Sunday 12 July 2020

Hello all,

Give it up for the Great State of Victoria for coming along and ruining everything. Here was Australia, possibly on the path towards elimination of COVID-19, about to blow a big trans-Tasman bubble and *pop*! 128 new cases in Victoria over the past seven days (as of Thursday 25 June). 

Well, here we are, back in stage 3 lockdown. I’ve been writing and re-writing these opening paragraphs repeatedly over the past couple of weeks or so. Some of it was scribed in those wild, heady days of late-June. Remember those days? Where you could visit a café and sit down in the company of up to 19 other people!? You could even visit the cinema—which fortunately, we did. Alas, playgrounds are now to close again, which seals off one of our outlets with the kids...very frustrating.

Talk about there being ‘no time like the present’. I’m very glad we got around to visiting all three zoos, IMAX and Melbourne Museum in our lockdown interregnum. So yes, this has been written in fits and starts over the past couple of weeks so excuse me if my tenses and such aren’t 100% percent consistent. I’d get my editorial team at work to check these things, but I don’t think they’d appreciate being used in that fashion (not to mention the terrifying insights they’d gain into my life).

On Wednesday afternoon, I took the kids to the playground for their last swing and slide for the next six weeks. It's a shame that these have to close as well because, on their own, they're not huge vectors of spread. The problem, again, comes with social distancing. Not so much the children, but the parents and others who come. In the weeks the playgrounds have been open, we've seen large groups congregating at popular parks such as Blackburn Lake. Although limits are clearly signed, people don't stick to them, hence we find ourselves back where we started.

Thanks to the spike in COVID cases, various places and businesses have had to scale back or delay their re-openings close again for another six weeks. IMAX Melbourne is one such venue, planning to open to 50 people per screening from Monday 22 June, but now remaining limited to 20 (and since 9 July, ZERO). But this essentially makes the world’s largest screen a private viewing event.

Which is how Archer and I found it when we saw Walking with Dinosaurs: Prehistoric Planet 3D  a couple of Saturdays ago. It was nice to be back in a cinema—really bloody nice—with the requisite choc tops and popcorn. The film told the story of a young pachyrhinosaurus as he made his way with his herd, being separated, reunited, separated again, stuck under a tree, threatened by nanuqsauruses before being reunited again. It might have only been a 45 minute thing, but it was still better than Jurassic World. The computer animation was seamless and incredibly detailed—a big step up technically from what was accomplished in 1993 with Jurassic Park—and the Alaskan scenery spectacular.

This visit to IMAX was also a big improvement on Archer's last visit—where we didn't even make it past the trailers before he wanted to get out of there! That was a year ago and what a difference a year makes. He sat through the entire thing, enjoying the the sights and sounds (and popcorn) of the world's largest screen.

And I’m not engaging in hyperbole—IMAX Melbourne is the world’s largest screen. It was the second-largest screen, but then Sydney decided it’d be swell to demolish their IMAX theatre at Darling Harbour—first Sega World, now IMAX...what the hell is wrong with those people? Apparently Sydney IMAX will be back at some point in the future, bigger than ever, but until then, we’re No. 1.

But as Michael Caine’s Nigel Powers said, ‘it’s not the size, mate, it’s how you use it,’ and indeed IMAX Melbourne uses its size well. Not only does it offer state-of-the-art 4K “LASER” projection (hey, two Austin Powers references in the one sentence!), it's one of a dwindling number of IMAX theatres to still present in the ginormous 1570 IMAX film format.

It truly is the best of both worlds—in fact they decommissioned the 1570 film projector back in 2014 (they screened Interstellar at its ‘final’ screening) before doing a Farnsy and reinstalling it temporarily for Christopher Nolan’s IMAX epic, Dunkirk, then permanently for his future films! It’s one of only a couple of dozen IMAX theatres in the world capable of showing both formats and it’s a great place to see a movie...particularly when you’ve got it virtually to yourself!

The tech behind IMAX is amazing. The film format, known as 1570, is huge: 15 perforations; 70mm film. Below is an oft-cited chart comparing it to the already-huge 70mm format and the comparatively tiny 35mm.

It’s not quite possible (or practical) to compare 1570 film to digital formats, as film is an organic material whose resolution isn’t really measured in numbers like ‘lines’, but as a rough comparison, 1570 IMAX film can resolve about 12,000 lines of horizontal resolution (12K); 35mm film will give you about 5–6,000 lines of horizontal resolution and the best digital projection (what IMAX uses) is 4K, which is 4,000 lines of horizontal resolution. Pretty epic, eh?

Museum piece

As Museums Victoria members, our IMAX ticket included entry to Melbourne Museum. I didn't intend for us to stay too long at the museum as it was secondary to the film, but three hours later, we had been into almost every gallery from the dinosaurs to the beautiful Milarri Garden full of indigenous Victorian plants. Part of the motivation for this was 100 Tiny Dinosaurs that had 'escaped' and could be found hiding in various places across the museum. I don't think we quite found all 100, but we found a fair few hiding among the trilobites or perched atop Phar Lap's display cabinet.

One new exhibition was the unexpected highlight of our visit: 'Mini Mega Model Museum'. This exhibition presented a fascinating array of models from the museum's own collection, from 19th century plaster dinosaurs to  1960s space race models. Each item had a story, including a model of the Parkes radio telescope (a.k.a. 'the dish') which was a replica of a model gifted to the Soviets in the 1960s. The exchange gift from Mother Russia was a model of a Tupolev Tu-104—very detailed with removable sections. Lots of ships (including the ill-fated PS Ozone), mechanical models, an entire quartz mine diorama and even food in various states of decay (very realistic, though all made of wax). One that caught my eye was the architectural model for the proposed new Museum of Victoria site down at Southbank (where Jeff's shed is now located). I remember this one accompanying newspaper articles about the then-Museum of Victoria throughout the 1990s until the current site was chosen.

You can view all the models in the exhibition here on the Museums Victoria collections page. Well worth a look!

After the museum, we even found time to visit Box Hill and see a man about an organ.

We completed the zoo trifecta with a visit to Healesville Sanctuary. Well, actually two visits to Healesville. Maddie and the kids went with Julie the other week and I went with the fam this weekend just gone. With the return to lockdown, sadly the zoos are again closed. We’re fortunate we made the effort to see all three (and the dinosaurs!) during the limited opening window.

It was a bit of a sodden and sun-free Sunday, but it was rather well-suited to the lush bush environs of the sanctuary. As with the two other zoos, the main drawcard was the dinosaurs, this time accompanied by a number of prehistoric megafauna (which succeeded the dinosaurs in the evolutionary timeline of our Earth).

As ever, during These Uncertain Times, it was nice to get out of the house and into nature. On the way to Healesville, we passed many of the wineries of the Yarra Valley who must be doing it incredibly tough at the moment. Sure, the big brands are probably doing okay (like Chandon and its parent company Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy), but those off the beaten track and without a place on the shelves of big retailers, would be struggling.

It brings to mind this article about wine: ‘Is it ever worth it to buy an expensive bottle of wine?’. Of course, it doesn’t take much for my mind to wander to wine (‘Oh my gosh! It’s a day ending in “-day”. Perfect for a wine!’), but the take-home messages from the article were: a) drink to taste; and b) try something different, something which isn’t one of, say, Treasury Wines’ 48 labels. FOURTY-EIGHT GODDAMN LABELS. Support the little guy or girl who’s trying something new with their wines instead of producing the same consistent and bland (yet ultimately inoffensive) cab sav. Or, as the author puts it in the article, ‘Save the world’s wine drinkers ... from a future in which cabernets are as interchangeable as Coca-Colas.’ I couldn’t agree more.

As if you needed any further evidence to support my contention that this government has a grudge against critical thinkers, education minister Dan Tehan announced a radical overhaul of university fees, effectively doubling the cost of humanities degrees.

This is shocking. 

This means an arts student and a law student will be effectively paying the same fees annually. The intent is clear: to drive students into the government’s preferred vocational industries and away from courses that produce well-rounded critical thinkers. In a chillingly Orwellian turn of phrase, Tehan claimed ‘students will have a choice’. What choice is that? 

This is despite all the evidence (and employer skill surveys) in the world that show it is the skills of humanities graduates that are the most highly sought-after by employers and most resistant to automation in the future.

But they’re decreasing the cost of science courses, I hear you say. How great is that? Well, it’d be easier to accept their sincerity in this arena if they hadn’t spent the last 7 years in office cutting and slashing and plundering the research budgets of our universities and institutions like the CSIRO. Budget cuts last year left government investment in R&D at its lowest level in 40 years. This is in addition to the hundreds of millions—probably billions by now—cut since Abbott took office in 2013. 

According to the CSIRO Staff Association (of which I was a delegate when I worked there), CSIRO’s jobs numbers are on track to contract 10 per cent over the preceding 12 months. This is the complete opposite of what we, as a nation, should be doing. We should be undertaking a project on the scale of the Manhattan Project to secure the environment and energy for the future. But no money for the important things here, only cuts for vital institutions.

Oh, and the funding package Tehan is trying to get unis to accept CUTS funding for engineering, science and other courses the government is seeking to encourage school leavers to enrol in. Perverse. Dumb. 

Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, the government hates higher education. They hate universities. They hate critical skills. They hate people who can think for themselves. Why? Because evidence (I know, there I go again with that confounded evidence thing) shows educational attainment is negatively correlated to voting conservative.

In their myopic worldview, why would they keep on supporting institutions that spit out intelligent, highly-skilled individuals who actually want to make the world a better place—and tend to vote against nativists and three-word slogans? 

Oh—and this is kinda important—the architect of HECS says the government’s arbitrary price changes will fail to have the desired effect on demand.

Author Richard Flanagan said it best last week: ‘This act is of a piece with a society that has for decades now placed ever less value on the creative, the critical and the questioning, and which regards conformity as the greatest good. Nothing is more helpful in preparing the road to authoritarianism. The government will save a few dollars today and Australia will pay a heavy price in the years to come.’

The last sentiment is particularly important. Whether you’re looking at culture, arts or sciences, we will pay a heavy price in years to come. None of our present problems will be solved through ‘getting the budget back into the black’, they will be solved by research, development and clever ideas—the very concepts this government has spent years cutting to the core.

Then again, the $250 million ‘rescue’ package for the $50 billion Australian arts industry vs. $250 billion on missiles to antagonise the Chinese and start a regional arms race probably tells you all you need to know about this mob’s priorities.

As with missives prior, I’ve been working through some more film scans and digital photographs from the past AGE...like months and months...and here are some of the results, along with more recent images that don't fit anywhere else. Pls tap or click to embiggen.

Well, the end of another period of time. Hooray. Congratulations for doing that thing.