A day of new starts

We had a new colleague join us at work.  Day one for Adam and he has to help us put everything in the office into boxes in readiness for the re-furbishing that starts on Friday.  We'll have to camp out for 10 days and then get started again. But it's a less than ideal way to start your new job.

The Productivity Commission released its draft report on national disability care and support options: two volumes of closely argued case in favour of reform.  We'll be supportive.  Everyone in the sector knows though that the debate is just beginning and we all know few politicians are willing to put taxes up these days.

Day One of Semester One at university.  I'm taking two courses: Literature and Cinema & American Foundations.  The first lectures in both courses were fun.  For the first time in over thirty years I finally got Roland Barthes joke about Mort d'Auteur.  How planet-sized can my brain be if I hadn't thought properly about the simple fact that Barthes was French, writing in French.  I'm looking forward to the rest of the term.

I submitted Kaboom to Mark Stanton at Jenny Brown and Associates (literary agents) in Edinburgh.  Mr Stanton wrote back today saying if you don't hear from me within three weeks I'm not your agent.  Tick tock, clock ticking.

As usual, we'll see where tomorrow takes us.
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Dance, dance wherever you may be ...

I accepted an invitation to attend a performance by the Shun Yen Performing Arts dance group.  I really should pay more attention to detail.  Spike and I turned up at Sydney's Capitol Theatre (with its surreal decaying sea world / Midsummer Night's Dream interior) not knowing what to expect other than it would Chinese, classical and there would be dance.  Well, yeh but not quite.

It turns that we were attending a Falun Gong vaudeville show.  It may not be a cult but it is hard not to imagine that some kind of invasion of the body-snatchers thing happened to a town-full of ordinary Chinese people from the 1950s.  It's as if they're in a perpetual world tour of happy-clappy, post-Mao, pre-Millennialist rapture . The audience look intently at outsiders like me, compassion represented by the fixed, sorrowful smile of forbearance on their tolerant faces.  On stage there's the creepiest male host you could imagine in an evening suit and bow tie from a 1950s Moss Bros. Store.  His American twang reeks of everything scary about B-movie characters whom one knows have already had their brains sucked out by the thing from planet B.  His Chinese sidekick, a woman with a plastic tiara who claps her hands like a Disney character from snow white, lead us from one dance to the next.  It's ghastly.

The dancers and the dances are, it has to be said, sweet.  It's as if a troupe of local amateurs had escaped from one of those early Judy Garland / Mickey Rooney musicals from the 1940s.  "Let's do the show right here" they cry ... and off they go: spinning, tumbling, synchronised swimming without water.  It's colourful, it might even be Chinese but when the curtain came down for the final time we were out of there like proverbial bat out of Hell.

And Miss Margaret Cramp danced in blue taffeta

Spike opened a letter today from the Registrar of Sydney University.  It read:

"Dear Douglas,

Congratulations on winning the 2010 Margaret Cramp Memorial Prize for a Part-time Student in First Year English" ... and on it went.

The University web site gives this information about the prize (which I didn't even know exists).  

"Margaret Cramp Memorial Prize for a Part-Time Student in First Year English
Established in 1945 from part of a gift of 1000 pounds from the Evening Students Association. Awarded annually to a part-time student for proficiency in first year English, in memory of Margaret Cramp, a former evening student and Library Assistant in the Fisher Library."

I know it couldn't have been a vast field of candidates but it's pleasing all the same to have some external recognition of my first semester efforts as an undergraduate.  

Later (after a Google search) I discovered this story from the Sydney Morning Herald, dated 11th May 1940 (sourced from Australia Trove)

UNDERGRADUATES' BALL.

A male ballet, a Maori sketch, and renditions of extracts from "Scram," this year's University songbook, were highlights of the Undergraduates' Ball, which took place at the Trocadcro last night.

Flowers in autumn tonings decorated the official table, at which a large party was entertained by Miss Margaret Christie, woman vice-president of the Students' Representative Council, and Mr. W. Granger, president of the council. Miss Christie wore a short fur jacket over her gown of black taffeta. One of tile honorary secretaries, Miss Helen Aspinall, chose black net and a floral lame coat, and Miss Margaret Cramp danced in blue taffeta. The guests included Mr. and Mrs. Hugh McConnell, the latter in a frock of dull-gold hand-painted satin, Dr. and Mrs. R. M. C. Gunn, Professor and Mrs. H. Tasman Lovell, Mr. and Mrs. W. A. Selle, Mr. and Mrs. John Bowie Wilson, Mr and Mrs. Vincent John Flynn, Misses Helen St. Vincent Welch, Robin Curtis, Betty Douglass, and Dorothy Dowling, Sir John Pcúii, and Professor von Wilier.

At most, the dancing Miss Cramp had five years to live.  And so, methinks, like Miss Cramp we should dance while we may.

Then ... Another Google search led me to this article from page 13 of the SMH, 11th April 1942 (a similar story appeared in newspapers in Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide).

"HORROR OF HOME ENVIRONMENT"

At the inquest yesterday on Margaret Alexandria Cramp, 22, a doctor stated that she had "almost a horror of her home environment."

Miss Cramp was found dead in front of a gas oven in a friend's home on March 27. The Coroner's finding was suicide.

Dr. John McGeorge, psychiatrist, of Macquarie Street, gave evidence by letter that when he first saw the girl at her home, in Birriga Road, Bellevue Hill, in May, 1941, she had made a half-hearted attempt at suicide. Her home surroundings were unbelievably gloomy, more like a scene from a Bronte novel than real life.

Her mother had died, and her father insisted on displaying pictures of her all round the house, including an Illuminated one, which he kept alight all night.

The girl's activities were restricted, and she had to be home at a certain hour, her father walting up. His attitude was one of continual, unex- pressed reproach, stated the letter. "Loyalty to her father prevented her from expressing her true feelings, which, I feel sure, were almost of horror of her home environment," the letter stated.

"She was a brilliant graduate in Arts, with considerable distinction, and was appointed to the University library. "I can only assume that my almost violent demands that the girl should live with other University girls in some hostel, rather than remain home, were completely ignored by her father."

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Busy day serving the public of NSW

From The New Yorker
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