Taming The Mob

Growing up one of my cousins had autism. S was a nice kid, but pretty much non-verbal, had great difficulty with social interaction, and engaged in repetitive behaviours that are typical of autistic people. S loved any kind of machine that made a noise and/or vibrated, and was delighted if he found a machine that did both. At the time, my Mum had a big bulky vacuum cleaner typical of the 1960’s and S would turn the vacuum on and stand on it for hours and hours uninterrupted. Before my Mum lost her memory to age, she would fondly remember S and his penchant for her vacuum cleaner with great affection. My Dad too, when he was alive, also remembered S with deep and abiding love. When S came to visit, Mum would get the vacuum out and Dad would go through his entire tool shed trying to find another machine that would make noise and vibrate. Dad never stopped trying to interact with S but never in a way that was forceful or difficult for S. At the time, we were all a bit bamboozled by S but we all knew that he was one of those precious people that we keep close and treat with extra tenderness.

But S and his family had a tough life. S was never able to live alone, get a job, meet a partner, get married, have children; he required constant care and missed out on all the things that we neurotypicals (and in fact most people who now call themselves neurodivergent) enjoy in life, both simple things, like sunrise in the morning, and complex activities, like graduating from university. Of course, the entire family was affected because there were three children and S required such a high level of care from his parents that the two normal children, by necessity, received less attention. When his parents (my aunt and uncle) were too old to be the primary caregivers for S, his siblings had to step up. S was never, in his entire life, able to live independently.

If you have some first hand experience with true autism, it is impossible not to greet the almost innumerable people (frequently young women) who claim a diagnosis of autism or neurodivergence and yet who live fulfilling and by all outward appearances completely normal and often privileged lives without some kind of scepticism. At least I do. Both because I am a sceptic and because I recognise in myself so many traits that neurodivergent people claim represent them. To prove the point, I took this online test and discovered that my “score is typical for many people with autism spectrum disorder.”

But, I don’t think I have autism or neurodivergence or ASD or any other psycho-social diagnoses. I think I’m a bit different to other people but, with modifications to my behaviour and some degree of social (and intellectual) intelligence, I can function in society even if I never feel like I really fit in. I don’t need a label and, in fact, a label would inhibit me from learning to deal with things in appropriate and responsible ways. We grow from difficulties not from having society or family or friends or even paid caregivers cater to our every whim. Fitting in (masking as the neurodivergent call it) is part of life as an adult. If you want adult privileges you must meet adult responsibilities.

In a controversial move – at least in highly politicised circles – the ABC (at great cost because everything the ABC does seems very costly) is producing a series of podcasts called “Autistic AF with Grace Tame.” These four episodes of the “Ladies We Need to Talk Podcast” seek to connect “with other neurodivergent women to get a better understanding of what life is like as an autistic person, beyond the stereotypes.” Now I’m not going to listen to these podcasts. That’s above and beyond what I will do for a simple and rarely read blog. In all honesty, I would rather eat cane toads for a week than listen to a podcast that is entitled “Ladies We Need to Talk” because I don’t fit in with 99% of women. I am much more comfortable around men not only because I do not understand female ways of connecting but also because some of these women are – at least in my opinion - insufferable.

Tame, who was the darling of both the left and the centre, became a target for criticism after a highly emotional speech at a Palestinian rally where she gave the mobilising cry “From Gadigal to Gaza globalise the Intifada,” which was followed up with an interview on ABC radio where she made the statement that sexual assault of women by Hamas on October 7^th had been “debunked” and was “propaganda.” As an aside, if you haven’t seen Tame’s Globalise the Intifada speech it is worth watching because Tame is really, really good at delivering speeches. Whether you agree with the slogan or the rally or are just an average human and plain horrified by the Israel-Palestine conflict you have to recognise that Tame is a consummate speaker. She is so good at giving speeches that you might be mistaken for thinking that she is actually really good at connecting with people (not a common trait among autistic people).

In an interview with Rebel News, outside of the ABC studios where a motley gang of folk were protesting the four episodes of the podcast featuring Tame (not something that I could be arsed doing but something I support in a democratic society), Charlie Pickering spoke a few sentences, barely a paragraph that, in my neurotypical or is it neurodiverse way of thinking was pretty banal all things considered. These are his exact words: “I do actually think it’s problematic, that’s my personal opinion. As you would understand, and as a Jewish Australian, there’s a complete misunderstanding of a lot of the words that are said and what [the] true meanings of them are. A lot of people are using words and phrases that have meaning well beyond what they think they do. I think you could argue that a lot of people who jump on protest bandwagons are ignorant a lot of the time.”

I might be wrong, because I may not be completely normal, but I don’t think the average Australian is offended by this. Certainly, the average Australian should NOT be offended by it because Pickering preferences all he says with the words “that’s my personal opinion.” A personal opinion was something we were all entitled to until we invented micro-aggressions and lateral trauma, and suddenly discovered we were all victims. A society of victims, what could possibly go wrong? But, of course, the left has lost it’s mind and has engaged, as it so often does, in a full scale social media lynching. Left wing media outlets were aghast when the NSW government floated a proposal to ban the words “Globalise the Intifada,” and yet, the same people who insist on protections for free speech have roundly condemned Charlie Pickering and would happily see him taken off the air. Free speech is never free I guess.

I haven’t watched or listened to Charlie Pickering since the Covid years when it became obvious, at least to me, that a segment of society was becoming increasingly authoritarian and coercive. I might be forced to live under regulations which I considered antithetical to basic human rights (Covid was never like Ebola, an infection that needed draconian social policy to manage) but I didn’t have to make things worse by being listening to Orwellian level propaganda. But I would, if pushed, be inclined to agree with Pickering. 

We have immature 20 and 30 something neurodiverse people speaking with complete confidence and authority about issues which are complex, historically and culturally deeply rooted, and, are, at their most basic level, so far outside their area of expertise, personal knowledge or even thoughtful reflection, that it would be akin to me giving a lecture on string theory to Stephen Hawking. I would look a fool, as do the young women (and men) who confidently proclaim authority on world affairs. Hubris is the burden of youth which unfortunately gets inflicted on an entire society when the protagonists are elevated beyond their level of intelligence because they meet an idealised version of the oppressed (who frequently turns around and becomes the oppressor).

But back to podcasts about autism. I can’t really comment because, as I said previously, I’m not going to actually listen to the podcast, but I certainly feel that the true experience of autism is unlikely to be communicated in the “Ladies We Need to Talk” podcast, because, the true experience of severe autism is not something that is easy to confront. The type of autism my cousin had is deeply distressing, exhausting to manage, and requires unrequited commitment in the face of zero positive feedback. It is not conducive to quirky social media posts or $20K per engagement speaking fees. It is the life long sorrow of something that could have been but was not. Human potential never truly realised, the greatest loss we all are forced to witness.

For an interesting analysis of the explosion of autism and ADHD diagnoses read Dr Suzanne O'Sullivan's book The Age of Diagnosis.

Big swell, Little Wind, Strong Wind, Little Swell

Finally the winter westerlies are here. Today we had a strong wind warning but a relatively low swell (HS about 0.70 metres, and Hmax around 1.4 metres). We noodled along the coast, in and out of all the bays, through the gauntlets, are far south as Mosquito Bay. The wind was up early, northwesterly not pure westerly, and pushing us along as we paddled south around headlands. Coming back, the wind was in our faces and it was nice to be out again paddling into the wind. I haven’t done that since the Furneaux Group circumnavigation.

The week before, we had a big swell (HS of 2 metres and Hmax of 4 metres) but no wind. We went north, out to North Head and as far north as Richmond Beach. The sea surface was almost glassy as there was no wind but the surface conditions were lumpy, bumpy with a secondary swell on top of the big ground swell. It was almost possible to catch runners back to our home bay but the swell was moving too fast to get onto.

Bonnum Pic

It’s a short drive between Bonnum Pic and Mount Jellore, both in Nattai National Park, so why would you not do both bush-walks while you are in the area? Accessed via a public road through private property (leave the gates as you find them) we parked just before the fire trail goes downhill into the Wollondilly Valley and becomes Wanganderry Pass Trail.

A short distance down the fire trail, an old burnt NPWS (National Parks and Wildlife Service) sign marks the start of the trail. There’s scant sign of maintenance here (scant in this case really equals none) but the foot pad is clear enough and a few of the old signs (many burnt in 2020) are still viable so you can follow the track relatively easily up and down two gullies. On the way out, we lost the track coming out of the second gully but if you head roughly straight uphill after crossing the little creek, you will come out into a big fire break beside private property.

The next few kilometres is pretty simple. Walk along the fire break until you it ends and a piece of old blue rope wrapped about a tree marks a very old road that heads roughly north along the plateau. The track is clear enough until you approach the cliff line (Wanganderry Walls) although the regrowth on either side is so thick you could be walking anywhere. There is one short section of heath where the regrowth is open, but most of the way you walk in a tunnel of acacia.

After about five kilometres the trail approaches the north south running cliff line and travels over some nice open sandstone slabs and pagodas. There are views down into the Wollondilly valley. It’s still worth keeping track of the foot pad as between the sandstone slabs the scrub is thick and the further north you go, towards the Pic of Bonnum Pic, the thicker the scrub becomes and the vaguer the foot-pad.

The last one to two kilometres is slow. It is really easy to lose the foot-pad as there seem to be decoy cairns in places and the ridge gains and loses 10 to 30 metres of elevation through thickening scrub. It’s worth searching out the foot pad each time you come down off a sandstone slab to avoid unnecessary bushwhacking. The foot pad, however, is for the most part, a tunnel here, and only visible when you are right up against it.

We ran out of both time and patience with the scrub about 300 metres from the very end, but we hadn’t brought a short rope in any event to do the “slide of death.” The view, unfortunately, is getting obscured as the scrub grows up but there are still spots where you get good views.

Our return was perhaps a bit quicker than the way out although we spent as much time searching for the foot pad on the way back as we did on the way out. I had mistakenly thought that we would recognise the various spots where we had dropped off the slabs into the bush but it turns out that thick brush scrub looks the same in both directions.

Mount Jellore

This newly upgraded walking track runs through Jellore Flora Reserve to top of Mount Jellore (834 metres) in Nattai National Park. I’m not sure when the track was upgraded, but at some point in the not too distant past it was a rough foot pad complete with a rope aided descent down and up the deep gully of a tributary of Jellore Creek. The NSW NPWS (National Parks and Wildlife Service) Jellore Flora Reserve website has a tremendous amount of information about cultural connection and zero information about the walking track which is very strange as I suspect a lot of money was spent upgrading the trail which now includes a large parking lot, steps into and out of the gully and copious signage.

In any event, it is a pleasant half day walk to and from Mount Jellore (3 to 3.5 hours will see you there and back comfortably) which has filtered views over Nattai National Park. On AllTrails, walkers report seeing Sydney in the distance on clear days (a straight line distance of 100 kilometres) but the bush is rapidly growing high after the 2020 fires and the view from some rocks just north of the trig (there are no views at the trig) are rapidly becoming obscured so visions of the high rises of Sydney are likely to be simply mirages.

The new trail is off Soapy Flat Road, a quiet rural road that takes you past the big houses and even bigger estates of Sydney’s wealthy elite. This makes the juxtaposition between all the cultural verbiage on the NSW NPWS website and the sprawling mansions set amidst manicured estates all the more jarring. Certainly no-one who is professing to being on stolen land here is giving anything back.

There are lots of large and tasteful sandstone blocks acting as bollards all along Soapy Flat Road and, as you walk through the bush on the track towards Mount Jellore past vast mounds of broken glass in old fire pits and rough driven in vehicle tracks, the purpose of these bollards becomes immediately obvious. Gentrification, in this instance, has benefited the natural environment.

The track runs along a broad ridge then descends down cleverly constructed steps to a creek and ascends on the other side. Leeches dwell in the creek, we picked up a few but managed to get the buggars off before they bit in. On the north side of the creek, the track intersects an old fire trail with private property to the west and continues east until it fades out at the base of the final short climb on a good zig-zagging track to Mount Jellore. The trig on top is apparently the first ever established in NSW in 1828 so there is a bit of history to go with your culcha.

Everything Old is New Again

This is the kind of trip report which you don’t really want to write because it makes you look like a complete dumb-arse. But we are all dumb-arses sometimes so here goes. On Sunday, after a couple of days of bush-walking, Doug and I drove over to an undisclosed State Forest to climb at a small crag. I’d marked the location (or what I thought was the location) on the topographic map. My pattern recognition primed brain saw a fire trail heading south from another fire trail and ending at a white area on the map (indicating no vegetation) with the hatched pattern that NSW topographic maps use to indicate a cliff line. This looked just like the little sketch map on the Crag Guide that I did not bother matching up latitude and longitude.

When we got to the State Forest however, we discovered that all the fire trails were closed except for one which runs north to south through the pine plantation. I had looked online before we left because, if you know anything about Australia, you will know that at any single point in time hundreds of hectares of public land are closed for one reason or another. There is nothing our bureaucracy likes more than closing public land because a twig has fallen or it might be a bit windy. Never waste an excuse to use an abundance of caution is the Australian motto.

It turns out, I discovered later, that the fire trails in this State Forest have been closed since 2022 because of damage to the roads due to wet weather. If you can do basic mathematics, that’s four years. I don’t actually mind closing fire trails to motorised transport. There is nothing in Australia’s constitution that says you have a right to drive everywhere and, as a culture, we drive way too much and use our own bodies way too little. But, if you are going to close fire trails just be courageous and do the difficult thing and shut them permanently to all but non-motorized users; instead of the “temporary become permanent” closures which is how most things are done. It’s cowardly.

Anyway, the roads were closed so we would have to walk in. We drove along the annoyingly corrugated open fire trail to an intersection and parked the van. We carried our rock climbing gear and set off. We were able to jump across the first ford, but further on where the road intersects a bigger river the road bed was completely flooded. We tried hopping across on various slippery logs which had toppled over but in the end had to take shoes off and wade across the knee deep river. A bit further on and we were able to balance with only a minor booter (a booter is when you accidentally get wet feet trying to cross a stream) across yet another creek.

I had my topographic map handy as there were many junctions we needed to make and at one point, noticing another small crag on the map I wondered if I might have marked the crag wrong. But we never seriously entertained the notion and kept walking. Eventually, we walked out to the turn around at a little lookout where bogans had been throwing their drink cans into the bush (half the reason roads get closed) and spent a goodly amount of time trying to find the crag. Nothing was quite right and the rock was not even conducive to climbing. Eventually, while we had lunch we pulled the latitude and longitude off the Crag guide and noticed we were indeed at the wrong location.

We had, however, blown through so much time that even though we would walk back past the crag we didn’t really have enough daylight to squeeze in a climb and drive home, so we walked on past contenting ourselves with catching a glimpse of some rock through the trees.

Ironically, when we got home, our handy trip database – in which we have recorded all our major trips for the better part of 30 years – indicated we had been to the crag before and climbed a few pitches!

The Undead

The Sunday paddles are, at least as a regular event, over. This is actually the second time I’ve binned the Sunday paddles. The first time was back in 2024 when interest and attendance was repeatedly poor. I don’t why I thought I could turn a trickle into a deluge after the passage of two years with more people than ever out of the game unless perhaps I have a God delusion and think that I can somehow turn water into wine, bread into fish, and non-interest into enthusiasm.

Mentally, this is a tough call to make because I am essentially giving up and if there is one thing that really signals weakness to me it is giving up. Seth Godin, in his book, The Dip, argues that winners know when to quit and when to keep going. Dips are temporary set backs which require a no quit attitude while cul-de-sacs are dead ends where no amount of perseverance will create a path forward. Dips are a bit like over-reaching during a training cycle. You get fatigued, a bit stiff and sore, but, if you manage your training correctly, you are stronger and fitter than ever at the end of the training cycle. I am so used to pushing the fatigue (both mental andphysical), soreness, even boredom at the repetitiveness involved in training that I take that attitude to everything. It works for training but it will never turn a cul de sac into a highway.

When you come back to first principles, the purpose of the Sunday paddles was myriad and yet none of those many goals were being met. In group situations, there is always a social element, and, as I live like a hermit because of my difficulty in finding people who enjoy doing what I do, that was an important goal. But I also wanted to be out with people who like being challenged and valued improving their skills. At the outset, the Sunday paddles were meant to include some skills practice, but very few people are interested in improving their skills even when doing so will open the door to a much wider range of possible experiences. Sea kayaking, particularly under calm conditions is actually a low skill sport where you can complete many, many trips with very little skill.

Last Sunday, I actually had three people show up. One regular (who I will continue to paddle with outside the Sunday paddles) and two paddlers from the ACT who wanted to go from ungraded to Grade Two. I ran them through some of the basic skills that constitute the Grade Two skill set although I could tell by they way they held their paddles, sat in the boat, just generally moved that they were a long, long way off. Initially, I thought I might be able to tick them off on a rescue if not the actual paddle skills but even that was not possible. If you can’t competently complete a simple rescue in calm conditions there is no way you’ll manage in a real situation.

Way back in 2020 after the fires came through and the lockdowns followed, I ran Sunday paddles for almost an entire year and they were quite successful. I even had double digit participants and we did a lot of really interesting paddles in a great variety of conditions. It’s hard to admit that those days are over, but they are and no amount of wishful thinking will bring them back. In a way, it’s a metaphor for everything in life. I used to be able to squat my body weight, but I can’t now and no amount of training will get me back to that point. I can hang on to what I have and I can maximise what I can do, but I cannot, like Jesus, turn the dead into the living.

Never Use a Long Word When a Short Word Will Do

 Every day go back to the beginning and rewrite the whole thing and when it gets too long, read at least two or three chapters before you start to write and at least once a week go back to the start. Earnest Hemmingway.

Many years ago I ploughed my way through Nassim Taleb’s weighty tomb “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.” The book is full of interesting insights and ideas – many of which are pertinent to our times (no government has ever promoted resilience because governments by their nature promote dependence) – but, the thing I remember most about the book was a few sentences early in the book where Taleb defended his option to reject any suggestions made by the book’s nominal editor. After reading that paragraph my mind continually returned to rub against the notion that Antifragile would have been a much better book with more editorial input.

Grace Tame’s memoir, “The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner” is such a book, but more so. Tame’s book is chaotic, confusing, and contradictory. In other words, it is a book in desperate need of editorial input. Compared to Tame’s book, Taleb’s Antifragile is written with the precision of an Earnest Hemmingway novel; the author who famously wrote 47 different endings to “A Farewell to Arms” and was known for his stringent rewriting process.

The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner was nominated for a number of book prizes in 2023, but, thankfully, won none. This is not a denigration of Tame, but a reality that the book is very poorly written, difficult to read and requires dedication to get through. Even Tame’s most ardent fans – she is broadly supported by left wing Australia – found the book a challenging read and many readers fell into the DNF (did not finish) category. This is almost unheard of on the solidly left wing Good Reads platform where anything right of Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto” gets a one star review.

I did not read the book, I listened to the audiobook version. Although I am good at sticking with heavy reads – I was engrossed by Niall Ferguson’s “The War of the World,” a heavy read at well over a thousand pages - and I read dozens of non-fiction books a year, Tame’s book is too discursive, too wandering, and too tangential to sit and read. Listening allows the “reader” to do other things and is simply the only way I could get through the book.

Tame’s story is well known in Australia so there is no need to repeat it here. The book traces the period of her life from birth through to winning the Australian of the Year Award in 2021 which, at times, feels too revealing, too nakedly honest. I’m not sure that the reader really needs to know about all of Tame’s later sexual encounters, or the drug taking, drinking, cutting, general chaotic nature of her life before and after what she calls “disclosing.”

Dispassionate readers have to wonder whether the chaos which seemed to permeate Tame’s life was a precondition to the abuse or a reaction. The book is so disordered and chronologically disjointed that it is impossible to tell. In “Troubled: A Memoir of FosterCare, Family and Social Class,” Rob Henderson (well known for his thesis on “luxury beliefs”) writes about the chaos that characterised his own upbringing and acknowledges that the leading indicators of success in life are relatively simple: marry before having children, finish high school, work full time. Tame’s life is nowhere near as destabilised as Henderson’s. She had loving and caring parents (albeit they were separated) and a large and supportive family network all in close proximity. Despite claims in the book that her background was somewhat impoverished, both parents had good jobs, the family had multiple properties, there were overseas trips and no apparent physical or emotional neglect and certainly no economic barriers. The abuse, in fact, occurred at a prestigious private girls school in Tasmania.

There is a sense throughout the book that Tame at one time both resists being cast merely as a victim of crime and yet finds comfort in various psychosocial diagnoses: autism, neurodivergence, ADHD, cutting disorder, anorexia nervosa (her words, and not the modern nomenclature now in use) which allow her to enter the now sacrosanct category of victim. Many of the experiences she describes as being evidence of one or all of these various issues appear to outsiders less caught up in their own mental torture and with the benefit of more life years to be the normal ups, downs, and round-abouts of any individuals life. No-one really fits in, we all struggle with our identity, making and keeping friends is difficult (although Tame, for all her psychosocial and autistic issues seems to fare much better than most in this regard), and, although these things get easier with age, they never disappear. At 60 we can be as fraught with self-confidence issues as we are at 16. Such is life, and it is made no better by the modern tendency to rumination fostered by therapy and endless affirmations of completely normal personality variations.

There is no doubt that Tame was failed by the system. When the grooming started, Tame was under treatment for disordered eating so she was seeing therapists and her mother had met with the school and requested that Grace never be alone with the abuser. The red flags were there but somehow Grace remained enmeshed with her abuser for six long months. This is both an indictment of the system and a sign that we should never trust strangers – no matter what position they hold in society – to be the carer for our vulnerable people. No therapist can replace the love of actual family and there is something dystopian about the way modern society appears to believe that various professionals (I use the term loosely) know better than we know ourselves. We should all be less gullible.

The book lumbers along under heavy prose with far too many adjectives (and randomly inserted expletives although I like a good expletive myself) often stacked one upon the other as if the author had one hand on the keyboard and the other on the thesaurus as she typed. There is a general sense, amidst much self-deprecation, that Tame is trying to convince the reader of her intellect by using the longest words and most arcane language available. Many times I was reminded of Orwell’s famous advice for writers “Never use a long word where a short one will do.”

Part of the difficulty of the book is that Tame frequently wanders off into random political discourses almost all of which fall solidly within the left leaning frame of reference and are delivered with both conviction and venom. One feels that her opinions are less well thought out and more the repeating of tropes held dear to the hearts of the (almost) communist left. Many of these are simply wrong. For example, she claims that America has no social safety net or public health care, while the reality is that the USA spends trillions of dollars on social welfare programs; a greater percentage oftheir GST than Australia spends (which is a big spender on social welfare programs). True, there is more economic disparity in the USA than in Australia, but Tame is simply wrong about many things she presents as categorical facts.

In Australia, where we have a government instituted Minister for Men’s Behavior Change (an Orwellian position), Tames thesis is a message for our times. Men are bad, women are victims. Grace Tame was a victim and her abuser deserved more prison time (I’d happily see him live out his days in prison). The fact that he was released from prison and then garnered scholarships and funding from the Australian government to attend university is a slap in the face to all Australians and Tame is right to be angry about that. The problem is, that the leftist agenda that Tame vociferously supports is how we arrived at this point in Australian history where abusers are more deserving of compassion and care than victims. Intersectionality works both ways and has enabled Machiavellian types to thoroughly game the system. The law of unintended consequences holds true even under the empathetic left, perhaps even more so as incentives go unrecognized.

Tame’s great contribution to solving the problem of pedophilia, grooming and exploitation could have been explicating why some women and girls are so vulnerable to victimization by men. Unfortunately, there are no answers in this book. The nub of the issue, what was really in Tame’s consciousness over the months she was groomed and abused, is entirely hidden. I finished the book feeling that more was concealed than revealed by this purportedly bruisingly honest and authentic memoir.

Solving the problem has to be a two pronged approach. Men, obviously, have to stop committing crimes against women and girls, but we also need to understand what it is about females that makes them uniquely vulnerable to male predators. Unlike the mostly low socio-economic class white victims of the UK grooming gangs, Tame was not from a low income family or a child in foster care whom no-one really cared about. She was (and is) an intelligent strong and determined young woman from a loving and supportive family, with friends and hobbies, and sports she participated in. And yet she fell victim to a predatory teacher. Why was that? What programs or social norms are needed in society to give women and girls the necessary skills to recognise and avoid suffering the same fate as Tame? Because if women are as strong and adaptable as Tame posits (and I believe they are) then we need to activate those strengths to prevent this inexcusable cruelty and wanton destruction of potential. Relying on psychopathic predators to reform their behaviour is not enough. We need to arm vulnerable people, but most particularly women and girls with the skills to recognise evil.