June 28, 2022

When my husband and I were first married, and he was in medical school, I taught high school English at a large and diverse public high school in Webster Groves, Missouri. That job supported us during those years, but that was in 1971 and my income didn’t make a difference when I applied for a credit card. Only my husband’s income counted, but he didn’t have an income.

In his last year of medical school I was pregnant. Our first child was due in August, which meant I would be able to teach through the end of the school year, and then we would move back to Minnesota where Bruce would be a resident in family practice. He would have an income.

What I didn’t know those first months of my pregnancy was that the superintendent of schools and the principal (both white men) conferred to decide…

It is early in the morning again. Maybe nobody is going to read what I write now, but I’ll spend some more time with writing anyhow, meaning, instead of lying in bed a bit longer and thinking about what I experienced during my lifetime and regretting that lying in bed and just thinking about all these things, I can never put it into writing, well, instead of just thinking about it I can get up, sit at the computer when nothing is distracting me that early in the morning, I just write about whatever comes into my head.

So, it is even a bit earlier than what it was yesterday morning, when I started writing my September Diary at 5 o’clock in the morning. So far, nobody commented on this little piece of writing. How do I know, whether it is interesting to other people or not? I just don’t…

Our daughter is moving out. She is moving out for years and the process has not ended. It is a piecemeal operation by a thousand cuts. Perhaps it is a friendly departure from childhood and her parents.

The bed, disassembled, is awaiting removal and another slice of her youth will be removed. We, the parents, have to let go. Just another cut.

Over the years the view from her window has changed. Where once we could see the escarpment in the distant there is now a wall of bushes. They form a peaceful, but at the same time restrictive and protective, wall.

Two of her trusted companions of her childhood are looking on and wonder when it will be their turn to leave home and join Caroline.

Perhaps never and they will be part of our new “Quiet Room” we want to establish here. No electronics, not even music :-(…

During the sixties and seventies, Australia discovered making free money by selling all our previously held government assets. Government insurances, the post and telegraph, banks, anything that could be sold, electricity, water , you name it and it would turn a dollar . And that wasn’t enough. It was followed by selling the ground underneath us. There were more riches to be made, oil, gas, iron ore, silver gold, coal uranium, titanium and now the richest of them all, lithium.

But what happened to all that money? Where is it now?

Here it is.

1 Gina Rhinehart (mining) $32.64 billion.

2Andrew Forrest (mining) $31.77 billion.

3 Clive Palmer (mining) $ 18.35 Billion.

4 Ivan Glasenberg (mining) $9,10 Billion.

With a looming economic recession rapidly coming over the horizon one wonders if all that wealth in just a few hands could have been better spent or, saved for a rainy day!…