da Scriffles

Does fate start where free will ends? 

At the National Screenwriters' Conference last month, I had a micro-mentorship with one of Australia's top TV drama writers.

The Australian Film Commission backed her first spec script, encouraged her, supported her and her project was made.

She sat in the edit suite, she visited the set, she took an interest in the production process - she didn't interfere she listened and they let her.

If you dig usually you find that these "overnight" success stories have been years in the making.

She said everything she'd done in her life to that point had converged to make her career as a TV writer.

It's a similar story for Shaun Tan's Oscar winning short film which came out of an award-winning picture book The Lost Thing.

They work in trust.

Trust the universe but not enough to stop peddling the canoe - even if it feels like the universe is conspiring to tip your canoe over.

I trust the universe because I have seen goodwill.

I trust the universe because my dog puts her head on my shoulder when I'm on the phone.

But what about words?

Why must it be paddle and not ever paddel or peddle? 

You lock words up to keep them in place - but still they do move.

What is the fate that words create? 

My grandmother used to take me up the corrugated dirt easement leading to the gate of her farm when I was a toddler to collect the paper - the Telegraph which no longer exists.

The bush was full of fluffy yellow wattle. The street was a dirt road. And the noise of the freeways and Gateways and tollways was decades away.

The little walk up the road was Baba's way of stopping my tears when mum dropped me off and left to go to work.

"Let's go collect the newspaper," she would tell me. I named her Baba Gazetta (gazetta is newspaper in Russian). She was always Baba Gazetta in our family. 

My brother and I raised dust in this quiet place climbing umbrella trees to scramble through the second-story window, running through the dark of the night with sheets over our heads playing ghosts.

My grandmother talked about lyre birds, borers (the kind that bore through wooden furniture) and barbed wire.

She milked the cows, fed the chickens, raised six daughters and never learned to drive.

Baba Gazetta died on Monday about 1am in a Brisbane nursing home. She died alone in a strange place after breaking her hip.

At 2am on Monday I sat beside her body with my mother and my aunts.

The nursing home staff had combed Baba's eyebrows and her false teeth stuck out strangely. 

"Are you sure it's her?" I asked my mother.

But her name was above the bed - along with a spooky piece of black ruffled plastic stuck on the ceiling.

I imagined lying in this bed having to look at this black thing above me - it would be even more frightening if all you could see is a black blur.

She'd spent four weeks in hospital after a hip operation - they tried to make her walk at 93 after a hip operation.

And they were surprised when she couldn't. The reason she broke her hip was that she could not get out of bed, let alone walk that day.

It wasn't long before she stopped talking and seemed angry.

She started wringing her hands, wringing the sheets, grabbing the doctor by the tie and yanking him toward her.

Through her last ordeal she wasn't wearing her hearing aids - but people still talked at her in her face and called her "cutie".

As we sat at 2am with the fluorescent lights blazing in a room where three other old women lay in their beds behind drawn curtains - people discussed things ... things ... like parking, giving her clothes to the second-hand shop, how she died peacefully in her sleep. The stories we tell ourselves are so scary.

Baba's only possessions were a few clothes and photos of all her grandchildren and great grandchildren which made her happy. She was a gentle woman - it's a difficult thing to be.

We've lost something.

Does it take an earthquake followed by a tsunami followed by a nuclear crisis to bring silence into the world?

Why aren’t you happy?

It’s because ninety-nine percent of everything you do,

and think, and say, is for yourself

— and there isn’t one. – Wu Wei Wu

Forgive your enemies and live an extra seven-and-a-half years! You heard right genius. 

Michael J.Gelb, author of How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, also told seekers of Happiness and Englightenment at the Happiness & Its Causes Conference at Brisbane's Convention and Exhibition Centre, about the Counter Clockwise Study which showed that you turn back the hands of time by believing you are young.

Scriffles, being a character out of a da Vinci painting, has of course forgiven all his enemies but he is a bigger soul than I - he is 500 years old! 

We have argued and agreed to disagree about this. ;) 

We all have at least one pair of shoes that never fit because one shoe fits the wronged foot and the other shoe fits the wrongee's foot - it's like watching Dancing With The Stars, awkward. 

And forgiveness has to be sought. To me, Gelb and Scriff are really talking about letting go of resentment - which is quite a different thing. Resentment is murderous!

Built up over decades, a resentment is difficult to toss away for a mere seven-and-a-half years. 

However, Gelb's advice to find happiness by doing the thing you always wanted to do makes sense - this too is my truth.

The Renaissance was built on the pursuit and exploration of Truth, Beauty and Goodness - finding a higher self, being centered and serene. 

Did you know that Copernicus - the man who first suggested that the Earth is not the centre of our universe - was seeking perfection?

Apparently, the maths for the old way of thinking was awkward and he thought that God would not do such sloppy math! He was right.

Leonardo - a genius - had insatiable curiosity and a grand passion to know Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

Did you know that he invented the parachute - centuries before people took to the skies?

Recently someone tested his parachute design by jumping out of a plane. It worked! Was da Vinci the Apple of his time or what? 

I haven't thought this day's lecture through properly yet but when I look at the gridlock - and think of all the money spent of transport plans that just collected dust over the past 20 years - or when I see an old person standing on the bus while teenagers sit - and I remember how I was always made to stand for an adult - there are so many ways to trash Truth, Beauty and Goodness.  That tunnel won't last 500 years will it?

Gelb has three secrets to Happiness: gratitude, forgiveness and humour. He also recommends faking it until you make it.

His diagram resembled the image on the left. He asked people all over the world to rate their happiness on a scale of one to seven in a survey that also asked them what they rated more important in their lives: love or money. The happiest people rate love most important and money least important - destitute people rate friendship, family and community above money.

Funny that the shape of the diagram is like the shape of infinity with its ends missing. There's a message in this. The Brisbane Convention Centre is full of people searching for Happiness - at lunch time the restaurants and cafes and takeaways are packed with Happiness people. The sky is blue, the sun shines, the birds sing. And we spent the day in a hall talking about happiness.

On the bus home I looked out the window and watched fluffy, white, billowy clouds drift in slow motion across the top of Woolloongabba.  

The other thing the sticks out about everything that was said about being happy is the need to be mindful on a "three-time scale".

Your ability to do this - to put other sentient beings before your own self-interest (and not just your loved ones) - "is an expression of what you are within".

The Dalai Lama's French interpreter, Matthieu Ricard, is a French monk. The "three-time scale" means three different time periods: a moment (short-term), a lifetime, and eternity (the environment).

Research published by National Geographic in a 2005 cover story called What's In Your Mind shows that monks and people who have meditated on compassion and cultivate mindfulness actually have better control of their brainpower - training yourself to think of others is just like learning a new language or to play an instrument. It's brain training.

HOWEVER! (And this is why it's not something everyone does.) It takes effort, practice over many years and it will not make you rich. It will however make you happy. So make up your mind already! Do you want to be happy or do you want to be rich? You can't have it all - even if you are rich. And you can be in the pink without a dime.

The Dalai Lama was surprised when former Australian of the Year, Pat McGorry, told him that youth suicide rates in rural Australia are higher than in cities.

The discussion was about happiness, sadness, compassion, consciousness, reality until the Dalai Lama insisted that Pat, who had been sitting quietly on stage, take his turn to speak. He was the last speaker. 

Pat McGorry, was on stage in conversation with the Dalai Lama at the Happiness and Its Causes Conference - along with leading international scientific thinkers Dr Paul Ekman (via video link); Professor Marco Iacoboni (discovered mirror neurons); and Alan Wallace (consciousness expert).

And what Pat McGorry wanted answers to was how do you change society's attitude to mental disorders, how to you change people's minds in order to create a world where children with problems are caught in time to be treated so they grow out of their affliction like some kids grow out of asthma - he says this is possible if we try.

"It's an activist agenda," he told the Dalai Lama. "There's a lot of enemies because it's about changing the status quo and it's about reform. How do we present this to our enemies and change the way they think?" he asked.

And then he mentioned the high youth suicide rates in Australia . But what about on the farm? _ asked the Dalai Lama. And Pat McGorry told him that Australia's rural communities are in decay and towns are dying and there is no space for youth in cities or in country towns - that's what  Headspace is about. McGorry is a Headspace director. The Dalai Lama recommended a more friendly, less self-centred, more warm-hearted society.

There must not be too many things that surprise the Dalai Lama - what do you think?

"I am not a specialist," he said. "Our existing education system is very much materialistic. We must introduce education for warm-heartedness."

It must be universal so this process of teaching warm-heartedness can not be through meditation or prayer or religion - it must be secular.

"There's no adequate information about warm-heartedness. We consider this a religious matter. You have to think seriously about that.

"We all have the same potential for warm-heartedness but we need to nurture these things: basic human qualities, good qualities."

Such freedom. I totally forgot what it feels like. Shooting in low light. Shooting into the sun.

Focusing on the thing that catches your eye.

This old John Wayne movie reminded me that Hollywood changed its mind (around the 1960s) about portraying "the Indians" as bad savages. 

So we got "Revisionist Westerns". Australia has no Hollywood. Australian stories are disappearing from our screens as we speak.

Frankly, our film & TV producers are girding their loins to battle for stronger Australian Content Standards and Quotas on subscriber, free-to-air and "somehow, some day, somewhere" online services.

It is the culture war! They will die with their boots on. It feels like an episode of Minscule in the big, wide world. 

So it is uncertain if revisions of our treatment of refugees will make it to the tickertape news that runs across the bottom of our screens - considering that in the political and social spectrum culture comes somewhere behind carbon pricing, refugee processing, jobs and the Australian dollar, not to mention the mining tax.

Still, Australians aren't taking to leaky boats yet.

This John Wayne movie made me think how times change but history doesn't.

I mean the systematic removal of the "redskin" (the now-outlawed Hollywood Western turn-of-phrase) from their homelands condemned them to live as refugees. 

Here's proof of prisoners (including the famous Geronimo) from the National Archives of the USA  - or maybe it was just staged, right?

Had "the Indians" fled, they would call themselves citizens of another land not "Native Americans" - do we think less of people who flee?

Today's decision to redraft refugee laws is a defining moment, just like 1975's dismissal - just like the Howard Government's decision to bring in off-shore processing in Naru or turn back the Tampa.

This is a blog. This is opinion. This is a democracy. Comprende?

 Heroes define us. I guess that's why Australians stick to sporting heroes - there's a scoreboard.

Leave it to elected representatives to define our character - just as long as they don't interfere with the real game.

Politics is history. You can't separate civilians from "party wars" - even civilians who switch off the TV, even citizens who cast a donkey vote or don't vote or can't vote.

I often feel like a character out of a Jane Austen novel - rarely the heroine these days.

I know my character flaws and over the years I have tried very hard to be the "good", do the "right". If I were a character in a Charles Dickens' novel I would be the one who never got away with anything and was always required to "be good".

My belief is that life is not about actual "right". It's not about actual "good" because these are relative - you can be right all the time if you hang out with people who think like you do. You can all be wrong together. Just think of the climate change debate. Just look at the political reporting about the Labor leadership and Prime Ministership of Julia Gillard.

All the fuss over who said and who did what to whom boils down to nothing but hot air. I guess if you want to be remembered do something worthwhile, say something worthwhile. 

Do you think that Alexander The Great should be considered "great" just because he conquered the "known" world? Maybe. But it didn't last long - well, he died so he didn't have time to do anything, so I guess he's great. Does anyone know what benefits flowed from this "great" acheivement? So he used elephants! But he did add to the sum total of knowledge at the time and probably opened up new trade routes. You probably can find Greek pottery in India thanks to Alexander. Many a mere ordinary mouse appears to think themselves an Alexander these days.

I fear that today we don't examine this idea of "worthwhile" too much unless it applies to us personally. I won't be around when the Torres Strait Islands sink beneath the waves and the stars go black so I don't care. How many times have I heard a similar refrain? 

For some people, worthwhile is bringing up a family, for others it is cooking food for others, or teaching. It's all cool and awesome in my book. It's "great"! 

Maybe worthwhile is as simple as peace of mind, the ability to turn the other cheek and show compassion. That's not easy. The ABC recently screened a series by Jimmy McGovern called The Accused - you should catch it if you can. It is crazy amazing and awesome!

There's a norm and you've got to find it and conform otherwise ... I think this is the part in the Bible which refers to "the meek". The meek shall inherit the Earth, not the powerful, because it takes immense (great) strength to be meek.

Try not exploding over dinner with someone you have known forever who obviously has an axe to grind but does not say a word in order to apply the pressure - there's Dickensian bile.

If you manage to show compassion, or do something worthwhile,  six out of 10 times (that is a passing mark) people still tend to only count the four times you didn't turn the other cheek. Fat people must walk the plank along with old people, poor people, people of different races ... the list could go on depending on who you meet. 

Legislate all you like to stamp out discrimination but the Dickensian Truth of Humanity and the Darwinian Theories will prevail. 

Sydney University's Professor Paul Griffiths spoke at last year's Happiness Conference in Brisbane about Darwin's theory of Group Selection - he tried to explain how altruism flourishes in society.

Google this topic and all you get are academic/scientific abstracts - no wonder this kind of thinking does not pass into general knowledge. I can't think that a busy teacher would have time to read this stuff in a world saturated with information.

Prof Griffiths told the 2011 conference that Darwin's theory of Group Selection had been discredited but was again gaining credibility. A successful society co-operates. FACT.

So even though it appears that selfishness prevails in our society there are enough altruistic individuals in our midst to dissipate the selfishness. As altruism flourishes in one group, individuals break away to move to another group to seed the process again. Eventually, selfish groups should become extinct because they fail. See Libya, Syria... despotic regimes. 

The more I blog, the more I write, the more I am in awe of great writers like Charles Dickens who build the truth of the world in words. If I could have dinner with anyone alive or dead it would be Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin.

If only Charles Dickens were alive to provide the commentary on our rapidly transforming world today! Recognizing a Dickensian moment is possible but putting it down on paper with panache - that's something else.

Define "good", "worthwhile", "great", "awesome". Define "right". Then take your self-interest out of the equation and redefine it. Who says there is nothing left to explore?

To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking. - Johann von Goethe

Defamation Tute: JR 212

My old uni notes (20 years old)

* Unlawful to publish defamatory matter unless it is protected, justified or excused by law.

Need proof of:

• publication

• it was defamatory matter

• no defences - protected, justification or excuse

"Liar" "Cheat" "Thief" "Coward" "Murderer"

I found a suitcase of old uni notes in the garage all dusty but readable.

The last time I did a "Law for Journalists" course - around 2002-2003 I think - the law had not changed. High Distinction too.

All the amateur publishers - for that's what most everyone is on the web in these days of social media - don't know anything about all this. That' why the mainstream publishers cry in their soup at night because there's nothing better than the thrill of pushing that envelop to the edge. A lot of what is published these days anywhere is careening down a chasm.

And the law - on paper hasn't changed - all the cases still stand. But you wouldn't think so watching what's been happening in our society with the Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and his crew calling the Prime Minister Julia Gillard a liar all the time, for example.

Interesting really. As if people in real life don't have to compromise, as if circumstances don't change, as if you don't change with the circumstances.

Reading these old notes I realised that I hadn't changed with the circumstances because the stuff of these notes is still what I believe. And reading my old Ancient History tute papers I see that politics hasn't changed at all either.

Tutorial No 5: The Alkmeonidai and Marathon: What was the significance of the signal at Marathon in the context of Athenian politics in the early 5th Century BC?

A record made by Herodotus of a shield signal to the Persian invading fleet of Darius was made probably by members of a pro-Persian force - possibly a respected Athenian family, the Alkmeonids. Lot of possibles there. No defamation laws. No defences.

Recorded in stone. Were the Alkmeonids defamed? They apparently did not believe that Athens could beat the Persians so they wanted to be on the winning side. Does all this sound familar at all?

I think that Arts students and generalists - as opposed to engineers, librarians and specialists - do get a better "education". Pity we don't rule the world. ;)