Mary MacKillop - a tough, smart saint

Mary MacKillop - Australia's first saint.
One does not need to be a Catholic to be thrilled to bits with this news.
Its symbology is more far-reaching.
Mary MacKillop long has been hailed for the exceptional woman she was - but this recognition has been largely from and within the religious world she avowed.
She was a nun who created her own order, using the Catholic system as a way of spreading not just the word of God but the word itself - literacy.
Her brown-clad Josephites, affectionately known as Brown Joeys, opened and ran schools wherever they went. They provided an education for the downtrodden and repressed of the time - girls.

Mary MacKillop was a feminist - way before the word was coined.

Among her wonderful nuns were women for whom life had been harsh, for whom other opportunities may never have arrived, among them women of the street. One could say that she saved them or made them - just as she saved and made all those girls who otherwise would never have had the emancipation of education.

Her schools are still outstanding and progressive.

They are, of course, Catholic schools,  but they accept Muslim and Buddhists and Secular students. In Mary's spirit, they are without prejudice.

With all this erudition there is one wild irony in the years and years of waiting for Mary MacKillop's Sainthood.
The highly patriarchal old Church of Rome, which once excommunicated Mary MacKillop for her fiesty disobedience - has rules, absurd archaic canonical rules. It decrees that, to be a saint, one must have performed miracles.
Miracles must be directly related to the act of prayer to the saint-to-be. They must involve cures of the incurable. They must be accompanied by medical "proof".
This sort of thinking seems incongruous when set against the principles of enlightenment Mary MacKillop represents.

Well, I think so. The fact that Australia has had to wait for decades until a woman emerged with the claim that praying to Mother Mary had cured her cancer is to oddly sideline the wonderful works and meaning of Mary MacKillop.
The woman in question clearly thinks this, too. She has refused to be identified saying that she does not want her cure to detract from the Saint herself and her pioneering work. One likes this woman.

I love Mary MacKillop.
Just as my late father, Max Harris, did.
He campaigned through the national media for recognition of Mary MacKillop as the brilliant pioneer educator that she was. He was a boy raised in the South East of South Australia, near Penola where Mary MacKillop's work with her mentor, priest and scientist Father Julian Tenison Woods all began. Penola is where Mary's first school was - a lovely wee town which is about to boom with tourism.
Max had an immense respect for early female achievers. He read all there was to read about Mary MacKillop and he cited her as one of the great (then) unknown Australians while doing his utmost to ensure that she was not just known but properly celebrated. He adored her spirit and her legacy and used his high media profile to champion her.

The Josephite nuns, an order of particularly interesting and intelligent women, were quick to take note and make themselves known to Max and so the bond became formed between the poet/columnist campaigner and the women who today represent the work and ethos of Mary MacKillop.
Those nuns were to give Max extraordinary comfort and support through his years of illness and, after his death, they were to tuck him under their eternal wing. Hence, his ashes are interred beneath a memorial rock between Mary MacKillop College and the Josephite Nunnery. The Mary MacKillop Centre museum is right there, too.

Max recognised Mary MacKillop's religion - and also the battle she had with that religion's patriarchy to do her work. She had to take on those fusty old Bishops. They excommunicated her. She had to live in hiding and plead to do her wonderful work. She succeeded and her work went on - away from Penola and Adelaide where it all began - across the country. Mary suffered Dysmenorrhea for which she needed analgesic nips of brandy. One always hoped it was St Agnes brandy, a saintly cure if ever one there was. But Mary was in no way airy fairy. She lived a tough life and she was a fighter. She worked truly and humbly for the benefit of others - for girls and education, for Aboriginal children and their cultural displacement, for the poor and their needs and for the sick and aged and their comfort.

Religion or no religion, one could not fail to recognise the extraordinary qualities of this wonderful woman. Her work was 19th Century but it remains vital and contemporary. She was a true pioneer. She is a role model for us all. And, as my late father so perfectly put it all those years ago, she is:

A SAINT FOR ALL AUSTRALIANS.

Clockwork Orange is on steriods

It is so easy to feel enveloped in the comfort zone. I think of my narrow world - gentle home life amid educated people, theatre, looking forward to a good white wine at the end of the day, the pleasure of cooking wholesome and interesting food...
It is a fortunate world.
But it must not be blinkered.
The world is changing. Demographics is changing. Even here in this pleasant city of a million, the status quo is shifting.

Even if only from time-to-time, we really must turn our minds to the horror stories of other lives, of kids on crime sprees because they have squalid and unloving home lives - drunks, dropouts and addicts as their role models.
More and more we have created a whole society of people who have never worked. Never held a job at all. Just been supported by the system and now believes that this is the only way and, further, that this is an entitlement which should be providing rather better income and standard of living, rather more like that of the people who work.
They are arising as a restless, angry and growing underclass - now boosted by immigration policies of recent years.
We are surrounded by a generation of idle people, bored, lacking in interests, unable to find distraction between the covers of a book or in tending a garden or helping others. They are the market for violent video games and porn websites.

Teachers despair, unable to control them, influence them. Teachers have breakdowns. Fewer people want to be teachers because of them.
Education is the solution - but it has failed.
Clockwork Orange is on steriods.

I think of the power of those people not only in disrupting and undermining urban life in an immediate physical and cultural sense but also in being able to wield political clout. They vote.

I simply don't know what to do about this alarming growth. I see it is an obstacle to saving the environment, to the economy even to peace.

Ignorance is a very, very scary enemy.

Where is that sand? I want to bury my head.

Visuacy? Visuacy? Idiotuacy, I say.

Where do teachers get off, making up words?
They'd mark students down for making up a word and yet here they are, introducing "visuacy" not only as a word, but as a whole educational concept.
It's a travesty, or should I say "travestuacy".

The teachers are reported in The Australian to be creating this word to encompass a broadening span of education in the arts. It opens students to further possibilities in visual arts education - the possibility that they should see fashion models as art. This, of course, may extend to seeing Paris Hilton as art, for she is her own work of art, as we all know. Next students will be able to do PhD theses on Paris Hilton as an art object. Why not?
Already they study Buffy, the Vampire Slayer as part of the university English curriculum.
She, apparently, is preferable to the onerous erudition of those hideous "dead white men" responsible for that vast body of English literature.

So, we have the dumbed-down contempory teachers adapting education to what interests them, what they are able to deal with without the requirements of too much education of their own.

Students can forgo art galleries and dead classic artists for the joy of gossip magazines and young celebrity adornments. I daresay the fashion accessory puppy-carrier will be provided extensive source of study.

An academic called Mr Strong (dare I laugh that his name sounds as if it came straight out of that high literature, the Mr Men books)
has "called for the visual arts to form the basis of the national curriculum alongside English, maths and science, arguing that it had more of a right to be among the first curriculum to be developed than history".

Huh?
Ditch history for visuacy?

Yes, siree. It's now and tomorrow, the great dumbed-down tomorrow shimmering with its indifference to the achievements and enlightenments of the past. The brave new world in which knowledge is excused by the fullstop statement "that was before my time".


Today's educationalists suggest that students should be able to look at Picasso's work alongside the pure and glorious art of lingerie ads like this one on WikiBuy. "Viewers can respond in different ways to each image in still enjoy both," says an arts professor, potentially relegating the great galleries of the world to dust-coated tombs.

As one commentator put it, this is like equating a ship's foghorn to a Beethoven symphony on the basis that they are both made of sound.

And who knows, "sounduacy" may indeed follow "visuacy" as the world steps backwards into a sea of trite - and idiotuacy becomes the outcome of an ever-declining education system.

Downer with schools

"Why this interest in history? Why this wish to reawaken the past?"

This question was asked on Fox News this morning. Now, of all people, I of course know that journalists fare well to ask the seemingly stupid question. It forces subjects to explain and articulate and it avoids presumptions.

But this question is revelatory.
It explains something of the contemporary attitude towards history - of closing doors on it and moving relentlessly, mindlessly forward. History is barely taught in schools these days. Somewhere along the line it was decided the history was hard, it was dry, and students could be alienated if they had to remember dates.

It was one of the victims of the dumbing down of education.

There was a spelling test recently which was spectacularly failed by Australian teachers. Why? Because they don't read.

That is ironic in this time when text has been given vigorous rebirth on this medium.

One may blame the spoon-feeding of television for the declines in basic education.

But the real culprit is, of all things, education and gender equality.
Teaching no longer the only career for many intelligent women. They can do whatever they want - and they do. Given the choices, however, the brilliant women who once dominated school education now take careers in the subjects they once taught. They are historians rather than history teachers, mathematicians rather than maths teachers...

Cultural progress has resulted in cultural decline.

The obscene power of tradesmen

The rich think they hold the power.
Once it was so.
These days, it is the tradesmen who hold the power.
It does not matter how rich you are, if a tradesman refuses to come and install your airconditioner or hot water service, then you have to go without. Until they are ready to give you some of their time, you are at their mercy.
Tradesmen can decide if you are to be cool in the heatwave or if you are going to have mud instead of cement in the drive, if your leaky roof keeps dripping, if your dishwasher is fixable, if you are going to get sharp TV reception, a floor polished or a carpet laid, a window repaired or replaced, a door fitted...
It is all done on their time, not yours.
Forget waiting for a doctor's appointment.
Doctors are a joy of accessibility compared to tradesmen.

How did this all come about. How did the tables turn so that tradesmen are the most powerful members of society?

Once upon a time, they were something of a lowly class -"blue collar" or "working class".
The management classes and professionals were the smug middle with the dynastic wealth and highly educated scoring "upper". Of course, these classes still were dependent upon the tradesmen. But, if one recalls the past of one's youth, not to mention the past as recorded in literature, they were a cap-tipping deferential class which sought to please those who employed them.

This has changed.
They could not give a damn whether you are pleased or not. They are indifferent as to how long they keep you waiting. They treat those who seek to use their services with sublime contempt - sometimes not bothering to turn up at all.
Certainly they are indifferent to returning phone calls.
What they are calling is the tune.

Why is this?
Perhaps because tradesmen are now in short supply.
The old apprentice traditions fizzled somewhere along the way. Meanwhile, families in the trades wanted something better for their children - university educations.

Even in trade schools, the traditional trades are out of fashion. Kids would rather study computer programming than plumbing.
Who leaves school saying they want to follow their dad into plumbing? In a world where the class system has disintegrated, there is no longer a sense of fraternity in the trades.

The sort of people entering the trades are doing so perhaps grudgingly.
Hence their resentment of the people for whom they are then to work. Well, contempt really.
Tradesmen can name their price. On top of this, they can choose simply not to turn up to do the job.
They don't have to worry about losing business because they know that they are as rare as hen's teeth and they will never run out of work. There is a world of poeple prepared to pay whatever they ask, prepared to beg them to do a job, prepared to wait on their convenience...

Why am I pondering all this?
Well, I may have moved house over a month ago had it not been for the tradesmen who have not turned up, who have put off jobs, who have not been accountable...
I am still waiting. I am not moved.

Oh yes, instead of being angry, I am just a grovelling supplicant, like everyone else.
One can't afford to be impatient with a tradesman let alone rude. They are in control. They are masters of our destiny. They might not be the upper class but they have the upper hand.