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Recovery

It's seventy years on and Berlin has survived all these disasters to emerge from its chrysalis, shedding its tattered shell if still a little ragged around the edges, to take its place as one of the World's great cities and certainly one of the nicest to live in, blending the caring-sharing East with the striving-individualistic West.  Young families abound as do playgrounds that are a lot more adventurous and risky and demanding of self reliance than those in litigious Australia.  

 

Playground
Dragon Park - One of many playgrounds in Berlin - there's a pirate ship too
The small child crouching underneath is my grandchild - playing with bucket and spade

 

There is an energy to Berlin that is palpable.

This article was written in 2015.  You can read a more recent addendum (from 2022):  Here...

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Travel

Central Australia

 

 

In June 2021 Wendy and I, with our friends Craig and Sonia (see: India; Taiwan; JapanChina; and several countries in South America)  flew to Ayer's Rock where we hired a car for a short tour of Central Australia: Uluru - Alice Springs - Kings Canyon - back to Uluru. Around fifteen hundred kilometres - with side trips to the West MacDonnell Ranges; and so on.

Read more: Central Australia

Fiction, Recollections & News

My Mother's Family

 

 

All my ancestors are now dead.  I'm an orphan. So for this history I've had to rely on my recollections a small pile of documents left by my mother. These include short biographies of several of her relatives. Following the female line; these recollections briefly span the two world wars; to the present.

Read more: My Mother's Family

Opinions and Philosophy

A Dismal Science

 

 

Thomas Carlyle coined this epithet in 1839 while criticising  Malthus, who warned of what subsequently happened, exploding population.

According to Carlyle his economic theories: "are indeed sufficiently mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next" and in 1894 he described economics as: 'quite abject and distressing... dismal science... led by the sacred cause of Black Emancipation.'  The label has stuck ever since.

This 'dismal' reputation has not been helped by repeated economic recessions and a Great Depression, together with continuously erroneous forecasts and contradictory solutions fuelled by opposing theories.  

This article reviews some of those competing paradigms and their effect on the economic progress of Australia.

Read more: A Dismal Science

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