Michael Green

Writer and producer

Fields of dreams

In Community development on

They’ve started dirty wars, inspired beat poets, ruined lives and eased pain. Poppies are the planet’s ‘most dangerous plant’ and they’re grown in Australia’s smallest state.

Published in Smith Journal, Volume 7

OUT the back of Campbell Town, across the railway tracks, down a gravel lane – somewhere in Tasmania’s golden triangle – the Lyne family are preparing their fields for a covert crop. Shh! On the other side of town, off the highway and over a hill, the youngest son, Angus, has been ploughing another paddock. The family recently bought this extra land so they can grow even more of the state’s most lucrative, secretive harvest.

They’re growing opium poppies. I’m a witness.

Lyne is 28 years old; a handsome, wholesome, 6-foot-5-inch, “very uncoordinated reserve ruckman” and 8th generation farmer. His father, Crosby, grows poppies, and so too does his brother, Sam. We’re sitting in the front of his ute, looking out over the dry midland valley to the green hills beyond.

“There are probably twenty families in the area that could tell you the same thing,” he says between bites of his sandwich, utterly bewildered by my interest.

No – it isn’t really a secret. But opium poppies are, however, Australia’s least known, most successful, least dispensable and, potentially, most dangerous industry.

Tasmanian farmers grow half the whole world’s supply of poppies for pain relief. Morphine, codeine, oxycodone, oxymorphone and more; if it hurts real bad, you’ll be treated with the Apple Isle’s best.


“For some reason people don’t like to be quoting this, but it’s the only Tasmanian industry in which we’re a significant world player,” says Rick Rockliff, from Tasmanian Alkaloids, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, and one of the major poppy processors on the island.

Rockliff was the company’s first employee in Tasmania, way back in 1975. His family grows poppies too, on the rich red soils at Sassafras, west of here, south of there, somewhere else in the golden triangle.

“It’s really been the salvation of Tasmanian agriculture,” he tells me, early one autumn morning. “It’s the only thing farmers can make a few dollars out of. Most of their income comes from poppies.” Rockliff is speaking with pride – this is the high point of our conversation. Otherwise, he is polite enough, but keeps his arms crossed and his sentences clipped.

Inspector Glenn Lathey doesn’t want to talk to me either. He’s from the Tasmania Police poppy squad, which guards against “diversion” of the crop. “It’s not something we talk about, for obvious reasons,” he says. “I’m not going to talk to you on the phone. You could be anyone.”

***

Humans have been using poppies since we began farming and maybe before – the seed pods have been unearthed at more than a dozen Neolithic sites, settlements from several thousand years BCE, way back in the New Stone Age. Later, the Sumerians cultivated it in Mesopotamia – modern day Iraq. They called it hul gil, the “joy plant”. The Egyptian goddess Isis gave opium to Ra, the sun-god, to cure his headache.

According to the opium poppy’s botanical name, Papaver somniferum, it’s the sleep-maker. Over centuries, it’s been used to treat everything from bad eyesight, coughs and sleeplessness, to asthma and diarrhoea, and by everyone from the Ancient Greeks and the Islamic Empires, to injured soldiers and beat poets.

The plant contains dozens of alkaloids – a kind of chemical compound that does profound things to the nervous system of humans and animals (other alkaloids include caffeine, cocaine, nicotine, strychnine, quinine and mescaline).

So far, scientists have deduced uses for only a handful of the poppy alkaloids, but as research continues, they’re likely to find more. Morphine was the first – it was isolated from opium gum in the early 19th century – and it takes its name from the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus.

But the plant has also caused nightmares, too many to comprehend.

Among the ethical abominations perpetrated by the British Empire, the Opium Wars rank particularly highly: at the time, one parliamentarian said there had never been “a war more unjust” or “more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace”. Having introduced the habit of smoking opium with tobacco to the Chinese, the British then fought wars to stop the Qing Empire from outlawing it. Twice in the mid-19th century, they attacked the Chinese coast to defend their right to sell large amounts of the drug into the country, and take out boatloads of tea in profit.

Shortly after, a British chemist named C.R. Alder Wright synthesised heroin from morphine. He was searching for an alternative that wasn’t addictive, but he failed very, very badly. This spring, 140 years later, Afghani farmers are likely to produce a record opium crop, which will find its way through traffickers and corrupt officials and onto the streets, in an illicit heroin trade bigger than three-quarters of the world’s economies.

***

On 29 January 1986, a small group gathered in working class Devonport, on the northern Tasmanian coast, wearing suits on a sunny morning. They unveiled a bronze plaque to a man – long since dead and from far, far away – named János Kabay.

In his speech, the Hungarian diplomat Pal Ipper expressed his official astonishment: “That here in Tasmania there are people who want to dedicate a memorial to a Hungarian from 20,000 kilometres and 50 years away is practically unbelievable,” he said.

The memorial was sponsored by the local poppy growers and processing companies. Without Kabay, there would be no poppies in Tasmania.

During the great depression, not long after his country was defeated and broken-up in World War I, Kabay worked speculatively and feverishly in Budszentmihaly, the small town where he was born. Trained as a pharmacist, he discovered a way to extract morphine from dried poppy capsules.

The original process for doing so – now used only in India – requires the production of opium, initially, by scoring the head of a green poppy and scraping the sap that seeps out.

Kabay’s method, however, bypasses the opium stage. Farmers leave the poppies in their fields until they dry on the stem. Then, once harvested, the “poppy straw” can be stacked and stored for months before processing. His insight allowed the creation of a commercial industry, one where the production could be more easily controlled and monitored.

In Devonport that sunny morning, Kabay’s son and daughter – who emigrated after he died and made Sydney their home – were listening as seven different speechmakers praised their father. Sir Edward Williams, from the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board, paid tribute: “Today we honour a great pioneer,” he said. “Here is a man who really made an industry.”

While he was alive Kabay did not receive so many accolades. Tormented by ill health, family disputes, money shortages and bureaucratic hurdles, he died young, in great pain, on 29 January 1936. In his final hours, he refused morphine.

***

“So what’s the process?” I ask Rohan Kile, casually. We are in the belly of the triangle, where it all began: a town called Latrobe, somewhere near Devonport. Kile is the crop-supply manager for pharmaceutical giant Glaxo Smith Kline, and he’s leading me into a giant shed – about 70 metres long and 40 wide – which harbours a three-storey mound of dried poppy straw, ready for processing.

“For extracting alkaloid? I can’t really tell you that,” he replies, with an inscrutable grin. “As an industry we don’t advertise how we extract alkaloid out of plants. People do try different things.”

In the shed, we stay well back from the precarious poppy chaff cliff. It’s a monstrous pile, but it’s only the remains of the harvest; ten times this amount has gone through here in the last two months.

Kile’s job is to make sure exactly the right quantity is grown. Each autumn, he calculates the contracts with growers, specifying the acres they’ll cultivate come springtime.

It’s an uncommon industry: obsessively regulated and managed at every stage. Together with state and federal bureaucrats, the processors licence, register and monitor the exact amount produced. Prospective growers must pass a police check to qualify for a licence, which is administered by the Poppy Advisory and Control Board. When the plants are in flower, from late spring, the board’s inspectors roam the back roads and fields, searching for signs of tampering.

Their numbers are fed all the way to the top. “Globally, the United Nations keeps track of how much legal opiate material is available,” Kile explains (he too, must pass regular federal police checks). No more than a year’s supply is stockpiled.

The processors hire their own contractors – not the farmers – to sow the seed and do the harvesting. Kile supervises a dozen field officers, who counsel the growers week by week, if need be, until the year’s job is done. “They advise on everything from pre-planting and ground preparation right through to managing the crop and harvesting,” he says.

Kile was born in the year of Tasmania’s first commercial crop, 1971. Twenty years earlier, in the aftermath of World War II, the Allied countries were seeking a stable, secure source of poppies for morphine. The drug company Macfarlan Smith hired an agronomist called Stephen King to conduct trials in England. After several washouts, he continued the quest in the southern hemisphere, with experimental crops in South Australia, Western Australia, New South Wales and New Zealand (Victoria said no). “On a couple of days Stephen had spare, he came to Tasmania to have a look around,” Kile says. “He decided he liked what he saw  – and the rest is history.”

King set up his headquarters in Latrobe, and began to grow. It’s grown ever since: the pain business is good business. As global population and incomes rise, so too does the demand for painkillers. The poor put up with it, or die – or both. But once you’ve got enough money, you’ll pay what it takes for blessed relief.

***

For decades, all over the country, young people have been leaving the land. Farms are growing bigger, and farming communities, smaller.

“Anyone who’s half-smart realises they could get more money elsewhere than the rural industry can afford to pay them,” Angus Lyne says. “They go to the mines.”

Not him, though. After several years travelling and farming in Australia and Europe, he returned home five years ago. “I wouldn’t do anything else. I feel very lucky to be a farmer,” he says. “It’s the whole package really, all the clichés: being your own boss and working outdoors.” He saw his opportunity in poppies.

Since then, the family has significantly increased the acreage they devote to the crop, and Lyne has begun share-farming to expand even further. He stewards a hefty harvest on other people’s land.

“Back in the drought I started doing that so there’d be enough work for all of us,” he says. “Now, with the way the industry is going, we’ll probably have to employ someone else here because we’ve got so much work on.”

They grow other crops too – barley, wheat and canola – but the return on poppies is much higher. Per hectare, he says, the margin is about five times that of wheat. On the Lynes’ land, poppies account for less than one-tenth of the territory, but half the farm’s income.

“They’re more intensive to manage. But the reward is there if you grow a really good crop,” he says.

Today hasn’t been Lyne’s best – he spent the morning dead-bored behind the wheel of the tractor, ploughing and talking on the phone to pass the time. It’ll be another three days before his digging is done. Now, he’s wolfed his sandwiches, and it’s time to get back on the machine.

“Is there anything else I should include?” I ask, searching for some intrigue to smuggle back across the border from the golden triangle, a good yarn gleaned from these taciturn Tasmanians. He’s silent, so I press again. “Got any curious stories?”

Only this: “If you eat them you’ll die.”

Food Know How

In Greener Homes on

A new scheme aims to get our food out of the bin

NEAR the pig pen at Collingwood Children’s Farm, there’s a compost pile 20 metres long and over a metre tall. At one end, the mound is cluttered with cabbage leaves and straw. By the time it reaches the other, it has transformed into rich, dark humus: the sign of prosperity for food growers.

“It’s all just billions of microbes eating and breeding,” explains Kat Lavers, chief composter with Cultivating Community, as steam rises from pile. “A good hot compost like this could be ready in a month.”

The compost windrow, together with two giant worm farms in the shade of nearby peppercorn trees, is a community compost hub. It’s the first of four to be built in the City of Yarra, as part of a new project called Food Know How.

The neighbourhood composting hubs are just one element of the scheme, which was launched in June. Together with Yarra council, Cultivating Community is seeking 500 local residents, 32 cafes and 3 offices to participate.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Right now, food waste comprises more than half the average household rubbish bin in the municipality. That means we’re all squandering good soil, food and money, from the residents through to the authorities. We’re paying to offload a useful resource to landfill, only for it to rot into methane – a potent greenhouse gas.

“We’re dooming all those nutrients and embodied water and energy to no man’s land, where we can’t recover them,” says Pete Huff, from Cultivating Community. “By learning some simple skills in our households and businesses we can cut the Yarra waste stream in half. It makes good financial and environmental sense and it makes good sense as citizens as well.”

He says the first skill is to avoid food wastage in the first place. The program’s website carries links to recipe ideas for leftovers and odds and ends.

If your salad greens often go slimy or your packets pass their use-by date, Mr Huff recommends making a meal plan and a shopping list to match it – after you check the pantry to see what’s already there. “They’re all simple things, but it’s about smart shopping, clever cooking and storing food correctly,” he says.

When it comes to unavoidable waste – the not-so-edible food scraps such as lemon peels, banana skins or eggshells – the answer is compost. Participants in the program will be subsidised to purchase a worm farm or composting system to suit their needs, and then helped to do it right with workshops and advice.

“Well-managed compost and worm systems don’t smell and they take up little room and time,” Mr Huff says. “We want these systems in people’s backyards, on balconies, or laneways. And if that’s not an option we’ll put them in their neighbourhood so they’re part of the fabric of the community.”

At the Collingwood Children’s Farm, volunteers will collect food scraps from cafes in the area, and pedal them to the compost hub on specially designed Trisled cargo trikes, which can lug up to 100 kilos at a time.

As well as the food scraps, Ms Lavers adds animal bedding and cardboard to the mix to provide a source of carbon. It’s a serious operation: to turn the pile, she pilots a bobcat.

“We see compost as a real asset, particularly in an urban environment where fertility can be an issue,” says Mr Huff.

Read this article at The Age online

Unburnable carbon

In Environment, Social justice on

This is an edited version of a talk I gave at the Wheeler Centre on June 6, 2013

AWAY from the glare and confusion on climate change, there is a deeper conversation going on. It is changing the way climate activists plan their campaigns, and it is changing conversations behind the doors where money talks.

Here is one example: on Tuesday, I went to a lunchtime meeting at Goldman Sachs, at 101 Collins Street, the swankiest office building in town.

In Rolling Stone, in 2009, journalist Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs like this: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

But, arguably, this meeting on Tuesday was an unusual one. It was organised by the Investor Group on Climate Change. There were about 100 people from the superannuation and fund management industry, in a big teleconference in Sydney and Melbourne, and they were there to talk to the American climate activist Bill McKibben.

Now McKibben, who is touring Australia this week, also writes for Rolling Stone. In one article last year he wrote this: “We need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth.”

McKibben got arrested twice last year for his climate activism. The event went for nearly 2 hours – McKibben gave a short spiel, and then there was an extended discussion session with a panel of super fund managers and investment analysts. Why were they engaging with this guy?

Watch this video at the Wheeler Centre website

Before I get to why they’re all willing to be there, I want to offer one small update on our current climate projections.

Turn Down the Heat: World Bank report

Late last year the World Bank put out a report called ‘Turn Down the Heat’ report, which stated that even if all nations fulfill their pledges to reduce emissions, we’re still on track for 3.5 to 4˚C warming by the end of the century.

A 4˚C world means: “Extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.” They concluded that there is no certainty that it’s possible for humanity to adapt to a 4˚C hotter world.

It’s a terrifying thought – put out by a very conservative public institution. It’s also hard to really comprehend what kind of changes that would involve, and what kind of suffering it would entail. But one thing it makes me think is that we need to do a better job of avoiding that situation.

Carbon budget: we’re blowing it

And that’s why I come back to that meeting at Goldman Sachs. The reason I was there and those finance types were there, is that a different way of thinking about the climate crisis has sharpened the debate. It’s the idea of a carbon budget. In 2009, scientists from the Potsdam Institute in Germany produced a set of emissions scenarios together with their likely influence on global temperatures.

Their paper says that to keep an 80 per cent chance of staying at 2 degrees or below, we can only release about one-fifth of the carbon dioxide in current proven fossil fuel reserves.

It’s worth noting that at the rate we’re going, we’ll have blown the budget by mid next decade. And of course, the fossil fuel industry is always searching for more.

Even for a 50-50 chance of going over 2 degrees, the report said, two-thirds of our coal, oil and gas must stay in the ground.

Subsequently, a British organisation called Carbon Tracker added to that analysis. They released some research saying that the reserves held by the world’s 200 largest listed coal, oil and gas companies alone is more than enough to exceed that threshold.

The moral case

Since the carbon budget idea has become more common, there have been two kinds of responses: the moral case and the business case. I’ll cover each one, and then the way they cross over, because that’s particularly unusual and relevant for us as citizens.

As I’ve mentioned, Bill McKibben is the person most associated with the moral case. Simply put, his argument goes like this: “if it’s wrong to wreck the planet, then it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage”.

Based on the unexpected popularity of his Rolling Stone article, he and others started a new campaign for calling for universities, churches, cities and pension funds to sell out of fossil fuel companies. It’s called Go Fossil Free, and it’s spread like wildfire across the USA. In just over six months there are already several hundred campaigns, and a dozen or so institutions have agreed to divest.

The argument isn’t so much that they’ll bankrupt the companies, but that they’ll undermine their social licence, and that open up room for regulation.

People are working on this moral divestment case here already. If you haven’t seen any yet, you can expect to. As with the US, it’s not only targeted at universities, but also churches and local councils, and for banks not to fund new fossil fuel projects.

They’ve had two wins so far: the NSW Synod of the Uniting Church has announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. And a couple of years ago, ANU students successfully campaigned for the university to sell stocks in a coal seam gas company called Metgasco. Those students are a cheeky bunch – they’re part of the national Lock the Campus campaign and they’ve since filed FOI requests for all the details of the university’s fossil fuel holdings. Now they’re moving onto the ACT government.

But most of all, the campaign here is aimed at superannuation funds.

There’s a campaign called the Vital Few – which is run by an organization chaired by former liberal leader John Hewson. It hasn’t had much success yet, but they say it’s early days. The Vital Few campaign says that across the super industry, about 55 per cent of funds are held in high carbon investments and only 2 per cent in low (although there’s no standard definition for what that means).

One plank of their campaign is a moral call to action for citizens: there’s no sense in greening your home if you’re investing in climate change all the while. You’ve got to change the way you invest.

All these campaigns have different approaches and different targets, but share a common thread – there’s a moral reason not to invest in fossil fuels, both for us as individuals and for our institutions.

The business case

But there’s another way to look at those numbers, and it’s this: “Holy heck, if four-fifths are going to stay in the ground, then someone is going to lose a lot of money.” Essentially, the argument is that investing in fossil fuels is risky, and you’ll want to sell down your stake, because if you don’t, at some point you’ll lose it.

In the case of listed companies, the value of their reserves is factored into their share price. Those reserves are assets on their books, and investors currently have an expectation that they will deliver an income stream in the future. And of course, it’s not just fossil fuels – all kinds of industries have a lot of assets tied up in the carbon economy.

Climate risk

This is one element of a broader set of risks that are described as “climate risk” – the prospect of reduced earnings or devalued assets, caused by climate change.

The first, as I just mentioned, is the “carbon bubble” or the “unburnable carbon” scenario. It’s the prospect that we’ll get our act together to prevent emissions, and fossil fuels will lose value. That could be due to tough policy measures, such as robust carbon pricing or regulations, here, in China or elsewhere.

There are other kinds of climate risk too. For example, the risk that cheap clean technology will out-compete fossil fuels. Or, curiously, if you’re a long-term investor, there’s a risk in the possibility that others will switch away from fossil fuels.

Then there’s the mother of all climate risks: the physical impacts. At the lower end of the scale – which, as we’ve seen around the world already, is by no means low – perhaps it’s a flood that destroys infrastructure. But remember the World Bank’s scenario of a 4-degree hotter world: it’s safe to assume that a climate to which humanity can’t adapt is not consistent with steady returns for investors.

Reports on reports on reports

When I started researching this stuff, I was overwhelmed by the vast quantity of reports on it. The finance world is rife with warnings about it. Most of the words spilled have been about climate risk in relation to “asset owners”: pension funds, super funds, insurers and sovereign wealth funds, such as the Future Fund. Among investors, they have a uniquely long-term perspective. In Australia the average super member has 20 years before they’ll retire.

Last year, the Asset Owner’s Disclosure Project – the organisation chaired by John Hewson, and which also runs the Vital Few campaign – released ratings of the way the funds are dealing climate risk. Australia had six of the top ten funds around the world (Local Government Super, CareSuper, Cbus Super, VicSuper, UniSuper and AustralianSuper).

But there’s no cause for celebration. The report concluded that no fund had “accurately assessed or managed its climate risk”. The highest rating fund, Local Government Super, estimates that it has about 10 per cent of its money in low-carbon assets, and 45 per cent in high.

The head of sustainability for Local Government Super, Bill Harnett, was at that meeting at Goldman Sachs, and he said this: “There is an inescapable logic that there are more fossil fuels on balance sheets around the world than we will ever be able to realize in our investments. There is an inevitability. We don’t know when, but we know it will come.”

And yet, his fund’s portfolio is still a long way from investing in a way that is consistent with limiting global warming to 2 degrees.

Why isn’t there change?

At that meeting at Goldman Sachs, everyone in the room accepted the broad numbers that McKibben stated – that four-fifths must stay in the ground. I’m assured that all the big Australian superannuation funds accept that this risk exists, in a broad sense.

Much of the discussion was about how they don’t know how to evaluate it. A couple of large financial analysts have tried. In recent months, HSBC in London did some modelling that showed a deflating carbon bubble could nearly halve the value of coal assets on the London exchange, and knock three-fifths from the value of oil and gas companies. Citi Research did a similar exercise for the Australian stock exchange and found that 14 per cent of value of the ASX200 is in coal, oil and gas, and related industries.

But the superannuation funds in the room say they don’t know how to incorporate those scenarios into their investment decisions.

Ian Wood from AMP Capital said there are two broad reasons. One is that conventional financial modelling gives greater weight to short term earnings. Future dollars are discounted, so if a coal project is making money now, then that matters more.

The other reason is the immense uncertainty about how those scenarios could play out. What will government policy be, here and around the world? If the carbon price spreads, what will it be? When and where will it be brought in? What will happen to technology? What will China do?

Here’s the upshot: for the time being, almost all of our superannuation funds are taking a position that that we won’t limit warming to 2 degrees. They’re betting that we’ll exceed the safe threshold for human civilisation. And they’re not just betting on the game, they’re playing it as well. Their investment policy helps shape that 4-degree world, and helps us on course for a world where they won’t get a good return on very many of their investments.

With a couple of minor exceptions, they’re all just sitting there, watching each other and saying they accept that it’s all true, but they can’t do anything about it.

Bad news and good news

I left the meeting with two conflicting thoughts. The 100 people there that day, they’re the ones in the whole industry who are the most engaged. And even they can’t find it in their modelling to take account of a risk they all acknowledge to be real. They’ll figure out a way at some stage, but it’s clear the change isn’t happening fast enough. Right now, the business case isn’t enough to convince super funds to change.

But there was something else. The really interesting thing about that meeting on Tuesday was this: McKibben was in the room. And the fact that he was in the room made the climate risk more significant for everyone there who was listening. The same goes for all of the campaigns, both the moral and business ones, the civic and corporate pressure.

As McKibben put it at Goldman Sachs: “For our purposes the fight is as good as the win.”

There’s a kind of vicious cycle in the way we’re investing at the moment – it reinforces the systems that cause climate change.

But the carbon bubble idea is so uncertain at the moment, and public policy is so uncertain, that the more people are talking about the carbon bubble, the more likelihood there is one.

So there’s a virtuous circle too. If these big institutions move their money, and if individuals badger their funds and their friends about it, then it becomes more of a reality for the people who are deciding how money is invested. It becomes more likely that governments will implement policy and regulations consistent with 2-degree warming.

Because of the nature of investment decisions, the tipping point isn’t the day when all governments sign off on a radical climate justice agreement. It’s the day when enough people think that significant action is possible. Or when they believe that China really is shifting away from coal. Or when they accept that the cost of solar panels has come down so fast that our centralised, fossil fuel energy system is going to change. Or when they get frightened that others are going to trade out first.

There is a deeper conversation occurring, and it is one that accepts the science, and one that includes both climate activists and market analysts. It has the potential to shift rapidly. It is happening – the only question is whether citizens can make sure it happens in time. 

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre website

Read this related article: ‘Bursting the carbon bubble’

Energy use portals

In Greener Homes, The Age on

Quarterly bill shock could become a thing of the past – if you can pay attention instead.

WHEN a smart meter was installed at Tim Forcey’s house in Sandringham in March, he decided to turn the extra expense into information.

He signed onto the free ‘Energy Easy’ web-portal offered by electricity distributor United Energy.

Mr Forcey is a chemical engineer and a member of the Bayside Climate Change Action Group. With his family, he’d already made some changes – installing insulation, external awnings, double-glazing and solar panels, and switching halogen lights for LEDs, among other things.

But the portal helped the Forceys understand even more about their bill. “You can compare your electricity use hour-to-hour, day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month. And you can also compare your use against a neighbourhood average,” he explains.

Their usage in May – about 16 kilowatt-hours per day, for four people – was about average for their suburb. But in the details, they found motivation to do better. With the help of hourly consumption data, Mr Forcey twigged that he’d been running two modems day and night. He switched one off, and put the other on a timer.

The new information also gave him a reality check. While he’d been “hunting for watts here and there”, he figured out that the family’s spa accounts for half their energy use. “People with pools would find similar things,” he says. “Those luxury items use a lot of electricity.”

Smart meters will be installed in every Victorian household by the end of the year. Retailers are beginning to offer flexible pricing, where you can choose to pay different rates at different times of the day. Depending on your capacity to understand and alter your habits, it will prove an opportunity or a threat.

Dr David Byrne, from the University of Melbourne, says most of us don’t have a good idea of how much we electricity use.

“People tend to underestimate their own energy consumption, relative to others’,” he says. “But there’s significant error on both sides. There’s a decent number who overestimate as well.”

He expects our knowledge will improve, as better billing information becomes a matter of competition between retailers. “We’re going to be more informed about our bills – there’s going to be much less scope for bill shock,” he says.

So far, several electricity retailers and distributors have launched web portals, of differing quality. You can find more information and links on the state government’s Switch On website.

Together with his colleagues in the economics department, Dr Byrne has been studying the way householders use Billcap, an electricity information portal used by retailers Click Energy and Australian Power and Gas.

Drawing on smart meter data, Billcap allows customers to view their usage, set energy budgets, estimate bills and compare consumption with similar and efficient households. It can also offer tailored conservation tips, as well as incentives to help shift peaks in demand.

Dr Byrne says that the households who were offered the service reduced their daily usage by 3 per cent, on average.

Those customers who used the site regularly did even better. “If you’re actively looking at the information, we found a 7 per cent reduction in daily energy usage,” he says.

The researchers are working to identify exactly how the participants cut back their usage, and who engaged most. “We’re digging further into the data, but these estimates are consistent with what has been found internationally,” he says.

Read this article at The Age online

Gelato at Brunetti’s

In Culture, Environment on

“I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods.” That’s the first line of Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote.

Me – I am always drawn back to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the sentences and their paragraphs.

Every autumn, for the several years I’ve rented a room on an elm-lined street in Carlton, I get an urge to read the novella. I want to read it sitting in my terrace courtyard in the waning sun; on a stool in the window of a busy café; on my grandmother’s old armchair in my room, looking out to the yellowing trees.

It’s an autumnal story, gentle and sad, lonely and tender, its scenes fluttering with falling leaves. It begins and ends in fall, and the narrator first meets Holly Golightly in September, on “an evening with the first ripple-chills of autumn running through it”. It barely wisps through winter and spring, and Holly “hibernates” in summer.

The narrator she calls “Fred”, after her brother, or sometimes Buster or Cookie, and who shares much with a young Capote – and something with me, too – says he doesn’t care much for springtime; autumns, rather, “seem that season of beginning”.

I’ve never thought about the book all that much, about what it means, or why I like it so. I just want to read it when the mornings are crisp.

But this year, I was drawn to it before the leaves alerted me, by the New Yorker, which carried a dismissive review of a new Broadway adaptation. The critic adores the novella, however: it is “so extraordinary a work,” he wrote, “that it incites not writerly envy but pride”.

Yes, I thought, that’s true. When it was published, Norman Mailer said Capote was “the most perfect writer” of his generation, who wrote “the best sentences, word for word, rhythm upon rhythm”. Mailer said he “would not change two words” in the book. Yes, I should read it again. Maybe its sentences will rub off on mine?

That was in early April. Normally, the leaves on my street would have begun to fall by then. One summer during the drought they fell at Christmas and we all worried it was the end for the trees. But the council installed all kinds of sprinklers and mulched around the trunks, and gradually they recovered. And this year, autumn arrived late. The hottest summer on record stretched deep into March and April: an extended, gelato-summer, my evenings still punctuated by the short walk across the park and around the corner to the ice-cream counter at Brunetti. Beneath those balmy days and mild nights the trees remained green. 

***

I do not know how many times I’ve read the book; less than ten, I’d guess. But I do remember when I first heard of it. I was in a crummy bar in Canberra, visiting an old friend, my first housemate when I moved there after university. He is several years older, a contrary character, alternately passionate and ambivalent about day-to-day life.

The bar has a sour smell, sourer every time I return. There were three of us: my friend and an old comrade of his – a socialist turned sensualist with a large tattoo of a rat on his forearm. We were drinking beer and talking about books; or rather, they were talking about books and I was listening. The socialist adored Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My friend agreed: “It’s a gorgeous story,” he said and his eyes grew moist, as they do in all the conversations with him I like best.

I thought it improbable. I’d never seen the movie – still haven’t, as a matter of fact – but I had the notion it was a swooning romance. I was suspicious of the book. Nevertheless, I bought a copy, one of those cheap, orange, Penguin classics. It contains the novella and three short stories, same as the first edition in 1958. It is pleasingly slim, enough to fit in your pocket.

The story isn’t a romance, I found out – not that sort, anyway. It’s all memory, belonging and loss, and a platonic kind of love. A decade on, Fred recalls the cycle of seasons he spent living above Holly Golightly in a New York brownstone; at first captivated, then burned and finally, warmed, by her reflected glow.

It was wartime, 1943, and young Fred had moved from the south with a fancy to be a writer. Before he’d even met her, the card above the girl’s mailbox nagged him “like a tune”:

Miss Holly Golightly

Travelling

Holly is a society girl, not a prostitute, though she understands the gossip; after all, she admits, “I’ve always thrown out such a jazzy line”. Assorted unpleasant men exchange generous tips for her company; Capote described his creation as an American geisha. She’s only 19, escaping her past, but always remembering it – playing sad country songs in the fire escape while her hair dries – and then inventing herself anew.

I’m not one for recalling plots, and I know it. But even so, Breakfast at Tiffany’s surprises me every time. By the end, yet again, all I have is a shimmering sense of her, and an impression of the writer too, the outsider upstairs, sometimes writing, often listening in, wishing he were nearer.

This year, though, I noticed a few things along the way.

It’s the ’40s, sure, but Holly stumps for marriage equality. She’s settled down some by this stage, and tells Fred she loves her man just fine, but he’s not her “guy ideal”. And who is? Jawaharlal Nehru, say, or Greta Garbo: “Why not? A person ought to be able to marry men or women or – listen, if you came to me and said you wanted to hitch up with Man o’ War, I’d respect your feeling. No, I’m serious. Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is.”

Man o’ War was a famous thoroughbred horse.

This too: I discovered – again surely – that Fred’s birthday is 30 September, the same as mine. And Capote’s. Not only that, but it’s also the day on which everything unravels: “So the days, the last days, blow about in memory, hazy, autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I’ve lived.” That’s how Fred described our birthday. It was really the three of us there, you know: Holly, Fred and me.

But most of all, I thought about Holly and the “mean reds”. Not the blues.

“No,” she tells Fred, slowly. “No, the blues are because you’re getting fat or maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re sad, that’s all. But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is.”

Her only cure is to hail a cab to Tiffany’s and look in the windows. “It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in the nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets.”

Holly yearns for a real-life place that makes her feel the way Tiffany’s does, maybe in Mexico by the sea, when her lost brother returns from the war. She went there once – they’d raise horses, and he’s good with horses. But even as she says it, Fred and Holly and me, we all know it’s an impossible dream.

***

In my street, the first heavy leaf fall came on May 1, the first day of the last month of the season: there was a cold wind and the yellow leaves fell like a storm. But then it got warm again, and once more I went for gelato. In most respects I’m an advocate for variety, but when it comes to ice cream, I’ve settled on my gelato ideal: two scoops in a waffle cone, chocolate and lemon.

This autumn Brunetti moved around the corner from Faraday Street, where it had been for nearly 30 years, and into the space on Lygon Street vacated when Borders died.

I visited the new store on a Saturday night, on a date. I had the mean reds that day, shot through with the blues: I knew well the cause. I’d been writing about climate change – the worsening disaster projections now, next decade, throughout my lifetime and beyond, together with the profound absence of either prevention or preparation. Nothing new, I know, but nothing tolerable either, when you think about it. In a recent journal article, a speculative “future history” by respected American science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, I read a throwaway line: “The human populations of Australia and Africa, of course, were wiped out.”

The store was alive, teeming and hollering like an old-time trading floor in a stock boom. As we entered, it became clear there were two kinds of people. Dozens of waiters strode after their errands, wearing bow ties and black waistcoats or else slim black aprons tied in a cross at the back, while all around the rest of us tottered, distracted and enraptured by the cakes, tarts, chocolates and macaroons, and the mirrors, the bonze trim, the patterned tiles and the blown-up, black and white photographs on the walls. We gaped alongside infinite desserts, we stared at the baristas on the central podium and we swept past pastries and savouries, croissants and paninis, until we stopped before a huge, tiled pizza oven.

I was agog. Sparkle-eyed. I turned to her and gestured toward all the people, sitting, talking, waiting, laughing, fattening: “Isn’t it wonderful?”

To our left there was a roped-off section commanded by a waiter in a headset. Straight ahead, the gelato, more flavours than ever before. “Maybe,” she replied slowly. “But it’s so much. It’s awful. It’s madness – it’s everything that doesn’t make sense.”

I agreed: awful. And wonderful. We slipped out of there, without gelato this time, and back into the autumn Carlton night.

***

I read the novella for a second time, writing this story, but the moment had passed. I’m done with wistfulness, for now. Everything – endless summer and falling leaves, apathy and indulgence, reds and blues, bad governments and worse; brown coal, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and humanity – it all has its season.

Read this article at the Wheeler Centre website