reeling and writhing

from a quiet blog, some very good news for disability campaigners

Apart from reviewing occasionally for The Ember (rather too occasionally, as I've become a bit prone to pick my reviews to pieces before submitting), I've been keeping an eye on the proposed National Disability Insurance Scheme since I last wrote about it here. Well, things are hotting up in that area, and I have decided now is a good time to blast this closed blog open very briefly to bring you up to date with this once in a lifetime opportunity to reform disability services in this country.

Here's a summary I drew up to send to family and friends recently, and a few suggestions for yourself following, if you're drawn to read that far.

I hope you will be - this is really starting to grow into something to talk about. But first, the news so far:

Last year the Productivity Commission began an inquiry into the feasibility of an NDIS and received over 600 submissions from families and organisations. A draft report was published in April and a full report will be made public by the Government in November.

Discussion forums and a nationwide conference have been held since early 2011 to increase people's understanding of the reforms, and you will find information on this on the NDIS website.

I'll  save you a little time by highlighting two:
1.the one that impresses us the most is the recommendation that the Commonwealth take over responsibility for disability funding in the future. The double layer (sometimes even more layers in service provision) of Government is one of the biggest moneysuckers from disability funding in this wide brown land of ours, and this reform would hopefully bring Government money closer to the people it's supposed to help.

2. This recommendation ties into the first: the Productivity Commission does not recommend that  a Medicare-style levy be introduced, but that real Govt funding be increased by States handing over their current disability budgets and the Fed Govt committing to real guaranteed increases in future. Hopefully this lessens the possibility that this reform can be dismissed or killed off in the Parliament as one more tax. 

Two other external factors that are exciting:
1. a whopping great number of disability organisations have banded together, put their differences aside and are supporting this, because they know enough is enough, and that people with disabilities and their families are suffering too much. For a list, see here

2. there appears to be quite solid bipartisan support across political parties for the reforms - one of the reasons the Productivity Commission was asked to conduct an inquiry in the first place. There seems to be general agreement, even in the media, that the system is broken and that things cannot continue as they are.



Now, dear reader of surprise guerrilla postings on closed blogs, if this news captures your imagination,

you might like to register your support for the campaign at the website, send messages to your friends,

AND

(kind of unofficially, this...!!): if you are a GetUp supporter and would like to send some votes our way, add your voice to those requesting support at GetUp, where the NDIS is currently under review as a cause to support.

My family thanks you for reading this and showing an interest in our future, which seemed precarious until these reforms became a strong possibility. Tell me I'm dreaming. Will this really happen?? I'm just daring to start hoping that it might.

I didn't write much about my son on this blog in the past, I know - but he is 26, he loves having us to himself whenever he can get us, and he is starting to put two words together on an irregular basis. (Two of them being 'driving faster'!)

For someone who started saying no at eighteen, that's progress of its kind. He suffers from irritable bowel about one week out of every four, and has adjusted with no complaints to a fructose diet and gluten free foods recently. He enjoys tidying (I don't lose pens or scissors any more, they get put back in a stand immediately they hit the table), lining things up, brushing leaves off park benches all year round, would watch Thomas for an hour if we let him, and became quite annoyed recently when a pathology nurse failed to draw a blood sample from him - he's a results guy.

I can't quite believe yet that this campaign may, in five years or a little more, deliver one of the major results we need, in the form of a home for him with full time carers who can continue to help him grow and learn through his adult life.

It's so close I can smell it, even at five years distance.

It has put the spring back in my step, and should be putting a spring in the step of everyone in the country who knows someone with a disability. It's going to be amazing. So let's make it happen, yes.

weekend news 2: neighbour wins Bristol short story prize

It is not every week that I go out for bread and bump into a neighbour who has won the Bristol Short Story prize. Saves me a bit of feed-reading!! and makes our little shopping square a larger place to be, all of a sudden.

'Beyond The Blackout Curtain', by Elizabeth Jane, took first prize of 500 pounds, publication and a Waterstones' gift card, and sits first in the 2009 prize anthology, which can be purchased at several UK outlets. The prize is awarded with the aim of finding stories to publish in a 'vibrant, original short story anthology' to be stocked in as many bookshops as possible, including high street chains, and to promote the profile of the Bristol Review of Books.

It was awarded way back in July (yes, my neighbour is modest and did not email me about this. I hope she keeps in better touch next time she does something astonishing) and entries for next year's prize will be accepted between December 2009 and March 2010.

Belated and heartfelt congratulations, Liz. BRAVA!!!

help! there's a comedian in my family and she still collects McDonald's toys

Very kind review from Mr Watts.

Go Mighty Ducks. And their hats.

(Google alerts for A Lot Of Bread are to be avoided, by the way. A Lot Of People write about Bread on their blogs.

Hats and ducks, on the other hand bring up all sorts of rural posts with quite a bit of character.)

Also the Breadsters won themselves a Trades Hall competition with a kooky video last night, about fax machines that play the Fireman Sam
theme. There's still time to catch them with two weeks of shows left, Wednesdays to Saturdays, 9.30pm at Trades Hall.

And here's last year's Age review from the Fringe anyway. Because I Can.

The Age, October 5 2008.

fire: a brief journal

(Sunday a.m., the morning I got up, opened the browser, read about Marysville and made these notes)

When I was in Healesville for a week late last year, doing some quiet stuff on my own, I kicked over the traces on my last day and hired a car and drove to Marysville.
Today  I hear it's the last time I will see it. There is possibly one building standing in the town. We stayed there on a hot Easter weekend once, one of the very first holidays we had away as a family that we paid money for (yes, we've been borrowing houses for evah.)

On the last day I was there, I bought lollies in the lolly shop, bought some antipasto bits and bobs to put in my pasta for my final dinner alone that night, walked into the model toys shop and asked questions about the road to Woods Point,  met a young fellow who quite probably had Asperger's who asserted that Wicked would finish now 'because Rob Guest is dead', and ambled along the river through one of the prettiest caravan parks in all Victoria, thinking it might be nice to come back and camp there sometime.

I walked back to the Information Centre and out through Gallipoli Park, where the entire population of the township is sheltering this morning,* and admired a wisteria colonnade in full bloom. Unfortunately I took no photographs. I can't believe that now. I went off then on the Woods Point road for a little bit to look at some myrtle beech thickets along there that I'm fond of, at an old culvert in the forest, and an old settlement at Cambarville that I hadn't been brave enough to drive up to the last time we were there.

I am crying for Marysville. It was full of guesthouses and holiday cottages, including the landmark Cumberland convention centre, and as pretty as a picture: there is a spot near the bridge and the main road that was magnificent. It is horrible to think how it must look this morning (and later that night, as first film emerges, I cannot look).

The Black Spur area no doubt has a history of burned out establishments - there is a History of Healesville Guesthouses book in the library at Healesville where every third or fourth place was burned down due to lack of water to put the fire out (this was a problem till the Maroondah Dam was built sometime around the '20s.)

Notes later in this week of horrors:

I heard later on Sunday that Marysville missed the fires in '39 and '83. I'm still numb. I will always miss it and its kind people. Kinglake, too, I know fairly well - I've driven through it on foggy days and marvelled at how high it sits above the northeast.
Where are we headed with all this?
Still on Marysville, harping in my distress, I find that fortunately a fellow called Ben took photos a while back, on the Net for all to see. I was going to post one, but I think the conversation there is a better resting place for this story.

This was all I could come up with this week. David has come up with something much more lucid, here. It is overwhelming.
One more post, which I drafted last week before all this, and then I'm having a blog rest, letting the shock settle. If it ever does.

I think I'll get my youngest son to string my old guitar back to right hander, I have a difficult young man living here who has no idea what's going on in the world, and I feel the need.

*Unfortunately, fewer of them than was first thought. And regrettably there is much more to read here about all the Victorian fires.

all aboard, toot

Fizzy Train is coming, coming down the track,
you gonna ride that fizzy train and it won't bring you back.

Ahem. My daughter's show in the Fringe festival opens next week, All Aboard The Fizzy Train; it's a revamped and expanded Deakin final-year piece that grew wings and flew off into these modest beginnings of the big time. Which is pretty exciting stuff, and all mothers must blog such things.

This engaging, whimsical three-hander stars Mr Confetti, a jewel-encrusted butler, a family (well, a father and son) of irons, and a range of other surprising characters, songs and props.

Which reminds me, I must pop down to the drygoods deli in Blackburn - I'm on fig supply this season.

Apologies to Woody Guthrie, of course, are in order.

 

digital fringes

The Digital Fringe festival is coming up again. I first heard about this in a class at RMIT, and have yet to go to the Horse Bazaar bar to check any events out. But of course, it's much bigger than one venue, and the organisers are looking for screens for the upcoming festival:

Digital Fringe is looking to find screens of every size across Melbourne and regional Victoria on which to broadcast this cutting-edge digital artwork.

No screen is too large or small to be involved in Digital Fringe - it may be in a back corner of a library on a computer monitor, part of a shop's window display, a projector in a foyer, or a huge public screen. We are simply looking to get G rated artistic content into as many nooks and crannies of public space as possible.

Screens which sign up to broadcast Digital Fringe entries can play the content whenever they like during the festival. Screening can be fitted in around normal programming, or be used if the screen has downtime where nothing is playing.

If you have been to the Fringe before you may have seen Digital Fringers doing mobile displays also - here's how it's done.
So if you are reading this and have some screen space to offer, the organisers can be contacted at people@digitalfringe.com.au.

And yes, it's part of the Fringe Festival, something I'm getting more excited about than usual this year as I get little snippets of one production in progress over Sunday night dinners.
I shall keep you posted, there will be some gratuitous parental publicity happening as soon as I can get some visuals to go with it.

Or you can search Facebook for All Aboard The Fizzy Train if you simply can't wait.

and now for some of our favourite things

Teh blog T-shirt. Thanks Boynton for teh link. (Gee those mousepads are a bit costly though.)

For Laura, another local, this story of a rooster. Beautifully told, as always, by Dervala Hanley.

the nicest things happen when you skip gym...

and go for a walk in the summer rain.

(and yes, I did bring them some bread.)

in which the seasoned blogger is content to fail picture posting class

There was going to be a linkless post here about The Abbey, which started on the ABC last Sunday.

I did a draft which did not please me on a second reading a day later. So today marks a foray into posting pictures, not something I've done much on this blog.

Two things prompt this: my admiration of the efforts of others (who actually take pictures worth blogging) and my daughter's Danish Deluxe chair and rather extraordinary opshop cushion, my snap of which came up better than could be expected.

The occasion? The acquisition of a larger bookcase and plenty of shifting and dusting last week. And the discovery that the viewing window on the camera is not broken, it had simply been turned off. Doh.

Fun times. A few tingles in the forearms at the end of the day, though. And I am ashamed to show the double stacked books on the old bookshelf on the other side of the computer, though the CD stack just out of the picture there is stupendously well balanced.

Suffice it to say that once the big 'un was filled and a bit of weeding done, the double stacks were no more. Yep, a modest collection, but bigger than some in these parts. What we lack in quantity we make up for in quality, though - speaking of which, if anyone is after a copy of Sir Ian Botham's 1995 biography, it's looking for a home.

Funny how friends accidentally fall together when you're lumping them from one room to t'other prior to the final shelving dance  (the only other travel books I have are by Bruce Chatwin).

This chair was a begrudging addition to our family room, as it's not a big house, and the colour scheme is egregious enough without those seventies shades clogging up the palette (basically mid-90s pale green, cream and grey, with badly scarred mountain ash floors and a few toffee and rust bits and pieces.) There's a story behind the brown one, which my daughter carried up the hill to our house when her father refused to take it from the hard rubbish collection - she has a GESOH to realise it is funny that he now sits in it all the time.

Nice kid, great collector. She helped me buy the bookcase, and picked up a bakelite phone for a bit of a bargain price at the same time. She is aggrieved that her mates think she sounds tinny on it, however.

In other news from the 'hood, I walked down the hill to snap this slice of urban history this morning.

Being a very ordinary photographer, I've neglected to provide sufficient foregrounding - this block is about 80 - 100 ft deep, and until three or four days ago had a post-war home on it of some fibrous substance, which was of some concern to me as it's about the third home in the street recently to be barricaded off with metal fencing, and one of them had collapsed stumps and had sunk in the middle. (Dear little weatherboard it was, too. Perfect writer's house, with a magnificent garden. That block is still bare.) Needless to say, I wasn't worried for long. But I was delighted to see the date palm at the back of the block and stopped to speculate with the bulldozer's driver on its age (maybe 70 years old, we decided) and provenance. He was a useful source of information, telling me first that the palm will be moved to the front of the block, and also that there were brick foundations under the removed house, suggesting that an older home had been there and maybe had burned down, with a new home being built over the top post-war.

As the nearest orchardists lived behind my place, and the oldest house in the area is a couple of streets away from me (1870s cottage), the date palm was interesting. They sometimes grew near older homes because people were eating fresh dates and threw the pips out the window - that's the claim made up at Mont Delancey in Wandin, anyway, which sports several splendid specimens.

Enough alliteration. Keep your eyes out for pips, you never know where they'll end up.

* Okay, so the fookers won't move. I'll be playing on Typepad help this evening. Please pray for me.