Incongruous court building will disrupt village-like atmosphere

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alling Shepparton a “village” maybe considered blasphemous.

However, a village is nothing but a conglomeration of people and the supporting infrastructure upon which they depend for daily living, and that is pretty much what Shepparton is.

An artist's impression of Shepparton's
proposed new courthouse - it will be
rather incongruous in the city's
village-like atmosphere.

It just so happens that more people have decided to settle in Shepparton than in any other nearby urban area and so grasping at whatever it is that will boost egos our village is now labelled a “city”.

Does that make any difference? Officially probably, but if we dare take it too literally, it can distort our understanding of what is and isn’t important in our village.

All urban areas have a heart and Shepparton’s has historically been the central business district presently centred on the Maude St Mall and its immediate surrounds.

Commerciality has driven a retail diaspora resulting in the creation of major shopping centres on the city’s fringes, effectively driving a dagger through the city’s heart.

Wounded, the city limps on, hindered by an administration which sees solutions through a dated 20^th Century prism that allows only visions reliant upon ideas built around a fossil fuel-based economy.

Shepparton, and those who live here, need and deserve better; they deserve innovative, bold and adventurous planning that will ready the village for a future in which water reliability will be threatened and its fellow “lifeblood”, oil will also be increasingly scarce becoming largely the province of the few.

Our village once had a human-scale, evolving from times when energy was scarce in that it was mostly human and animal, but then progress came along and in just few decades we were being whisked around the Goulburn Valley in steam trains and motor vehicles initiating the social erosion that continues today.

Our communities have become socially shredded as the insisted individualism of the corporatized world drives aspirational wedges between us as we pursue various goals bringing on a perceived and practical inequality.

A manifestation of that inequality, the collapse of values that bind a community, is the plan to build an incongruous court house in the heart of our village that is clearly out of step with the human-scale of its surrounds.

Member for Shepparton, Suzanna Sheed, herself a lawyer, correctly points out that the building will be more than somewhere to dispense the law for it will also be the focus for a host of social services processes that are presently sprinkled throughout the city.

That being the case, what is proposed appears to be a distorted effort to contain blustering egos within a limited footprint and so the building has gone up rather than out, disrupting and destroying Shepparton’s beautiful low-rise skyline.

The preservation of Shepparton’s village-like atmosphere is too important to sacrifice to such economic callousness and so rather than the proposed glass-like shrine to vanity, we should be acquiring more property and building a low-rise complex that reflects the human-scale of our village.  

Yes, it's time to 'scare the horses'

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t’s time to “scare the horses”.

A more than a decade of reading about and listening to some of the world’s best minds and understanding the damage you and I, and our fellows are doing and have done to earth’s atmosphere, the constant, although subtle, message has been not to scare the horses.

Yes, It's time to scare the horses.

Okay, but what does that mean?

The facts about climate change, indisputable and illustrated beyond debate by the world’s scientific community, are so contrary to life that to articulate them, as we must if we are to emerge intact from this dilemma, would freeze people into inaction.

Many have warned of that freeze, along with caveat that many “lectured” to about their behaviour, re-double their resistance, become angry,  even more remote from reason and so increasingly determined to adhere to behaviours that are worsening our troubles and align themselves, emotionally and physically, with values contrary to what the world needs.

Circumstances that manifested themselves in two world wars most certainly scared the horses and although the responses were varied, people, although frightened, unsure and uncertain, broadly and generally responded with a commitment that saw sweeping transformations in behaviour preparing communities around the world for the privations, destruction, costs and deaths of war.

Climate change demands an even more disciplined approach, but unlike a war there is no obvious adversary and so while some are scared and confused, a small, but powerful and massively influential minority whose power and influence rest in maintenance of the status quo, continue to laud what exists and encourage more of the same.

As convincing and as populist as their arguments might sound, they are false and beyond that, what is proposed for United Nations climate talks in Paris later this year can be shown as insufficient to put the world on a path to repair.

Preparations for war illustrated the amazing innovative, inventive and can do nature of people and within that their adaptability, which has taken humans to the top of the food chain, as we stood together to confront a common enemy.

Having a clear understanding of who and where the enemy was simplified affairs as it gave people a focus; somewhere and something upon which to vent their frustrations, fears and anger.

Climate change is a more complex, convoluted and wicked problem as the enemy is “us”, making it difficult and confusing, and somewhat impossible, to be angry with yourself and along with that put yourself, your family and friends, and in fact the whole of society of which you are an active part, in the “enemy” category.

So rather than bolt about like scared horses and be angry and irrational, we need to understand and accept we were wrong, we made a mistake and although time is scarce, we need to bond on a war-like footing, make bold decisions, take equally bold actions and make the great escape.

Roaming brings many benefits both to individuals and communities

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iding a bike was a skill learnt in the historic-fog of personal history.

Professor Trevor Hancock used
this image to illustrate the
advantages to a community
of "roaming" - advantages
now largely lost.

That relatively simple skill brought many bonuses and chief among them was freedom.

Suddenly the world was my oyster (well, the geographical wilds of Echuca east at least) and I was free to roam, pretty much at will.

That wonderful freedom allowed to myself and my friends was not considered much until recently when a Canada’s Professor Trevor Hancock talked about how stronger, resilient and healthier communities were when kids had the freedom to roam.

That roaming, he explained unintentionally informed kids about their community in that they got to know a variety of people, understand how it worked, its strengths, weaknesses and along with that understood and learnt much about themselves, all things that enriched them personally and aligned them, ultimately with the unstated aims of their community.

A pictorial image illustrated clearly how our roaming has been reduced to almost nil as the decades have passed taking with it an almost inexplicable sense of community that arose from kids roaming about the place.

The image illustrated that a kid of today could roam, unaccompanied, about 300 metres from his home; his mother less than a kilometre; his grandfather nearly two kilometres and his great grandfather regularly roamed about 10 kilometres to go fishing.

The visiting professor lamented the loss of roaming and was able to equate it with the decline in the broader wellbeing of community, suggesting that it illustrated, in a practical sense, our personal disconnect with nature.

Humans are unquestionably a part of nature and have long and rich history of being a part of it, until modernity really took hold.

Professor Trevor Hancock - he extolls the
community benefits of "roaming".

Humans have been hand-in-glove with nature for most of their existence, and many still are, but as Professor Hancock pointed out, we now spend 80 per cent of our time in a building, and so disconnected from nature, and of the other 10 per cent, half of that is spent inside a vehicle..

That disconnect from nature is now almost total and what is happening in the world indicates that such remoteness is bringing unintended consequences – we are almost absolutely insensitive to the impact our behaviour is having on earth’s climate system.

Roaming, of course is not the solution, rather just a small part of it.

The almost incommunicable health roaming brought to our communities appears to be lost forever as most people, reacting to the few stories given broad coverage in our popular media about isolated violent behaviour keep their children pretty much within reach, killing off their natural adventurous spirit.

Learning to ride a bike was about freedom and primed my willingness to engage with the other, a desire still with me today.

We need to look 'up-river' if we are to resolve domestic violence

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Australia's PM, Malcolm Turnbull - he
sees the solution to domestic violence
 in a "rich spend", while it
is really an 'up-river' problem.

omestic violence is an “up-river” problem.



Malcolm Turnbull’s plan to spend richly to slow what is mostly men attacking women and the “up-river” theory arrived personally about the same time.

The $100 million spend was something about which I was inherently uncomfortable for it seemed about mistaking the poison for the cure.

Domestic violence arises for a host of reasons, but prime among them is our market-driven consumerist based society that creates mostly unfilled aspirations manifesting frustration and anger that frequently erupt as domestic violence.

The PM’s market driven-like response to domestic violence was unveiled on the same day as the co-founder of the world’s Healthy-Cities movement, Professor Trevor Hancock from Canada’s University of Victoria, talked about the “up-river” problem to a room of about 150 people.

He told of a small river-side town that hauled a floating body from the water; day after day the bodies kept floating down the river and so the town developed a complex rescue and morgue infrastructure to remove the bodies and decently dispose of them, until someone suggested maybe the town should lift is gaze and look up-river and see if the source of the problem could be found.

The scenario discussed by Professor Hancock and proposed resolution of domestic violence sound strikingly similar – the PM’s approach to domestic violence focusses on the symptoms and so sees a change in the behaviour of men as resolving the difficulty.

Many of those assumptions are correct, but the actual violence is naught but a symptom for there is a deeper malaise.

There is a broad and sweeping societal malignancy that can be directly related to the profit and growth society that already exists in Australia and one Mr Turnbull wants to further strengthen.

Many directly link domestic violence to the less than honourable male behaviour and of course they are correct, but what causes that corrupt conduct, what frustrates men, why does our way of life disturb personally held understandings of status, erode aspirations, or contort their confidence to such an extent that they seek control by physically lashing out at those nearest them, mostly their female partner?

Existing systems epitomized by the commercial success of our PM promise much, but are analytically foreign to human betterment for they discriminate against equality, while celebrating individuality.

Each of us is of course an individual, but the individualism encouraged and almost enforced throughout modern western societies is foreign to what we really need, which is a sense of belonging, purpose, friendship, collaboration, fellowship and a belief that you are an integral and vital part of your community.

The perpetrator of domestic violence is estranged from his community, and despite appearances, probably frightened, emasculated, lonely and socially impotent and in accessing the only power he has left, he physically or emotionally damages his partner.

Yes, it is up-river; many of our men are thrashing about in a society created pool of frustration, disappointment and powerlessness that causes them to exercise the worst feature of their maleness - violence.

Grand court house proposal assualts good sense

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deas reminiscent of the energy-rich 20^th Century and appealing to and warming egos are embedded in a plan to build a large, glamourous and centralized court in Shepparton.

The grand new court house proposed
 for Shepparton - energy scarcity
and information abundance
makes it already obsolete.

Cutting to the chase, it is simply the wrong thing to do.

Shepparton people frequently lament the centralization of government and health facilities in Melbourne, and a few major regional centres, and now, in a Goulburn Valley sense, we are doing the same thing.

Centralization of services was good sense in the energy rich and information poor 20^th Century, but the circumstances have reversed; we now have an overabundance of information and a scarcity of energy.

Living in what is colloquially known as the “information age” and the officially deemed “Anthropocene” – an era in which humans are now the major influence on the earth’s biosphere – leaves us no option but to design our lives around those two facts.

Rather than taking the people to where the infrastructure is, we should be taking the infrastructure, which now is frequently little more than information, to where the people are.

So instead of spending richly on creating a soon to be impractical 20^th Century piece of infrastructure, we need to understand how the disruptive information technology works and take the until now court house-bound law processes to the people.

The modern court house need be nought more than a mobile, compact team of people, armed with a barrage of technology around which the information age has been built, and through that take what is a virtual court house to the people.

True, the virtual court house idea is not ideal but even a cursory look at world events, with just a hint of understanding, illustrates that Shepparton will not be afforded exemption from the unfolding rigours facing humanity, such as resource scarcity and a seriously disrupted climate, and so maintenance of our civil society might need some less than ideal ideas.

It seems that the concepts upon which the last century were built have infiltrated our being to such an extent that we can no longer think beyond the horizon and our subsequent sclerotic thinking prohibits us from imagining that there might be another way; a better way of doing things that allows us to take off the blinkers that so limit our view and subsequently our perceptions.

What is proposed is unquestionably impressive, but for those of us interested in creating a community that is both sustainable and resilient, and ready to withstand the unsettling and difficult decades ahead, it assaults good sense.

Shepparton should be applauded for its ambitious endeavours in providing the city with a grand new art museum and now an equally grand court house, but considering the needs that our different future will demand, both are inappropriate.

Living life, vicariously

R eporters mostly live life vicariously. They watch, record and write about what went on, but usually as a spectator, looking on from outside the arena. Thinking of this, the words of the late U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt ring loud: Theodore Roosevelt. “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Quietism, with its philosophical overtones, in some ways describes those who stand outside the arena for they neither challenge nor support anything and in Australia’s prosperous decades of the 50s, 60s and 70s it was a profitable stance. The decade of the eighties changed all that, it continued apace in the 90s and now in the second decade of the 21st Century, it is critical that people, including spectators and reporters, not just watch and report, but join the conversation. Shepparton presently, and urgently, needs all hands on deck, everyone needs to step into the arena, join the affray, take a chance on victory and risk defeat. The city, and it is not alone, needs ideas that will equip it to live with weather quite unlike anything it, and the greater Goulburn Valley have ever experienced. Climate scientists use evidence to illustrate changes in our weather and so they are in the arena using both their skills and knowledge to help us see what is happening and explain why we should join them. Having mostly lived vicariously as a journalist, insisting on objectivity, fairness and balance, my life has largely been that of the spectator, but that all changed about a decade or so ago when it became obvious that because of our behaviour the earth was warming and so the Goldilocks-like climate that has allowed humans to prosper was changing. Climbing the fence and stepping into the arena was the easy part, but struggling with the “dust and sweat and blood” arising from blatant indifference, apathy and the grossly misplaced confidence that technology and man’s inventiveness can resolve all, makes the vicariousness and inculcated quietism of my other life mighty attractive.

Walking and Cycling given priority in five-step city plan

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alking and cycling in line with a “five-step plan” should have priority when imagining Shepparton’s town planning and infrastructure needs.

The need to acknowledge and implement that plan falls upon both the city’s paid officers and its elected representatives.

Let’s look at the plan.

A sign of the times
 in Shepparton.

Step one: The plan and it associated infrastructure must first and foremost be walkable.

Pedestrians must be able to use and access easily wherever it is in the city they want to go.

Step two: Once the needs and convenience of those on foot are attended to, the cyclist should be considered next, meaning that after pedestrians’ needs are resolved, facilities and amenities should be such that cycling is not only easy, but next to walking the preferred method of moving about.

Step three: Obviously, in city as geographically large as Shepparton, walking and cycling are not always feasible or possible and so the next option is public transit and so that should always be close to the top of the planning agenda.

With fossil fuels become less viable, private transport will become an ever reducing option and so the city needs to reinvent Shepparton around one of the many forms of innovative public transit systems.

Shepparton was recently visited by a fellow who explained how the city could be serviced by battery-powered, Google-controlled, driverless vehicles that would circulate throughout the city, taking both people and freight wherever they, and it, needed to go. Such “pods” are already technologically possible.

People and freight would arrive in the city by sophisticated rail and then taken around the city on their Google-controlled, driverless pods.

Step four: This is about land and property use – for a town or city to be walkable, there has to be somewhere to walk to and so our designers need to ensure the city is dotted with beautiful public spaces where people simply want to be.

Property use is also about ensuring the present and preferred idea of sprawl, that is growth at the cities edges, is reversed with the emphasis being put on infill and the development, or redevelopment, is concentrated on the inner-parts of the city where the infrastructure is at its most intricate and developed. The city’s rating system should reflect that, rates being the cheapest in the centre and more costly as you get toward the periphery,

Step five: When steps one through to four are completed, the city’s attention should turn to road transport, but not until all four of the first steps have been totally developed and all options exhausted.

Five fundamental steps toward making Shepparton a city that may just endure the rigours of the 21^st Century; a century that beyond doubt is going to be different from all those passed, particularly the energy-rich 20^th Century.