Eva's track and its flowers.

There are a few drawbacks with this track, like its soggy nature, so wear good boots. Also, there are said to be a few red-bellied black snakes, and while people have told me the ones around here are quite shy, the ones I know best are from New England, and those can be quite aggressive. I threw a stick off to the right, which shouod make a shy snake go to the left. This one dashed to the right, and chased a second stick further, at which point, we skittled through.

If you live near where I do, you can find this bush track, but only friends get the map, because there are flower thieves about. If you Google it, you can find it, but thieves are low on Google fu. This walk has drops and rises and mud that I can manage without a pole, and I have passed four score years. Still, being cunning, I will take a pole hereafter.

The track takes its name from a Silesian lady, so Eva more or less rhymes with never. Apparently, she loved the wildflowers there, and a good friend told me to watch out for orchids, just before she showed me this one on another track: it is a sun orchid, Thelymitra, and most of them are still in bud.

This orchid may be on Eva's track, but I was on my own, and watching my step carefully (concerned about falls and snakes), so I missed seeing any orchids, but, there were two species of Boronia, first B. pinnata, and then the one that gets stolen, B. ledifolia.

The track has a mix of environments, some of them quite soggy, and two entry points, one near my home, and the other requiring an agile duck under the water pipeline, and you need to know where to duck under, so try the other entry first, or apply a keen eye as you wander along beside the pipeline.

Another flower of note on this track is Dampiera stricta, small and sort of blue-mauve, I think (I am colour-blind, so check the picture on the left).

In September, as I write this, they fill in the expanses of green, and the plant is also popular in gardens. The petal pattern tells us it fits into the Goodeniaceae, the family that takes its name from the Goodenia.

Then there is the dogrose, Bauera rubioides, with its characteristic downcast flowers, and I seem to recall having a saccharine children's book about some sort of terrible shame being brought down upon the flower. It maust have had a happy ending, but I would happily see all authors who write simpering tales of anthropomorphism brought to an unhappy ending.

Anyhow, the plant is quite widespread, but not all that common. On the left, Burchardia umbellata is pretty enough for some to count it as an orchid, which it is not: it is in the mostly African family Colchicaceae.

It gains a common name: 
milkmaids

The ti-trees (pronounced and often written as tea-trees), are in the genus Leptospermum , in the family Myrtaceae. There are various myths about early scurvy cases in 1788 being treated with tea brewed from their leaves, but my book Australianisms, which looks at when terms came into use in Australia, has tea-tree as a medicinal only in the 1870s.

On the right, this is Leptospermum squarrosum, the Pink Ti-tree. So: there are some pretty flowers to see on Eva's track, and I never saw a snake: as I walk lightly, that makes the risk of you encountering one even less,

We need more teacher-librarians, not less!

Last week, teacher-librarians at 58 schools in the Newcastle/Maitland diocese were informed they were either being made redundant or ‘redeployed’.  This is not an isolated event: across Australia, teacher-librarians are quietly being phased out of schools. 

I have taught at every level from kindergarten to undergraduate and adult education. I have a Master's degree in Education, specialising in assessment and evaluation, and I retired from the education sector at the age of 43 as a Principal Education Officer, to pursue other interests. I had directed the recovery of the 1985 HSC examinations after a disaster at the Government Printing Office had made a disaster seem inevitable.

I am, first and foremost, a meticulous planner and cunning writer, with a nose for stupidity, and the skill to prepare for it, so I had done so, and I had plans for most kinds of disaster. I knew the smell of rank mental corruption, and that is relevant here: nobody has heard of the 1985 HSC disaster, because I stopped it dead, and I also defeated the internal ghoul who was trying to sabotage us (I was ready for him as well). Thanks to me, the disaster never happened, and that got me bumped up to Principal at the age of 41, well ahead of the normal.

The scheme to do away with teacher-librarians stinks, and it must be stopped. It must not pass! Read my background again: add in that I was the policy advisor and fixer to the two statutory boards that controlled education in Ausralia's largest state, and you will realise that I may just be entitled to call myself qualified to call out maladministration.

In my writing career, I won a number of major awards, and even more minor ones, writing for children. Along the way, my later career was littered with fraud cases that I broke. That is relevant because it is my professional assessment that the dunces who plan to do away with teacher-librarians are the very lowest grade of frauds. They pretend to be adninistrators, and they are the sort of people I would normally dismiss with a sneer, as beneath my interest.

In my teaching career, it was my pleasure at one point to banjax an unqualified and illiterate principal (I had first taught the literate members of staff to call him "Wackford Squeers" *) because he declared that we did not need a library: "you can get everything off the internet"' he told us. Kids need libraries, and libraries need teacher-librarians, because TLs are first and foremost trained as teachers before getting specialist library training, all aimed at shaping kids' minds and directing their skills as Young Discoverers. Teaching without TLs is like raising an army by giving youngsters guns and saying "get out there and fight!".

I concluded that I was about number 6 on his shit-list of urbane intellectuals, so having assembled a nice dirt file, and needled him until I hit number one spot and went for the jugular. Poor bugger, hadn't stopped to wonder why the debates master kept annoying him, but my methods remain sealed, just in case I need them again. Suffice it to say that the dirt file's existence was flagged, and those interested knew I would make it available.

The Peter Principle (no relation to me) says that people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. I have seen three cases where the subject entered, already above his (it's  generally a male thing) level of incompetence, and so had no limit to their further rises. In educational administration, I submit that this is very common, and may well explain the Maitland/Newcastle stupidity.

Let me stress: getting rid of teacher/librarians is an act of extreme ignorance, with or without total incompetence. But how do I know about TLs and their roles?

As the main content provider for WebsterWorld, the Australian competitor to Microsoft's Encarta, I worked very closely with TLs and reference librarians for five years, and I have maintained the links and their passion for feeding minds.

And "Squeers", the principal who knew it all? He was so innumerate around computers that he could not even hide from me that he was playing Solitaire in his office. Of course, I never told him that I could see his screen in the glass-fronted book-free book case that sat behind his desk, when he thought I assumed he was working. Now THAT was a Catholic school: I wonder if he has found a part among this singularly philistine bunch of boors, yahoos and ignorami?

Disclaimer: I have no idea how the Wackford Squeers Depreciation Society found out about the book case and what it revealed. Absolutely none.

_____________________________________________

* Wackford Squeers? It's a Dickensian reference to a fictional evil headmaster in Nicholas Nickleby. My version was hardest on the kids I sought to protect from that vile man.