The most startling footage I’ve seen has been of the cars zooming down the river.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUpkPTcqPY

Although the amount of damage caused by the floods is huge and it’s one of Australia’s worst ever natural disasters, fortunately the number of people killed is relatively low in global terms.  The death toll is now 16.  In comparison, more than 500 people were killed in floods in Brazil in the last couple of days.  And the floods in Brisbane took place on the one-year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, where more than 200,000 people died.

The Queensland authorities seem to be doing an excellent job of dealing with the floods.  Compare this to the US response to Hurricane Katrina.  TV footage showed Kevin Rudd (Australia’s foreign minister and former prime minister) wading through the water helping people move their belongings and carrying someone’s suitcase.  It’s hard to imagine George W. Bush or Condaleeza Rice doing that.

The Big Picture has some amazing photos of the Queensland floods from the end of last year.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/01/australian_flooding.html

As well as donating directly to the Queensland Premier’s Relief Fund there are a couple of anthology fundraising projects.

FableCroft Publishing had planned an aptly named anthology: After the Rain

After the Rain was commissioned in 2010 and is due for release in April 2011. However, in the face of the ongoing flood disaster in Queensland, the authors and I have pulled together this limited ebook version as a fundraiser. The authors have freely given their stories for this use.

The book includes stories by some of Clarion South writing friends.

Another group also has a fundraising anthology planned and is looking for submissions.

http://100storiesforqueensland.submishmash.com/Submit

“100 Stories for Queensland” is a charity anthology to assist the victims of the Queensland floods. Stories are donated by writers from across the globe. 100% of the sales profit will be donated to the Queensland Premier’s Flood Relief appeal.

And finally some more photos of the floods that have been circulating on the Internet. (I’m not sure of the original sources).

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.”
– Donald Rumsfeld

I’ve been reading about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the allied occupation of Japan.

There is a big divide in knowledge between Western and Asian history.  Most Australians know relatively little about Japanese or Chinese history (other than what they might have gleaned from watching the occasional samurai movie).

When I lived in Japan, I met a few well-educated Japanese in their 20s and 30s that hadn’t even been aware Australia and Japan had fought against each other.  I did talk to one student whose grandfather had been in one of the submarines that had been involved in the attack on Sydney Harbor.

Japan is often criticised by its neighbours (particularly China and Korea) for what they omit from their history textbooks.

Of course most countries have a tendenancy to gloss over the less than pleasant incidents from their past.  The previous Australian prime minister objected to what he saw as the “black armband view of history.”

A couple of years ago a Japanese TV station asked viewers to vote on their favorite figures from history.  Although it was possible to nominate anyone from history, the list ended up being heavily weighted towards Japanese.

Here is the list of the top 10 favorite historical figures chosen.  I’m guessing that many will be unfamiliar to non-Japanese.  It’s also interesting to see which Westerners turned up on the list.

10 Hijikata Toshizo
09 Helen Keller
08 Mother Teresa
07 Noguchi Hideyo
06 Tokugawa Ieyasu
05 Matsushita Konosuke
04 Hideyoshi Toyotomi
03 Thomas Edison
02 Sakamoto Ryoma
01 Oda Nobunaga

The full list is at
http://www.japanprobe.com/2006/05/08/japanese-rank-their-favorite-100-historical-figures/

Increasingly the majority of people are reliant on the news media to shape their view of the world.
Even though we get more news from all over the world than ever before, the majority of news is negative and what is not reported is often more interesting.
Sometimes what is left out of news stories can make a big difference.

In Australia there was a recent incident where some of the commercial TV stations showed footage of a man of Middle Eastern background shouting and swearing at a news cameraman outside a court.  The man’s son had been charged with riot offences.

Australia is fortunate to have Media Watch, an excellent program that looks at the stories behind the news stories.  They showed the unedited footage of the incident that showed the man repeatedly politely pleading for the news cameras to leave him and his son alone.  They crossed the street to avoid the cameras and were followed.  Then the cameraman swears at the man and calls him a terrorist, provoking the outburst that was then shown on TV.

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/outrage-over-channel-nine-cameramans-terrorist-slur-20100413-s62i.html

Another recent example of the sharing of knowledge came from the Royal Commission currently being held into the Victorian bushfires (173 people were killed on February 7 last year in Victoria).

Christine Nixon, the then police commissioner, who was responsible for coordinating the emergency response (although in reality it is the chief fire officers that are responsible) left the emergency center just when the fires were at their worst and went out for dinner.

Counsel for the commission questioned her statements to the media:

“It’s just that when you did a media interview on 3AW last week, you told Mr Mitchell that you had dinner for an hour and ‘people knew where I was’. Who knew where you were?”

Ms Nixon: “I certainly knew where I was and I didn’t see any point in telling anybody. What I mean by that was – they knew that they could contact me.”

http://www.smh.com.au/national/police-commissioner-ate-while-victoria-burned-20100414-se5k.html

The majority of my friends live in different countries and Facebook is one way to keep in touch with them.  Of course a lot of the posts on Facebook are low in terms of information quality.  I really don’t need to know what people are eating for lunch or that they’re enjoying a coffee right now.

A friend recently quit Facebook giving the reason that when she met up with friends in Melbourne there wasn’t as much to talk about because everyone had already heard all of her news and seen the photos via Facebook.

In terms of information filters, I’ve deliberately isolated myself from sporting news.  Melbourne has one of the highest rates of attendance at sporting events in the world and is the home of AFL (Australian rules football).

When I visited my parents on the Gold Coast at Easter, they were talking about their football tipping results.  I hadn’t been aware the football season had already started.  My parents were surprised that I could live in Melbourne and be unaware the football season had started.  They wanted to know why my workmates weren’t talking about the sporting results.

My immediate workmates are Malaysian, Chinese and Iranian, none of whom spends a great deal of time talking about football results.  (At least not in my presence).

A few years ago I had an article published about unusual things from Melbourne’s history.  (For example, when Melbourne was settled in 1835, it was first called Bearbrass).  Even though I was born in Melbourne and have lived most of my life here (apart from a few years in Japan and a couple of years travelling), I recently learned something vitally important about Melbourne.

I overhead a conversation on the train and discovered that Melbourne is home to one of the world’s most prestigious circus training courses.

Not far from where I live is the campus of The National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA) – Australia’s centre of excellence in contemporary circus.

If you’re tempted to run away to join the circus, you can sign up for a 3 year Bachelor of Circus Arts.

http://www.nica.com.au/

A Japanese clown that will be instantly recognisable to anyone from Osaka.

Things That Have Changed in Australia:

• Things are a lot more expensive. (Yes, I know that’s how inflation works).  For example, the apartment I’m renting in Melbourne is smaller and a lot more expensive than the the one I was renting in Osaka.
• Melbourne seems to have  a preponderance of shops dedicated solely to ugg boots.  I can’t remember encountering any ugg boot only stores last time I was here.
• Half the population seems to be gluten intolerant now.  (I hadn’t come across anyone who was gluten intolerant pre-2004).
• My local supermarket now has self-service checkout lanes.  They’re a pain to use.  You have to scan things yourself and the machines attempt to judge the accuracy by weighing the bags.  Almost every time, I’ve had to get an assistant to reset the machine because something has gone wrong.
• Internet speeds and download limits are a lot better than before.  (Still more than 5 years behind Japan, but a big improvement on last time I was in Australia).

Things That Haven’t Changed in Australia (But I notice because I have changed):

• Melbourne’s public transport sucks.
• There are still a lot of racists in Australia.  (Given Australia’s history, it’s particularly galling to hear Australians complain about boat people.)
• A lot of people talk on their mobile phones on their trains.  (After being in Japan, I now found this particularly annoying).

Things I Miss About Japan: (Other than my friends in Japan):

• All of the cool places: the shrines, temples, ninja towns, monkey hot springs.
• The daily encounters with strange things.
• Lots of food: 551 Horai Shumai, Chibo Okonomiyaki, Izakayas (Melbourne has some izakayas that are all right).

Things In Melbourne That Remind Me of Japan:

• Within a 15-minute walk of my apartment in Melbourne there are 4 or 5 sushi restaurants and another half dozen or so Japanese restaurants.
• The communal laundry in my apartment has a sign up reading: “Someone has stolen my underwear again!  Beware of the pervert.”

There was lots of rain in northern NSW and south-east Queensland.   My parents’ house is okay, but some towns near here had to be evacuated and some of the roads were cut off.  A couple of people were killed in the floods.

Two weeks ago one of my Irish relatives and her boyfriend stayed with us for a few days.  She’s my cousin’s daughter.  (At first I thought that made her my second cousin, but she’s actually my 1st cousin once removed.  My nephew is her second cousin.  Gets confusing!).  She and her boyfriend had been doing a working holiday and travelling around Australia.

We went down to Byron Bay for the day.  We also had a look at the beach near my parents’ house.  It’s a 10-minute walk to a really nice beach.  The weather was great.

After my cousin left, the weather got bad.  The storms washed away a lot of the sand from the beach.  On Friday I went down to the beach and took some photos and a video.  The wind was blowing lots of foam in the air.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gPGdVw4odY