Are you a Ten-Pound Pom?

 

Whether you are a Ten-Pound Pom or, like me, a more expensive (more valuable? ☺) Fifty-Pound "Wog", all your records, original application, medical records, interview papers, letters to the Department of Immigration, even the envelopes you posted them in, are stored in the vaults of the National Archives in Canberra.

 

 

You can get copies of your own documents. Let me show you how:

Go to www.naa.gov.au. There you click on "Search the collection", then on "RecordSearch", and type in as keywords your name (no, not "Ten-Pound Pom" but your real name!)

Found your name? Good! Click on the hyper-linked "Control Symbol" to arrive at your individual listing. Once there, click on "Request copy" and follow the instructions.

 

 

I've forgotten now what I paid for it but it wasn't more than $25. A few weeks later, I held in my hands copies of every document, from the time I first applied to emigrate to the moment I became naturalised, a "time capsule" of the best decision I've ever made - click here.

 

Life in the subjunctive

 

The subjunctive is a verb mood that expresses hypothetical (but unfulfilled) conditions/situations : “If I WERE (fill in the blank), I would/could ... ”

Is it old age or boredom that makes me start many of my thoughts in the subjunctive? "If I were back in Burma, I would stick it out for at least another year instead of chucking in a job that others would have killed for" or "If I were still in Greece, I would spend more time in the islands rather than giving my all, seven days a week, to a job that eventually got the better of me".

My problem has always been that I thrived on stress and stressed out without it. As long as the job was challenging and exciting, I was at it seven days a week. Once the routine set in, I would go crazy from time to time and become obsessed with something, and my obsession would sent me on a trip to a place from which the journey's origin could no longer be seen. As a result I made a lot of stupid decisions without an obvious motive.

I now wish I hadn't ...

 

Seachange

 

The term 'seachange' hadn't been widely heard of in Australia until the launch of the ABC television series of the same name in 1998. The premise behind 'Seachange' was deceptively simple: the highly successful but deeply unhappy lawyer, Laura Gibson, decided to leave the stress of big-city life and a disastrous marriage behind and head for the small coastal township of - no, not Nelligen! - Pearl Bay. There she became a magistrate and gradually entangled herself in the lives and loves of the local population, a colourful collection of oddballs and eccentrics who could only exist within the mind of a television scriptwriter. Laura's gradual discovery of the real meaning of personal happiness and her slow-burn romance with the mysterious Diver Dan rapidly became a national obsession. Suddenly, everyone was talking about 'doing a seachange'. Seemingly overnight, country life became cool, small-town coastal life even cooler. The sleepy Victorian town of Barwon Heads, the set for the fictitious Pearl Bay, enjoyed a tourism and real estate renaissance. For a time, there was even talk of the town changing its name to Pearl Bay. Even today, many years after the final episode, coastal areas seeking to attract residents from the major cities will often term themselves 'seachange towns' as a way of summing up their appeal.

Despite being very well written and boasting an attractive cast, the real credit for the show's phenomenal success should probably go to its timing. Put simply, Seachange captured the zeitgeist. Every week, as audiences watched Laura slowly shrug off her big-city hang-ups and embrace a simpler life, many discovered they had a yearning to do the same. The series cleverly captured a national undercurrent of dissatisfaction. 'There must be more to life than this', we had been collectively moaning for years. Laura & Co. assured us that there was.

Either that or they had watched me move to "Riverbend" in 1993, five years earlier ☺

 

Let there be light reading

 

The temperatures are going back up again and they forecast 34 degrees for tomorrow which makes it a warm enough day to sit in the shade and read a good book.

And what better book than Flash Boys? I picked it up in an op-shop in unread mint condition but I can't imagine anybody NOT reading it as it is absolutely spellbinding! But be warned: it's not good for your blood pressure, because if you have any contact with the stock market, even through your retirement savings, this is exactly what's being done to you every trading-day of the week!

Just GOOGLE "front-running" and "wall street" and "scandal" and "high-frequency trading" to make your blood boil. Of course, it was the stock market crash of 1987 that gave rise to high-frequency trading. During that crash, Wall Street brokers simply stopped answering their phones, and small investors were unable to phone in their orders.

In response, the government regulators mandated the creation of an electronic Small Order Execution System so that the little guy's order could be sent into the market with the press of a key on a computer keyboard. As always, the smart guys quickly used the new system for purposes which had nothing to do with the little guy (read Dark Pools).

At just 265 pages, I'll finish the book in a day which means I need another one to get me through to the weekend, and I've chosen No One Would Listen which is a true financial thriller about Bernie Madoff's 65 billion Ponzi scheme. As Warren Buffet said, "You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out", and it needed the financial crisis of 2008 to reveal just how inappropriately Madoff had been attired.

P.S. As soon as I've finished with "Flash Boys" and the Madoff swindle, I start on "Understanding Women" which just came out in paperback:

 

Desired things

 

American writer Max Ehrmann (1872–1945) wrote the prose poem "Desiderata" in 1927. The Reverend Frederick Kates, rector of Saint Paul's Church in Baltimore, Maryland, included Desiderata in a compilation of devotional materials for his congregation in 1956. The compilation included the church's foundation date: "Old Saint Paul's Church, Baltimore A.D. 1692". Consequently, the date of the text's authorship was (and still is) widely mistaken as 1692, the year of the church's foundation.

"Go placidly amid the noise and haste ... the universe is unfolding as it should."