gilbey at Oxford University Press graciously stepped into a last minute withdrawal from the programme.  They reminded us that our mobile world is not bound by geography, and that blogging is not academic writing - it should be conversational, personal and short, especially for 'Gen 140 characters'.

I turned up ten minutes late after grabbing a much needed latte from Mr Tulk cafe, just next door to the conference venue.  Augustus Henry Tulk was the State Library of Victoria's first librarian, chosen from a short list of 48 applicants in 1856.  48 seems like a huge number, even then, and I wonder what Mr Tulk would have thought of a journalist heading up the State Library, breaking down prosaic notions of professional roles.  For more on this I recommend reading Richard Susskind's The Future of the Professions.

The words which stood out on Day 2 of #ALLA2016conf were analytics, actionable intelligence, business intelligence, partnerships, demonstrating value, and, incandescent rage.  Karen Rowe-Nurse spoke from the heart about managing in today's multigenerational organisations and highlighted the importance of building a good rapport with your boss; approaching management as a state of mutual dependence; and to avoid sending emails with the following words: 'the answer is just no'.  In the heat of engagement we sometimes need to take a deep breath and walk away from the keyboard.  I'm no exception.

Client Current Awareness in an Online World was a panel presentation from Herbert Smith Freehills, Allens and Manzama, who utilise news aggregation and content intelligence to deliver personalised results to clients.  Manzama are now focusing on the next wave of delivery around predictive analysis: being able to proactively spot events in the future, a kind of clairvoyance we could all use in our own professional lives.  A session from King Wood & Mallesons on business and industry intelligence providing another reminder that both lawyers and law librarians need to be agile to client needs and think creatively about how to source and present information, and structure that information delivery using smart templates.

The afternoon provided an absorbing range of legal topics.  Helen Edney, the Library and Information Manager at Northern Territories' Legal Aid walked us through their Crime Wiki, and, discussed how she was able to demonstrate the financial value of their services by cost benefit analysis.  The theme of partnerships with commercial publishers was picked up again by the librarians at the Supreme Court Library in Queensland who discussed providing a suite of online services to their large group of stakeholders.

Junior Browne from the University of the West Indies, in charge of the Faculty Law Library started with a cricket analogy which reminded me of a similar Richard Susskind quote, we can all learn from elite athletes - playing forward rather than defensively.  Junior walked us through Carilaw and the collection of Commonwealth Caribbean primary legal materials.  The afternoons session rounding out with a chilling discussion of data retention and privacy in the digital era from Jason Bosland at the University of Melbourne and the editor of the investigative unit at the Age, Michael Bachelard.  Papers from the conference will be available soon online, and a selection will appear in the ALL Journal, worth following up.

Conferences, they take it out of you.  All that networking, listening, note taking, and, all that worrying - am I strategic enough?  Have I flagged all these issues?  Where can I find out more?  Should I start playing computer games? Did you see the orange water bottle from Thomson Reuters?  Which publisher is giving away the Lindt chocolates?  If attending a conference can feel like 5 days work compressed into 2, convening a conference is a very large task and Veryan Croggon, Leanne Whykes and their committee made this look, from the outside, effortless.  Well done, and thank you, it was a stimulating, thought provoking 2 days.

#ALLA2016conf, Day 1

I'm sitting in the State Library of Victoria's Helen Macpherson Smith Genealogy Centre, the outside walls of the old library form the inside of this more recent wing, in between sessions at Day 1 of ALLA's (for the uninitiated, the Australian Law Librarians Association) biannual conference.  A university student sits at the table we share receiving instruction from her tutor, pouring over physics conundrums together. Their formulas distract me as I gather my thoughts to write this, but they also offer a perfect illustration of some of the themes teased out today: disruption, hybrid learning, STEM/STEAM curriculum, gamification, collaboration and creativity.

Rose Hiscock, the inaugural Director at the Science Gallery Melbourne, gave the opening keynote address and spoke about, amongst other things, collapsing a topic. Take climate change for instance, is there a more innovative and compelling way for scientists, in collaboration with artists to tell that story and engage the population? And what happens when we stop paying attention to what's happening around us? The team from Directioneering, an executive career strategy firm who can reengineer your resume and revamp your LinkedIn profiles, quoted a CEDA report which estimated that 40% of current jobs will be replaced by computers in 10-15 years time.

#ODEAR

Somewhere in the middle of these propositions and challenges from the podium a Panda bear danced at the back of the auditorium offering its own unique contribution to disruption, distracting the speaker momentarily, and offering some clever marketing from one of the publishers (see #jadedpanda).

It's worth noting that the fifth speaker of the day would be the first to speak specifically on a legal library topic, on implementing a legal research skills programme at the University of Canterbury.  Clare O'Dwyer, an earlier speaker talked about her move to Vietnam to head up Library Services at RMIT University's campus, but this was more in the line of directioneering and reingineering careers.

I have my own personal career advisor, someone who keeps me pointing in the right direction and anticipating a future now, my 12 year old nephew Cole.  Shortly I'll leave this wonderful building, the State Library of Victoria, inspiration to generations of Australian writers, researchers and students, and battle my way through the crowd outside glued to Pokemon Go, and head off to conference drinks at the old Melbourne Goal.  See you tomorrow

Paraire Tapu - Good Friday

1.  we arrive outside the door, to a small basket of ferns and Holy Water cupped in porcelain.  fingers in, a soggy hieroglyph traced on foreheads already bent towards the altar, push open heavy doors.  the ferns remind me of home more than Palm Sunday, and home of the book I'm reading, Tangi, by Witi Tame Ihimaera.  the story of a fathers death, a sons gaping grief.  death as betrayal, a final leaving behind.  "Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?"  the book weaves into this moment, leavens it.  we move inside

2.  most of the seats are taken.  my friend with me, we walk to the front, past my usual seat guarded by the stations and the heater high up on the wall.  I hope she'll feel welcome, not estranged as the hour unravels.  by the sequence, the movements,  the words which enfold us.  make the sum of us, one.  this is my body

3.  the word in Maori is Paraire Tapu, and I wonder, why is Good Friday good?  It’s stripped back in here.  the flowers, the altar cloth, all the ornaments are gone.  an empty tomb.  bereft, and strangely comforting.  there is an absence today which allows something else in.  the singing starts, we rise to our feet.  holding a single sheet of paper which rustles in many hands.  should I sing?  if I sing, will my voice rise?  will it climb.  then drift away

4.  Aranga – arise now.  we shuffle, pass a thumb over forehead, lips, and heart.  a kid starts whining, I loose the thread of John.  the light is warm through the window, it comes from far away.  this story has no beginning, told in fourteen chapters with an ending we already know.  the denunciation always rattles me.  would I have had the courage to speak my heart?  do I have the courage, even now?  take this, all of you

5.  he will come back, and so will the flowers, the altar cloth and ornaments

6.  we look at each other

7.  and smile

--Amanda Surrey

Passage to India

My Dad was born in Calcutta, now called Kolkata. His Dad, an English tea trader had shipped East from London where he met my Grandma, an Irish nurse who had a Florence Nightingale aura about her.  She would die young of breast cancer and many decades later my Aunty showed me photographs and told me stories about her which filled a gap in my family knowledge.  My Dad never mentioned his Mum, the pain of loosing a mother so young and being shunted off quickly thereafter to an English boarding school took its toll.  The blight of the English stiff upper lip.

Kolkata circa 1937, Grandpa seated in the middle, Grandma to the right.

Dad would grow up to follow his father into the tea trade, accepting a job in Colombo, Sri Lanka where he and his newly married British wife, my mother, ushered two girls into the world.  I learned early on through a succession of nannies who were fired at regular intervals, and by hanging out in the kitchen, that the staff did not have a great reverence for their employers' children.  One of the kitchen hands used to fix a clothes peg to my ear lobe and make me count to ten, in Sinhalese, before taking it off.  Ow!  Still, I never squealed.

Despite, or because of my early experiences and background I remained sceptical of the benefits colonisation brought to Sri Lanka and India.  I grew up listening to the forthright assertion that British rule was a blessing to third world countries, pulling the poor souls out of chaos and into a promised land of industrialisation and rule-making.  Never mind that they had their own rules and laws. 

In November I visited India for the first time, I was elated to finally visit a country I had heard so much about, and to form my own view of it unfiltered through the lenses of my family's reminiscing.  Arriving in Delhi with only one full day to spare, en route to Northern India I decided against the inevitable tourist frenzy at the Taj Mahal and opted to sightsee Old Delhi instead.  Standing in the courtyard at the Jama Masjid mosque I looked through the arches and saw The Red Fort, a stunning seventeenth century palace built on a scale that would challenge the fertile imaginations of The Game of Thrones producers.  Here was India.  Here too were the British.

Weaving through the traffic and market sellers which separate the Mosque from the Fort, my guide Bhupendra unravelled the long history of the Fort.  As we passed through the outside walls, no longer guarded by crocodiles hidden in the moats, yet requiring bag checks and a quick frisk as we entered, Bhupendra pointed out a number of ugly brick barracks which the British had built inside the Fort after an uprising in 1857.  These buildings were not only out of time, their functional design jarred with the exquisite palaces and gardens inside the Red Fort walls.  Looking at these barracks William Blake's hymn Jerusalem sounded in my ears. Written around the time the East India Company and the British Army were making significant inroads into India, I heard the hymn and rearranged the words: 

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In other people's green and pleasant Lands.

My Grandpa would turn in his grave.

I'm photographed at the Jama Masjid mosque in Delhi, India's largest mosque with a courtyard capable of holding 25,000 people.

Wye?

I've never been a fan of Christmas Day, growing up in our family wasn't 'very merry', and this year I had rashly tweeted on Christmas Eve, at 10.03 PM, 'joy to the world! ~~ it's almost over for another year.' I wasn't to know that in less than 24 hours everything would be turned on it's head, a bushfire would sweep through Wye River where I own a property.  I would spend a large part of Christmas Day with my partners family in Sydney glued to my iPhone and the Fire Ready app in particular.  if you haven't got the Fire Ready app on your phone, load it now.

It was in the afternoon that the warnings started, with a sickening post Christmas lunch lurch I read that it was too late to leave Wye and Separation Creek, a smaller hamlet just over the hill from Wye.  The iconic Great Ocean Road was the only road into and out of town and it was now closed. The fire would burn right down to the beach, leaping over large sections of the road. By 10.30 at night the ABC predicted that a total of 60 houses had been lost.

By Boxing Day that number had risen to 116, 98 in Wye River and 18 in Separation Creek, or Sep as the locals call it.  I would wait over 24 hours before hearing that my house had miraculously survived, while others on the same street, more exposed to the bush, had burnt.  Other home owners would wait longer to hear the fate of their homes.  Twitter hashtags #vicfires and #wyereiver both a blessing, the source of unofficial confirmation, and a cause of more stomach lurching: one tweet from a local, 'Riverside got hit hard'.

During the days after the fire I spent an obsessive amount of time on my phone.  While mobile technology has gifted us with applications that literally save lives, that same technology has hatched a fixation in times of crisis on a live stream of comment, photographs and videos, calling out for own raw contributions to the feed.  TV seems, and is, staged in comparison.  My neighbour posted a photo on Instagram of his house on Christmas Day with the fire clearly visible over the rooftop; someone took a photo from the inside of their car as they left Wye with the fire closing in on Separation Creek, a dog's face in the passenger seat oddly reassuring; and Mashable Australia helpfully compiled some of the Christmas Day social media activity on one page.

The most important, and the most astounding outcome of the Christmas Day fire was that no one lost their lives.  There was no better news than that.  The house I've owned for less than a year and the first house I've ever purchased, made it.  I have cherished memories of the times I've spent at Wye River: the view from my deck 2 weeks before the fire; our dog Nero passed out in the sun on that deck;  a family lunch the last time we were all together at Wye in October; a drawing of the 'Wye Beastie', a whimsical offering from a friend, now framed and hanging in the spare room.

A house is more than its contents, a house brims with memories, with the times we've spent in it with family and friends.  In the ten months I've owned that house I've shared it with loved ones and holiday renters I've never met.   The previous owner who owned the property for 19 years asked me to look after 'her'.  Her.  As a Buddhist I had to remind myself as this tragedy unfolded, that this was a perfect example of attachment playing out.  But there is little relief in acknowledging that in a time of crisis, or in its aftermath.  Our attachment to home, to place, runs deep and quick.