First Day of Summer, First Day of the New Year of Grace

A glorious first day of summer in Hobart: after our sung Latin Mass at St Canice for the first Sunday of Advent, we gathered outside for lunch and a meeting, in order to plan for the future of our Latin Mass Community, in response to His Grace's instructions to do so. A committee was formed, and, God willing, arrangements will be made to organise more Latin Masses in the future.

There was a good attendance at our Missa cantata, the servers and I did our best, and the choir sang well: I was especially taken with their rendering of Veni, veni, Emmanuel at the Offertory and the Advent Prose Rorate cæli desuper at Communion.

Of your charity, please pray that, as our limited resources may allow, we may give greater glory to God by our liturgical worship and by our evangelical witness to Christ and His Church, that more and more may come to love and serve the Lord.

Restore the House of Assembly

Given the expected vote for a change of government when Tasmanians next go to the polls in March 2014, I would propose that the new House of Assembly take up the important matter of electoral reform. 

Now, the Legislative Council has ever fulfilled its role of a properly and admittedly conservative check on the more progressive tendencies of the House; and to this end, each year a few of its fifteen members are chosen anew in local elections, so that all Legislative Councillors serve six year terms; the Council itself cannot be dissolved nor can its veto over legislation be overruled; and, uniquely in Australia, nearly all of its members are independent, and not members of any political party.

Given the fact that it works admirably, and has been but little changed since 1856 (a portrait of the young Queen Victoria still looks down upon the Council), with such minor reforms as the introduction of preferential voting in 1907, the breaking up of its two multi-member electorates in 1946, the gradual expansion of its franchise to full adult suffrage in 1968, and the equalisation of the number of voters in each electorate in 1998 (when also the original number of fifteen members was reinstated, after having slowly grown to nineteen), it seems to require no tampering with, but instead high praise.

However, the same cannot be said of the House of Assembly. This began with thirty members, a number that increased slightly, then was restored to thirty in 1907, albeit with the then-beneficial redivision of the State into five multimember electorates, each returning six members by the Hare-Clark system of proportional representation. Given the fine balance between Labor and Liberal, sometimes causing the House to be divided fifteen-fifteen, the number of members was increased to thirty-five in 1959, with seven elected per division.

But the rise of the Greens, and the consequent fracturing of politics in Tasmania, led to a somewhat cynical reduction in the number of members to twenty-five, with only five elected per division, in 1998, with the hope that minor parties would less likely hold the balance of power – though that has continued to occur, as demonstrated by the current presence of Greens as cabinet ministers. Worse still, in a House with only twenty-five members, the Government members may number thirteen or less (as presently), resulting in a distinct dearth of talent.

The time has come to secure stable, majority government for Tasmania, since minority government, though beloved of minor parties and those elements who vote for them, has proven deleterious to the State - as I would confidently predict the coming landslide victory for the previously not well regarded Liberals will confirm, given public displeasure at the continuing train wreck of a Labor minority Government in a marriage of convenience with the Greens: a Government more concerned with giving civil recognition to unnatural liaisons, and facilitating the murder of the unborn, elderly and ill, than with more mainstream priorities, such as diminishing the number of persons on welfare by in all ways assisting the economy to grow, that the dignity of gainful employment be extended to all (a human right more valuable than a pretended ability to marry oddly or just give up and die). Premier Giddings, after all, is but Gillard writ small (not literally, but figuratively).

I therefore propose - and hope I am not alone in so doing - that the House of Assembly mutatis mutandis return to its state before 1907, and abandon its distinctive but fatally flawed Hare-Clark electoral system (since proportional representation, while fine in theory, has produced weak coalition governments for too long in recent decades).

Instead, let thirty single-member electorates be established: a simple way to do so would be to divide each of the Legislative Council electorates into equal halves, so there will be the same number of electors in each, as near as may be. These would then be used henceforth to elect the House of Assembly at each future general election. This would bring the electoral system of the House into conformity with that in every other State, and the Northern Territory too, leaving only the ACT still beholden to the questionable blessings of proportional representation.

I make no apologies for the fact that this return of the House of Assembly to what was its basic structure for its first fifty years (though using preferential voting as elsewhere in Australia for the lower house of each parliament) would both guarantee a workable majority for the winning party, and eliminate the bad influence of the Greens in State politics. There would ensue the wailing and the gnashing of teeth, no doubt (no teeth? teeth will be provided!).

I can but confess my Schadenfreude at the upset this would deliver to the secularist elite. There is something sanctimonious and irritating about the holier-than-thou attitude of the Greens, redolent of the Pharisees of old: I felt sorry for Prime Minister Gillard having to sit through weekly sermons delivered by Senator Brown, I mean meetings between her and him. No doubt symbolic protests by the self-consciously left-wing and unemployed would be mounted to no effect whatsoever; and the usual suspects would wail and whine in the Fairfax media, while the Murdoch press would gloat: c'est la vie.

Jokes aside, there is every prospect that the Legislative Council would gladly vote in favour of such a reform, as would the Liberals in the House (and maybe even the Labor members too, though I assume they would secretly delight in thus disposing of their parasitic coalition partners, while publicly lamenting such an affront to democracy: it would be a strategy best designed to secure them sympathy and future votes).

Preferential voting would all but guarantee that whichever major party won a majority of the two-party-preferred vote would gain a majority, and a clear one at that, in each future general election for the House: and that both Labor and Liberal would be mighty pleased about. I do hope that common sense prevails and this my speculation comes to pass.

Good News, Tassie Traddies!

The text following was distributed to-day as a printout to those attending our monthly Missa cantata:

Anna Greener and Tony Robbie met with His Grace, Archbishop Porteous[,] on Friday 1 Nov. The following points came out of this meeting:

• Archbishop Porteous is very supportive of our Community and would like to assist us to become a Parish in our own right. This would then mean that we would be able to celebrate all the Sacraments in the Tridentine Rite[.]

• This cannot take place until we are able to find a Priest to regularly minister to our Community. His Grace is in the process of attempting to find a Priest for us but would welcome any suggestions of Priests who may be prepared to take on this role. He is very happy for us to have Mass said as often as we can find someone to say it for us.

• He is happy for the proceeds of our offertory to be used to support the running of our Community, although there are administrative details to be sorted out[.]

• He gives us his blessing as a Community and assures us that he will actively support us expressing our Faith in the traditional rite[.]

Anna Greener

Tony Robbie

Please join us in giving thanks to God for His Grace's support, and pray that this venture may prove fruitful. It is vital that our financial contributions suffice to support a priest to minister to our Latin Mass Community, so we must henceforth be even more generous…

I understand that to begin with arrangements will be made to have a Latin Mass each fortnight, beginning in December.

Back from the Far North-West

Green Point Beach, Marrawah, on the west coast of Tasmania 
(280 km from Launceston).

When at full scale, the windfarms to the north are just visible.

Two days ago, I was at Marrawah and Arthur River – the westernmost settlements in mainland Tasmania, locales I'd never previously visited – and yester-day, at Cape Grim and Woolnorth Point (northernmost tip of Tasmania), as part of a tour of Woolnorth itself.

Woolnorth – the property encompassing the extreme north-west of Tasmania – is a huge and prosperous dairy- and beef-cattle and sheep farm of 55,000 acres (!), the remaining one-seventh of the land-grant made to the Van Diemen's Land Company, the oldest company in Australia and the last still governed according to the terms of its Royal Charter (issued by George IV in 1825).  I rather liked the idea of that; its Governor and Court of Directors still administer the agribusiness – though now they answer, not to the founding investors, rich London merchants, but to a New Zealand district council that holds a majority of the shares; and there is no longer a Chief Agent sent out from the old country...

The view across Suicide Bay 

(site, 'tis said, of the murder of tribesmen by shepherds in 1828) 

to Cape Grim, northwestern tip of Tasmania.

Woolnorth Point, northernmost tip of the island of Tasmania 
(40° 38′ 33″), 

with Bass Strait on the right and the Southern Ocean on the left.

This morning, departing Smithton, which has been my base, after visiting a pleasant property at Edith Creek, it was good to motor back the scenic way through Nubeena and Forest, before turning to the highway again and striking out for home, via Boat Harbour Beach (a delightful nook) and a late lunch at Burnie, where my coffee came emblazoned with the name of the restaurant:

Your Grace, You're Wrong

Pity poor old Archbishop Doyle: just a few weeks back, when visiting my parish, he apparently went out of his way to tell priest and people that in reading the Scriptures at Mass, the phrase used must not be "A reading from..." but simply, strangely, "From..." – which is plainly contradicted by both the old and the new translations of the Mass, as easily confirmable online (see the musical settings ICEL provides, for the Old Testament and Acts, the Epistle and Revelation, and the Gospel: I assume no one would be so mad as to claim that "A reading" is only to be uttered when sung).  Indeed, the General Instruction to the Lectionary says:

121. The formula to be used is always: “A reading from the Book of…” “A reading from the Letter of…” or “A reading from the holy Gospel according to…” and not: “The beginning of…” (unless this seems advisable in particular instances) nor: “The continuation of…”

Still more embarrassingly for His Grace, the 2007 Australian edition of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal – which he must surely have seen and discussed as a member of the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference, since the Conference had to seek approval from Rome for the local adaptations made, none of which mandate what he claims – most explicitly states that the priest when reading the Gospel begins by saying:

134. At the ambo, the priest opens the book and... says: Lectio sancti Evangelii (A reading from the holy Gospel)...

Someone was asleep at meetings it appears!

 This bizarre determination not to say "A reading" – which is self-evidently the English for the Latin word Lectio that prefaces all readings from the Bible in the modern Mass – is traceable, I suspect, to some busy-body liturgy consultant who has neither Latin, nor an ability to think with the Church (its remote origins probably stem from the U.S.A. via Queensland): it is just the sort of mistaken idea that a person would seize on if they were insufficiently educated in the true principles of liturgy, probably as the result of a throwaway line from a lecturer.  (It may also have something to do with the 1992  Canadian lectionary – whose rules of course have no authority here.)  Neither that person, nor apparently His Grace, have bothered to read through the new translation of the Mass sufficiently carefully so as to realize their blunder.  It is rather poor for him who is the chief liturgist of his diocese to make so odd an error, let alone foist it on the people.

Certainly, wherever in Australia and New Zealand I've attended Mass, in backwards Tasmania alone have I ever come across this strange shibboleth: I would appreciate it if anyone who has encountered this mistake elsewhere could leave a comment detailing their experience thereof.  I am quite at a loss to know why this aversion to saying "A reading" arose, although I do know it's been trendy here for a decade or more.  Perhaps it is a last leftover of the aborted new translation of the Missal by bad old ICEL in the 1990's?  That would be typical of the outlook of this Archdiocese.

To add insult to injury, the new edition of the proper Mass for St Mary of the Cross quite explicitly says that each reading indeed begins with "A reading from..."

At least Doyle's retiring any time now, and hopefully the next Ordinary will be less clueless.  One can but pray.

Snowy Mountains

One pleasure of the austral winter is the sight of snow on the high peaks: flying back into Launceston on Thursday I was able to catch a glimpse of snow on the Great Western Tiers (the escarpment descending from the Central Plateau), and, the last few days having been mainly fine, cool and clear, the sight of white snows shining from afar on two of the three eastern heights visible from home, Mount Barrow and Ben Lomond (the latter an alpine plateau containing the second-highest peak in the State) has been delightful – apparently, it's been one of the best start-of-season snowfalls in decades, and the skiing should soon begin.  Only Mount Arthur, northernmost and lowest at 1188 metres, showed but a tiny scatter of snow.

I drove up to the top of Trevallyn Hill on Friday, and took these (rather poor) images of the two snowclad giants:

Mount Barrow, 1413 m high and about 46 km away

Ben Lomond, maximum height 1570 m and about 50 km away

Because of snowfall in the highlands, and down to lower altitudes in the North-east (dusting Scottsdale and other towns), there are floodwaters from snowmelt coming down some of the rivers, and so the Cataract Gorge is in flood again already, as the Trevallyn dam's impoundment is reduced to its minimum level to cope with this influx.  I had a pleasant walk through the Gorge yester-day, and a coffee, enjoying the spectacle of the onrushing torrent.

10-10-5

The Tasmanian Electoral Commission has just completed the distribution of preferences for the recent State election (they had to wait ten days after polling day for all postal votes to come in, then began the final counting yesterday morning), and the expected result has materialized: each of the five electorates has returned two Labor, two Liberal and a Green, giving a total of 10 Labor, 10 Liberal and 5 Green Members of the House of Assembly.  The glories of our Hare-Clark system of voting!

An interesting aside: the Electoral Commission has posted online the first preferences figures for each polling place, and Trevallyn (where I cast my vote) turns out to be one of the very Greenest suburbs of Launceston: 39% voted for the Greens first, compared to 41% for the Liberals and only 19% for Labor.  The Statewide result was quite different, basically reversing the percentages gained by Labor and Green!

Premier Bartlett, having decisively lost the election, went to see the Governor to-day, and doubtless will again next Wednesday (after the official declaration of the poll); though Labor leader, Bartlett has repeated that the party gaining the most votes ought assume government; as the Liberals outpolled Labor, and their leader, Will Hodgman, has said from the conclusion of the poll onward that he and his Liberals ought take office in Labor's stead, I expect that His Excellency will first receive Bartlett's resignation, then send for Hodgman to offer him Her Majesty's commission to form a government with himself as Premier.

How unwelcome a prospect for the Prime Minister of Australia, to have another Liberal Premier showing up within a few weeks' time, just when Rudd is trying to get all the States to agree to his proposed federal takeover of public hospitals...  I can't quite see Hodgman agreeing to forgo tax revenue and hand over further power to Canberra.  Good!  A do like a poke in the eye for proponents of ever-larger bureaucracies.

Minority Government again... given the incompetence and deplorable goings-on under Labor over its recent rule, the electorate has signalled that it doesn't want Labor – but isn't quite sure what it wants.  The three parties in the House will just have to muddle along, taking each vote as it comes, with the Liberals always under close criticism and scrutiny, having to justify each and every policy they propose, compromising if need be to get legislation passed.  I must say, I think that's a good thing.  The quality of governance has declined of late, and a salutary check on the executive arm will be the inability to command the legislature.

Apparently Premier-elect Hodgman wants the Governor to summon the new Parliament within the month (not waiting for the upcoming Legislative Council elections), so as to test his support on the floor of the House.  It reminds me of 1989, when Premier Gray tried to hold onto power despite losing his Parliamentary majority, but lost the inevitable no-confidence motion.  (That was when a businessman attempted to bribe one of the MHA's to cross the floor, but instead himself went to jail for his wicked crime against democracy.)

A closely related issue: with 25 members, to be split three ways for the foreseeable future, the House is just too small – talk about the Senate of Lilliput!  It was inappropriate enough back in 1989 when Field ran a minority Government with just 13 MHA's (the Greens on the crossbenches supported it, sort of); now we will have the silly spectacle of a minority Government with only 10 members – 9 Ministers, and only one on the backbench.  At the least we need to go back to the old House of 35 members (7 per electorate), and I would wish for 45 (9 per electorate), though that's most unlikely outside my febrile imagination.

[UPDATE: Quite unexpectedly, the Greens signalled on the 8th of April that they would lean toward supporting a minority Labor government, to the understandable ire of Hodgman, who'd only the day before been beaming smiles, thinking he'd be called to Government House to be sworn in as Premier...  instead, the Governor decided that the best constitutional principles required him to keep Labor on, as Labor has the prospect of forming a stable government, whereas the Liberals (refusing to negotiate with the Greens, and unable to rely on Labor) have less chance of doing so.  Hence, Bartlett was retained, had his commission as Premier renewed on the 13th of April, and is presently negotiating with the Greens...]

As we now prepare to mark Good Friday and Easter Sunday, we ought spare a prayer for our elected representatives...  Here is the prayer the Speaker reads at the start of each day's session:

“Almighty God, we humbly beseech Thee to vouchsafe Thy blessing upon this Parliament.  Direct and prosper our deliberations to the advancement of Thy glory and the true welfare of the people of Tasmania. 

“Our Father, which art in Heaven; Hallowed be Thy name.  Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done in earth as it is in Heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread.  And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them who trespass against us.  And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.  For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever.  Amen.”

Pyengana

On Saturday we went off on one of my famous long-distance "half-day" drives in the country: out to the North-East, through Lilydale and Scottsdale, then further on where I've not been for many years, through Branxholm and Derby, winding through the Weldborough Pass to Pyengana – where we at last lunched, at the Holy Cow Café no less!  The lush dairying farmscape out the windows, beneath high hills wreathed in low cloud, helped explain the reason why this café was located at a well-known cheese factory.

Rather than drive back the same way (we'd come about 140 km on a very winding road that is pleased to call itself a highway), we pressed on to St Helens, down to Scamander, and then up through St Mary's Pass to St Mary's.  The Pass itself is only 6 km long, which is better than the windy slow sections of the Weldborough Pass.

Then we sped through the Fingal Valley toward the Midlands Highway (some idiot has rebranded it the "Heritage Highway", but that's nuts), which I followed only for a short while before taking the turnoff to Nile and Evandale – a road less-travelled, part of which is unsealed.

Our Saturday outing only took us about 7 hours.

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Casting my Vote

Parliament House, Hobart

Most embarrassingly, I missed out on my chance to vote in the last State election – in Western Australia, where I was resident at the time – since I had moved from one Perth suburb to another, forgetting to change my voter registration, and therefore was not on the electoral roll for the correct electorate.  It was even more embarrassing to receive the official letter asking why I had not voted, and demanding I pay a fine (voting being compulsory in State and Federal elections) if I couldn't explain why: I had to fill in a form telling of my negligence, which put paid to the fine, but left me annoyed and promising to do better in the future.  In any case, the W.A. election went as I had hoped, chucking out the incompetents in Government, and returning a hung Parliament, forcing the politicians to cooperate together.

To-day, therefore (having made sure I was properly registered at the outset of the election campaign), I went along just before noon to the nearest polling place, at Trevallyn Primary School, where I was educated.  I still remember most of the school song: "Trevallyn! Our goals are high, as year by year proceeds; As days pass by, we always try to live by worthy deeds.  From kindergarten to grade six we live the golden rule, Helping others through each day to build a glorious school."

The process was relaxed and quick: from parking my car to getting back into it took scarcely five minutes.  I walked up along the path, thinking how the bushes had grown, and how low the fence now looked, then turned into the courtyard (evidently the school tuckshop is still in the same place), before entering a building erected since my time at school there (where it is was a wall and path down to the quadrangle) – it housed the music room, for to-day separated into two parts by barriers (the musical instruments could be seen over the top).

There were half-a-dozen waiting in line when I entered, with about the same number voting, attended to by eight persons working for the Australian Electoral Commission.  Along the wall were eleven small booths at which to fill out the ballot paper.  To the left as one entered were three men to whom one went first – they checked one's name off on the electoral roll (using laptop computers) and then gave out the ballot paper.  At the entrance and exit were two other employees assisting.  To the right was a table at which several other employees were assisting a lady, I conjecture she was casting a ballot for another electorate or something like that.

Very soon I was filling in mine, numbering the candidates in order of my preference from 1 to 20 (at the least, one is required to number the first five); as the secret ballot was invented in Australia, and was first known as "the Australian ballot", I will keep my choice to myself: secretum meum mihi.

Popping the ballot into the ballot box, that was it, and I walked out.

Polls (having opened at 8 am) close at 6 pm, and there will be coverage of the count to-night on TV: for election results, see the ABC's excellent coverage online.

The newspaper informs me that the initial count of first preferences will be 90% complete by late this evening, and final distribution of preferences will be done slightly faster than in the past, with the successful election of all 25 Members of the House of Assembly to be announced by Thursday the 1st of April.  As it is, the outgoing Labor Government has announced that, with a hung Parliament expected, if the Opposition Liberals garner more seats or first preference votes than Labor, Premier Bartlett will resign and advise the Governor to appoint Will Hodgmann as the new Premier.  Only time will tell...

At least a nasty organization called Emily's List (which funds pro-choice women candidates) did me a service, by listing online those candidates it supports: I put them firmly last.  No abortion, thank you!

State Election Musings

Tasmania operates its own advanced, home-grown system of proportional representation, the Hare-Clark method, whereby each of the five Lower House electorates returns five members (formerly seven).  Without going into the intricate and admirable details, each person votes by numbering all the candidates from one to whatever, thus indicating his preferences in due order.  

In simple terms, a candidate is elected if he gain a quota (16.66% of the votes cast), and any surplus votes above this quota are redistributed to the others, according to the next preference indicated; first he who has the most votes above the quota has his extra votes redistributed, whilst being declared elected; whoever has the most votes above the quota once this has been done is next declared elected, and his surplus votes likewise distributed; this continues until no one has a quota – when the candidate with the least votes is eliminated, and his votes redistributed to others according to the preferences expressed; if any now have a quota, the process continues as before; if none do, then the candidate with the next-smallest number of votes for him is likewise eliminated, and so on.  Did I say, simple?

It usually takes a fortnight to count the votes and then to carefully perform the distribution of them to ascertain who has been elected!  

Typically, the most well-known candidates win well over a quota, and lesser candidates from their own party typically gain the second or third preferences from the surplus votes.

There is even an exquisite, nice adjustment called the Robson rotating ballot: to stymie the donkey vote (when a fool, unable to understand the system, stupidly numbers the ballot straight down), different ballots are printed with the candidates' names in different order.

The system avoids the backroom machinations that plague the party-list system, which binds the voter to vote for a party, not individual candidates: if I wish, I can vote for a Liberal first, then a Green second (like Hell!), then a Labor third, or any other combination I like.

All this being said, the House of Assembly nowadays has too few members - only 25! - whereas up to a decade or so ago it had 35 (the exact number had fluctuated since colonial days from 30 to a high of 38, before the Hare-Clark system was fully introduced a hundred years ago.)

In Tasmania, we have gone from the two-party system (Labor and Liberal) of old, to an unstable three-party system (Green, Labor and Liberal) over the past thirty years.  A shameless late-night sitting of Parliament in 1998 resulted in Labor and Liberal (always enemies) ganging up against the Greens, by reducing the number of members of the House, reducing the number elected in each electorate from seven to five, and thus increasing the quota each needed from 12.5% to 16.66% – they thought the Greens would be unable to gain enough votes to pass that threshold, but in fact they have, as their vote has continued to grow over time.  Hence, even when one party has a majority in the House (for minority governments are now common), it only has perhaps 13 members, notoriously not enough to provide sufficient Ministers of decent quality.

Allegedly the Labor Party is considering changing the model somewhat, by dividing the State into seven electorates of five each, thus returning the Lower House to its traditional 35 members.  I would favour this as a minimal reform in the right direction.

My own modest proposal (and I have appeared before a Parliamentary Inquiry into these matters some years back, to testify to what would benefit our State), would be to remain with the present five electorates (since Tasmania has employed these same divisions for State and Federal elections for several generations now, as the Constitution entitles Tasmania to have five M.P.'s in the Commonwealth Parliament), but to return to electing seven, or even to go beyond and elect nine members per electorate – thus increasing the House to 35 or even 45 members.  

Why?  Because the more members per electorate, the closer to an ideal form of proportional representation, and therefore the more democratic the system.  We're not ignorant yokels content with a first-past-the-post simpleton system; rather, Tasmanians have been using a very advanced electoral system for a century, and ought continue to perfect it, not diminish its proportionality.

I am aware that Labor and the Greens support social engineering increasingly antithetical to traditional morality, but democracy means we get a reflection of popular mores, alas; we get what we deserve.

(By the way, the Upper House, the Legislative Council – which can reject any legislation, even financial bills, and can never be overruled nor ever dissolved – has but 15 members, all titled The Honourable, each elected from a single-member electorate in the usual Australian manner by Single Transferable Vote, our improvement on the plurality system.  It had 19 until recent redistributions; but 15 was the original number.  Every year, three electorates have an election, such that the Council's composition is continually changing, but within an overall continuity.  Legislative Councillors are traditionally independent of party affiliation, though some are Labor men.  The Council was traditionally a potent and conservative House of Review, but has become far less effective in recent years, alas.)

What to expect of the upcoming election, to descend to the level of practice from that of theory?

Well, Labor has been in government for twelve years, and I certainly believe it is time for a change, especially given all manner of major and minor scandals and goings-on that ill-beseem Her Majesty's Government in right of Tasmania.  As to whether the Liberals can gain a majority, frankly I doubt it (though I desire it); the Greens I suspect will sit on the cross-benches and hold the balance of power (damn).  But I actually think the worst thing is a majority government, and the checks and balances of an independent Upper House, and a divided Lower House, should actually serve to keep the State from overstepping its due functions.

At present, since the last election in 2006, there are 14 Labor members (who form the Government), 7 Liberals (Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition) and 4 Greens.  As to the near future, well, reputable opinion polling indicates that the Liberals are ahead of Labor; for the first time ever, the Greens are neck-and-neck with Labor – it would be shocking but perhaps logical if the left continues its generational shift from Labor to Green, while the right continues Liberal, and those in the middle split three ways.  Those uncertain how to vote still number a fifth of those polled!

Could we end up with the House of Assembly divided into 10 Liberals (Will Hodgman as Premier; what a pity his father has just retired from Parliament after decades, missing out on being in his son's ministry), 7 Greens, and 8 Labor MHA's?

In any case, we all go to vote (voting is compulsory, just as it should be) on Saturday the 20th of March, and with luck a new Premier and Ministers will be sworn in by the Governor just after Easter – though possibly, if there is no clear winner, we may have to wait till Parliament is opened, and the matter is decided by a vote of no confidence on the floor of the House.  Since neither Labor nor Liberal will ever enter coalition with the Greens, let alone with each other, it is possible that, if no Premier able to command the House can be found, we'll have to go to the polls again...

Runabout

I had the itch to go out for a drive this afternoon, but rather overdid it... having spent close to six hours on the road, and covered over 400 km, I now think a good bushwalk would have been better! For the record, I drove down through the Midlands until I reached the Fingal Valley turnoff, then went up through Avoca, Fingal and St Mary's, turned down Elephant Pass but took the slightly easier St Mary's Pass through to the sunny East Coast, drove up to St Helens, but then, rather than take the Weldborough Pass through to Scottsdale, I retraced my route down past Scamander, then - rather than go up to St Mary's - I took the coast road down to Bicheno, then down cross-country toward Swansea (by this stage I was regretting my earlier enthusiasm), took the Lake Leake road through to Campbell Town, and finally returned north to Launceston via the Midlands Highway. The countryside was nice to see, but now I'm pooped.

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All of this faffing around puts me in mind of Newman's saying, "We walk to heaven backward".

As it's All Souls day, when not frantically zooming down the highway, I have been reading the Day Hours of this solemn Commemoration. Pray for the Holy Souls in Purgatory!

Big Day Out

It's Show Day here, so I had a good sleep-in; later in the morning, a family friend dropt round; and in the early afternoon, I took my father (now quite elderly) out for a long drive in the beaut Spring countryside, up along the North West coast, through Devonport, Burnie and Wynyard out to Table Cape - to see the tulips in bloom around there.

The day was brilliantly clear and sunny, and zipping along the highway was fun; I like driving. Dad enjoyed seeing the verdant farmland, and enjoyed our late lunch en route: a nice plate of selected meats and cheeses, with bread and whatnot,plus a hot chocolate and a raspberry icecream. Reaching the tulip farm at 5.30 pm, we found the tulips not yet out in force, but saw enough to please, and to promise more to come in succeeding weeks. It was good to turn for home, and we arrived back, a bit tired but happy, at 8.20 pm, having driven 350 km: a big day out.

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Hobart

Only 6% of Catholics in Tasmania attend Sunday Mass.  Within the next decade, the total number at Mass on a given Sunday will be only 1,500 - in a State with a population of half a million, of whom slightly less than a fifth are nominally Catholic.  I do hope this will be taken into account when the See of Hobart is soon vacated...

Who to blame?  The system has failed: while I disagree profoundly with the aCatholic brigade (such as that insulting Coyne creature), at least they have the wit to admit that the grim statistics are shocking and prove that things have gone badly wrong.  They believe in a hermeneutic of rupture, they believe that the Church must change or die (to quote Spong), and have their own conspiracy theory - that Popes since Vatican II have put the brakes on instead of "pedal to the metal, foot to the floor, hold on tight I'm a-comin', Lord!", that the noble intentions of the Council Fathers, nay, the Spirit of the Council itself has been subverted: they consider that only vastly more change, and of course a complete volte-face regarding sexual morality et al. can make the Gospel believable and meaningful.  In the meanwhile, they rejoice in the sensus (in)fidelium expressed in adhesion to secular values and rejection of all Roman teaching, either on the quiet or with loud laughter: they are glad when priests wink at all manner of dissent, since they regard such men as prophets and harbingers of the new age.

The problem with this diagnosis is that its reductio ad absurdum is a complete rejection of all revealed religion (which is at base Modernism in the theological sense), with various half-way houses along the way, such as the "St Mary's in Exile" crowd, and the many clergy, religious and laity who have made all manner of compromises and private changes in their faith and practice.   Frankly, I have more respect for those who in 1968 left the Church and abandoned all religion, than those who have lingered under the lintel, half-in and half-out of communion ever since.  Such types have white-anted the Church from within, and their baleful influence continues to the present.  If a presbyterate fall under the sway of what von Balthasar called der antirömischer Affekt, the priests of that diocese influence each other, via peer pressure (since priests form a tight bond, set apart as they are), not to look outward in communion with the universal Church, but to look inward in communion with none but themselves.  In Australia, this manifests in philistine behaviour as well as in bad theology.  Since what they teach and practise logically leads to atheism, most people have taken the hint!

Talk about a vicious circle; in private, priests in Hobart were mocking and groaning, rolling their eyes in disbelief of the piety of the faithful when the relics - relics! - of St Thérèse were coming to town: they told each other it had been a bad idea to allow it; one (who's since left the priesthood) stated the bones would be best boiled to make soup; and within a few days of this, as a server at the Cathedral I witnessed the Archbishop and clergy bemoaning the whole show, while standing in the Cathedral sacristy about to come out and mouth pious platitudes to welcome the very relics.  It was a stunning glimpse into a complacent, mediocre clerical world that set its own standards, and lived down to its doctrines.  

Worldwide, will the Pope's Year for Priests have been greeted by many with derision?  The phenomenon of the self-hating priest, who has an abortifacient mentality to priestly vocations, is well-known: better no priests than any who believe what the Church teaches!  Privately, it is assumed by too many that sooner or later women's ordination, contraception and all other currently prohibited things will be allowed, and that the certainties of yesterday's Faith will become - what?  As I say, logic teaches that this leads ineluctably to atheism (or Anglicanism of the fuzzy-minded variety - in which case, go join the C. of E.).  People give up the Faith because it appears not challenging because true, but pathetic because confused, fit only for old women of both sexes.

Notoriously seminaries from the late sixties through to the nineties fell into the hands of priests who were themselves dissenters, surely with the connivance of bishops: the year in which they suffered rupture varied, as more recently has the date of their reform and at least partial restoration to orthodoxy; whatever of the seminaries themselves, typically, theological faculties continue to contain many mediocre types who both dissemble and - "wink wink, nudge nudge" - display their degree of divergence from Catholic truth.  A priest told me how his lecturer in theology taught that the Eucharistic presence ceased when the Mass ended (classic Lutheranism, that) - and that when he and other students protested to the seminary rector, with proof of what had been taught, they were forced to apologize to the lecturer, virtually on pain of expulsion: this happened in Melbourne, not many years before the then-new Archbishop Pell reformed the seminary.

These jolly thoughts are the product of much exposure to the facts on the ground - gasp in amazement, I was once a precocious dissenter myself, before I got over it and accepted Truth, ironically while at University ("I was a teenage Modernist"!) - remembering from this experience that it is the allegedly mad, bad, mean, nasty conservatives who are rational, kind, prayerful and generous, while it is the supposedly loving and hard-done-by liberals who are rude, arrogant, irrational and lacking in sanctity.  "Scratch a liberal, find a fascist."  I often think of a certain pestilent person in holy orders, who I'm told was angelic when first ordained, but having gone liberal is quite detestable, as well as boring and foulmouthed: what an advertisement for the joys dissent brings.  (High Church Anglicans of the sort striving to be authentically Catholic tell even worse horror stories about the dreadful people they have to contend with: but for the Pope, Catholics would be even worse.)

To be Catholic is to think with the whole - with the whole Church through time, to adhere to the Vincentian Canon of what has always been believed by all everywhere, and as a corollary to apply the hermeneutic of continuity; dogmas and doctrines, practices and pieties may develop in a living, organic process, as the Holy Ghost guides the Church into all truth (and never out of any!), as St Vincent himself noted in his Commonitorium, and as about-to-be Blessed John Henry Newman explained further.  There can be no irruption of destructive cancer or return to Year Zero: attempts to return the tree to the acorn by chopping its grand growth down (as Tolkein put it) are metaphyiscally impossible, killing the tree and making its fruiting impossible: as was said in another circumstance of liberals, "they have no seed".  The Council can only be read in continuity with all the others - else the whole is a nonsense and a sham: its either Catholicism or atheism, these are the options.

Many of the unintended consequences of Vatican II have been so damaging because they assailed the faith of the little ones of Christ, of whom Truth said it would be better for those who did so to be cast into the sea with a millstone round their necks.  Whether innocently or maliciously, in the time since the Council, the years of confusion, of wandering in desert wastes, the seeds of doubt having been planted, every vile weed has come up in the garden!  Irreverence is never separable from impiety (as Trent taught); orthopraxis cannot be divorced from orthodoxy (as the East well knows, and the West has unhappily now learnt).  There must be a return to what is tried and tested and true, and a rejection of fruitless attempts at producing a counterfeit "adult" faith that is but compromise with the world and evasion of truth, as Pope Benedict so bitingly said the other day at Vespers of the Holy Apostles.

Here in prosperous, comfortable, safe Australia, practical atheism is the de facto position of this "bastard child of the Enlightenment": so what can stand against this, but a confident, combative, aggressive Catholicism, secure in its radically God-centred, believing, sacramentalist worldview.  This is what worked in the past in Australia.  Alas, in Malcolm Muggeridge's words, just when all the enemies of the Church seemed to have been thrown back from the assault - the white flag was raised!  Having by great works overcome sectarian bigotry, the Church in Australia raised up a middle class just in time for the achievements to be squandered: material wealth replaced spiritual yearnings, and the postconciliar crisis allowed catechesis to slip, much nonsense and abuses (spiritual and moral) to proliferate, and the sheep to wander off, being let loose by (as Chaucer put it) "shitten shepherds".  Even where bishops attempt to restore order, so many priests form a disloyal opposition that the attempts for the moment have not effected much real restoration.  I am tempted to say that it will take the current generation to pass away before, as the Supreme Pontiff formerly known as Cardinal Ratzinger opined in his earlier days, "The Church of the future will be smaller, but it will be more fervent."

So - with this in mind, to-morrow I'm off to Hobart for the Extraordinary Form of Mass (I mean, the more self-evidently transcendent experience of worship): the 11.30 am Missa Cantata at St Canice.  If I leave at 8 am I should have plenty of time: its only a 400 km round trip, which if the Mass were weekly rather than monthly I'd gladly do every Sunday.

It's a pity the dog-in-the-manger attitude of this archdiocese has prevented the F.S.S.P. coming to work in Tasmania to succour the needy Catholics here: they've applied at least twice that I know of.  For the moment, all eyes are on the Ecclesia Dei Commission: "Come over and help us" (cf. Acts xvi, 9).  Ecclesia Dei adflicta indeed!

Schola Gregoriana Hobartiensis: a Retrospect

While filing papers this evening I found my old Gregorian chant folders from my years as a member of the Schola Gregoriana Hobartiensis Spiritus Sancti ("the Schola"), from 1995 until 1999 - from when I learnt of its existence from a member, Bronwyn (please pray for her - she has a hole in the heart), to when I left Hobart for Melbourne, though I remained a guest member when in town...  

The Schola had been founded some years before by Bede Dunne, an accomplished musician and chant expert who had been conducting church choirs since before the Council; he is now very old, blind and frail (pray for him and his dear wife Joan, herself unwell), and in the past few years the Schola as I knew it, with its Benedictine ethos, died a natural death, though its latter function of providing music for the monthly Missa cantata has been continued by a new choir arising phœnix-like under new leadership with a new membership.

When I joined the Schola, its raison d'être was to chant Vespers roughly monthly (and occasionally other paraliturgical devotions, such as singing the Litanies of the Saints on St Gregory's day at the Cathedral, though that was before my time).  Once Fr (now Bp) Jarrett organized to begin monthly Latin Masses, he prevailed upon Bede to change our purpose to singing at these Missæ cantatæ, although in effect this meant the end of our orientation toward the sung Office.  

Despite this, the Schola maintained a monastic spirit: our weekly practices always began with the chanting of the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, with versicle and collect, and concluded with sung Compline according to the Monastic Rite, observing due ceremonial.  I remember that my role (later taken by Ben) was to chant the lectio brevis - but one night, at the mention of adversarius vester Diabolus, who goeth about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, Yvonne mischievously made a comic clawing gesture toward me - I couldn't sing my part straight-faced for a year afterward!

At one stage, Bede, in an access of fervour, even designed cream habits for us Gregorianists to wear, complete with scapulars embellished with a design signifying our Schola... owing to the embarrassment some of us felt at thus appearing in public (and in one newspaper article), these costumes were quietly laid aside.

But to return to my beginnings, chant-wise: the first liturgical function at which I sang with the Schola was (Monastic) Vespers of the Ascension, which was held at St John's, Richmond - site of our recent pilgrimage - back on Sunday (yes) the 28th of May 1995; as I recall, there was Benediction to follow, and Fr Hayres was only too pleased to preside.  According to my surviving copy, I was to intone the first antiphon, Viri Galilæi, and later the Magnificat antiphon O Rex gloriæ; still their tunes are in my head, as some of the first chant that ever I learnt.  It's strange to think that was fourteen years ago...

The weekend of Friday the 2nd to Sunday the 4th of February 1996 was used for a Gregorian chant workshop: Terce, Sext and None according to the Monastic Rite for Saturday and for Sunday, plus first Vespers of Septuagesima, all practiced hectically then sung in the church of St Canice - and there was much else...

Vespers of St Matthew, at St Matthew's, Pontville (1998); of the First Sunday of Advent at the Cathedral (1998); St Cecilia's Day at St John's, Glenorchy; various Sundays after Pentecost (such as in late October 1997 at the Cathedral again); Vespers of the Dead, which we sang at our practice venue, the parish hall of Sacred Heart, New Town; the fourth Sunday of Advent, according to the Roman Rite, at Corpus Christi, Bellerive (1997); Passion Sunday; the second Sunday after Easter; the third Sunday after Pentecost, or "within the Octave of the Sacred Heart", sung at Sacred Heart with Fr Jarrett presiding...

We even sang - and sang, and sang - unusually for us, mainly in English, at Sr Catherine Maria's eremitical consecration at St Francis Xavier's, South Hobart.  I can still hear Bede referring to "I am the Bread of Life" as having "a fairground tune"!

About the last Masses I find myself having sung were those of the Epiphany, and of a Sunday after the Epiphany, in early 2001.  But there were many others: Septuagesima 1996; second Sunday of Lent, 1996; Fourth after Easter, 1996; Trinity Sunday, 1996 and 1998; sixth and tenth and nineteenth and twenty-third after Pentecost, 1996; Advent Sunday, 1996; second Sunday of Advent, 1997 and 1998; Candlemas, 1997; third Sunday of Lent, 1997; Low Sunday, 1997; fifth after Easter, 1997; Corpus Christi, 1997; seventh and eleventh and sixteenth and twentieth after Pentecost, 1997; All Souls, 1997; fourth after Epiphany, 1998; first Sunday of Lent, 1998; Palm Sunday, 1998; third after Easter, 1998; fifth and ninth and fourteenth and eighteenth after Pentecost, 1998; All Saints, 1998; Sexagesima 1999; sixth and tenth after Pentecost again, in 1999...

During Bede's absences overseas or, increasingly, due to ill-health, Em would step in as choir-mistress pro tempore, but she was always first among equals, helping us master simple psalm-tones; Bede it was who would make our heads go round in circles as he carefully expounded the secrets contained in the adiastematic notation transcribed from old manuscripts into the Graduale Triplex, while we struggled to hit the right note!  We learnt many useful terms, such as celeriter, quilisma, epizema, and so forth world without end.

The Schola, when singing Mass, tended to restrict itself to attempting the proper Gregorian Introit, Offertory and Communion, plus perhaps the Alleluia (but not its verse); the Gradual was too difficult usually, and if time were short or our skills unequal, we would psalm-tone much of the Proper.  However, Bede would also give us interesting things to attempt, such as singing the Alleluia in organum, a fifth or an octave apart, producing a magnificently barbarous sound.  Since the people knew it, we nearly always sang Missa VIII - de Angelis - and Credo III.

From getting to know Ben and Jane, who came along to our early 1996 workshop, joined up and ended up giving me lifts to our practices, I gained an enduring friendship; the missal I take to Mass was a gift from them - it had belonged to Ben's mother Kathleen, a convert who had raised him and his brothers in straitened circumstances, and a staunch member of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales: May she rest in peace.

I also remember in particular Kevin, a most humble and kindly older man, a secular Franciscan, who some years after perished in a house fire: Requiescat in pace.  I still remember sitting in the sun room reading Lauds with him one morning when we were attending a Gregorian chant intensive weekend workshop leading up to Pentecost in 1998, which we kept at Deloraine, again with Fr Hayres, that peripatetic priest (now retired), himself a noted astronomer, musician and ex-Olympic swimmer.  That weekend we sang the Proper chant at the Novus Ordo parish Mass, and then Vespers with Benediction in the evening.

You learn useful things in choirs: such as, "You're never louder than when you're wrong."

Absit omen!

Another Lazy Mass

What is it about hospital chapels?

To-day, having for a change read the parish bulletin, I noticed that St Luke's Hospital (recently, like St Vincent's, incorporated into Calvary Health Care, based in Hobart and somehow carrying on the charism of the dear sisters who used to run it in the olden days) has a Mass on Thursdays at 3.30 pm: so I went along.

I am sure that, but for my obedient and automatic standing and kneeling at the appropriate points, the few gathered for the Liturgy would have sat like lumps throughout.

(It may appear judgemental and nasty-sounding of me to - quite rationally, given my experiences - assume so, but under the I'm certain very well-meaning unintentional confusion about posture lies the assumption common to many if not most these days that somehow the rubrical necessity is to be informal as possible, and that a small gathering without any ceremony is in fact allegedly closer to the example of Our Lord and the Apostles in the Upper Room, and therefore Mass sitting about in bean-bags, with no vestments and so forth is per se more authentic, what Luther termed more real and evangelical, than what they deride as "bells and smells" and probably gay liturgy - the last criticism is particularly Australian, stems from our cultural cringe, albeit does have I will admit some truth to it in certain circles, yet is strange coming from liberals who presumably are less opposed to such immoral lifestyles!)

I feel sorry for Fr Kene, our local Nigerian priest-on-loan; apparently he, together with his confreres elsewhere in Tasmania, would prefer to dress as they do in Nigerian, in clerical outfits with Roman collars, but were told that "we don't do that here" - and I suspect that they have been warned off being too Catholic in other subtle ways, also.  No criticism meant of them personally of course; their preaching is excellent and orthodox.  But the cult of self-reinforcing anti-Roman mediocrity that reigns in the inward-looking Tasmanian presbyterate does not want to be discomfited: as I remarked at the time of the Tampa controversy (then-P.M. Howard's "Pacific solution" of taking boat-borne asylum seekers to detention camps on offshore islands or elsewhere), while the clergy here were vocal in opposing the Government on the refugee issue, if it had been a boatload of priests coming those same priests here would have urged them to be machine-gunned without mercy or pity.  

It's the dog-in-the-manger, spiritually abortifacient (in Bp Fisher's words), we-want-the-Church-to-die, almost self-hating attitude of the local priests that causes many of the faithful, including myself now I'm back, to simply retreat from involvement in the archdiocese.  The liberals have seen all their hopes blighted, and think that the disaster since the Council is the result of it not being fully implemented - as a complete rupture with the bad old days - by the nasty old Popes since.  This priestly generation (well, it's really a very old generation!) must die before rebuilding can occur: at least poor Adrian only has two years before retirement.  After all, the priest in Kingston parish - a strange example of apparent lack of Catholic faith; he preached in my hearing that Christ, when He died on Calvary, "didn't know He would rise again" - delights in telling his bewildered parishioners and parish councillors that he will be the last priest the parish will have (a large collection of the still-expanding southern suburbs of Hobart), and asserts they had best prepare for a priestless future (à la the Russian Old Believers perhaps? how unconsciously ironic).

Thanks be, in the Novus Ordo to-day is the feast of St Barnabas Apostle, the "Son of Encouragement", that faithful and greathearted man picked out by the Holy Ghost: by his name, he reminds me of the familiar passage from II Corinthians i, 3-5 which insists upon that which I live by, that it is in the God of all comfort we place our trust, and not in sinful men, of the sort who, were the Church a human institution only, would indubitably bring her to utter destruction:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort: Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, * that we also may be able to comfortthem who are in all distress, by the exhortation wherewith we also are exhorted by God.  For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us; so also by Christ doth our comfort abound.

[* Here ends the Little Chapter at ferial Vespers.]

Apocalypse Now

How appropriate, at this time of pandemic fears (one should fear swine, say the Egyptians - but not the Copts!), that Matins should present to us the beginning of the Revelation of St John the Divine, of what things must surely happen soon...

I had plenty of time this morning, given the late hour of the sung Mass, to say Matins, then go for a good half-hour walk along to Taroona High (alma mater of Crown Princess Mary of Denmark; her father taught me calculus), itself built upon an age-old Aboriginal midden.  Having come along to St Canice a half-hour early, my hosts having to help set up beforehand, I then thought it best to redeem the time in prayer (Lauds through to Sext) - and given another ten minutes' delay, while Fr perforce heard some confessions, I said None too.

Really!  If one arrives only a scant minute before Mass, should one inconvenience the priest and the waiting congregation by asking for confession then and there, rather than, say, reflecting on one's wretchedness during the Sacrifice, abstaining from the Sacrament, and humbly confessing at a more appropriate time after the Liturgy?  As it is, the accustomed late beginning and, let's be honest, wearisome length of the Hobart Missa cantata has put people off coming - only 50, rather than the longer-term average of 70, were in attendance.  While there exists the attractive power of solemn, prayerful, sublime traditional worship, there are also opposing repulsive factors!

(I am being a bit crotchety, I know, but to have to drive so far to get to the only available Latin Mass, and then to put up with admittedly minor but real irritations, doesn't improve my temperament despite what virtuous patient forbearance I ought practice.)

The choir sang better than ever, and to the delight of the congregation we sang the well-known Missa de Angelis with Credo III.  Again, a Latin hymn or motet to fill up the quarter-hour Offertory silence, and a vernacular hymn at the end would have been a good idea - but, as I joked with my friends over lunch afterward, perhaps a recessional hymn would have proved too much full stop!  To be fair, Mass took only an hour and eight minutes, a vast improvement over the extreme length of the service even a few months back.  I fully understand that Fr only celebrates the Latin Mass once a month, and is not so much of a singer, so that he simply monotones the collects, Dominus vobiscum's and so forth - but surely he could chant the Pater noster?  After all, he has been doing this every month ever since Fr Jarrett departed the State to become Bishop of Lismore, and that's now eight years ago.

The feeling I get at this monthly Mass is that of "sheep without a shepherd" - the servers, the choir, the priest, all and sundry, all seem to be doing their best, but there is a lack of overall direction and certainty that makes the liturgy appear like a brave essay at achieving some restoration of and through divine worship of the mos et patrius disciplina, without a full capacity to attain it.  The contrast between Tasmania's strivings, and the far more settled Mainland Latin Mass circles seems great.

After Mass, having said Vespers (!) in thanksgiving, lunched and visited with friends, and driven the two and a half hours' journey back to Launceston, I've now settled back; even Compline is done.

Reflecting back over the experience of Mass, I recall the fervorino our priest gave us - that we ought, through the prayers of our heavenly Mother Mary, beg for the graces of Eastertide: a joy that none can take from us, a peace that the world cannot give; that thus our desire for heaven ever grow.  As St Paul tells us in the Epistle, being strangers and pilgrims in this transient world, we should abstain from carnal desires, as these war against the soul (cf. I St Peter ii, 11f); as our Holy Mother the Church bids us pray in the Secret, may the Lord grant that, by the holy mysteries offered and received, mitigating our terrene desires, we may learn to love things celestial (His nobis, Domine, mysteriis conferatur, quo terrena desideria mitigantes, discamus amare cælestia); and as she bids us pray in the Postcommunion, may the sacraments which we have received both as ghostly nourishments restore our souls, and also be helps to our bodies (Sacramenta quæ sumpsimus, quæsumus, Domine, et spiritualibus nos instaurent alimentis, et corporalibus tueantur auxiliis): all of this in and through Christ Jesus Our Lord (cf. customary end-formulæ of the Epistle and of all orations).

Off to Mass in Hobart

Having been busy and otherwise disinclined to blog over the past few days, I find I've let St Paul of the Cross, St Peter Chanel, St Catherine of Siena, St Joseph the Worker and now St Athanasius - these worthies - slip by without comment; but I suspect I may have blogged a little in their honour last year, as a quick search of this blog should reveal...

Having gone to confession and run various errands in town this morning (to say nothing of a rather good brunch at Pierre's Café), I must now quickly get organized for the drive down to Hobart, where I will stay with friends overnight and then with them attend this State's monthly, sole Latin Mass to-morrow at St Canice.

Oremus pro invicem.

Drink Beer

It's hot - 38.2°C at maximum to-day, which would have been just about a record but for yesterday! - and what else to do than have a beer?

I've been enjoying a Huon Dark Ale brewed by the Two Metre Tall Company (why is the company so-named? because I met the owner, who is indeed two metre's tall).

If you can obtain some, it's a very fine drop.

All Records Broken

I had cause to go into town to-day to have lunch with a congenial mate, and then off and around the city, stopping off to note down the times of service at the local Greek Orthodox church (they have Divine Liturgy one Saturday each month; a friend of mine worships with them in Hobart, and Fr Timothy their priest is a friend of a Catholic bishop I know), buying some groceries, looking for the latest copy of an Astronomy magazine I take, etc.

It was hot out in the sun, certainly, but I had no idea that at 3.30pm the temperature broke the all-time record: it reached 38.7°C - the hottest recorded since records began in 1884! That's 101.7°F.  Golly.

(I just noticed - the candle in its candlestick on the sideboard has bent over in the broiling heat.)

Scamander on the coast and Ross in the midlands were both 41.5°C at 3pm (new records for the mainland of Tasmania), Cressy and Launceston Airport inland from Launceston, plus Fingal all broke 40°C, Bushy Park and Ouse (both in the south, up the Derwent Valley) 38°C... extraordinary weather.

(Oh, and in Victoria Melbourne registered 45.1, while in South Australia, Adelaide was 43.1.  Perhaps the whole world is just going to drop into the Sun.)

8th Wonder

On Sunday, the Lord's day, we ought contemplate the magnalia Dei - what great works God hath wrought.

For this reason (amongst others), I paid a visit to that marvel of Van Diemen's Land, the Kimberley Warm Springs - which at 24-25°C may be said to be the last gasp (quite literally) of the vulcanism that has down the ages left its mark all down the Eastern seaboard of Australia, in such relics of past eruptions as the Glasshouse Mountains and lava tubes in Queensland, Mt Gambier with its associated blue lake in South Australia, and mysterious Hanging Rock in Victoria.

Behold the elegant porticos erected for the comfort of weary pilgrims!

For some reason, these springs are not widely known, nor frequented...

... despite the attractive if unusually labelled facilities (note signage to the right).

Their curative properties are legendary, it seems.

I'm afraid my very amateurish action shot does not sufficiently illustrate the roiling cauldron of bubbling sand that lies in the very depths of these springs...

...nor can the lens capture (thankfully), the rather pungent odour (note the pond scum, and see if you can spot the flies hovering).

Those still curious may consult its official entry (and status) in the Australian Heritage Database.

I gave thanks as I departed, once more, the Warm Springs at Kimberley.