mike carey

The HSC is the final external examination that high school students sit in the NSW education system, and a new English Literature syllabus has recently been released. Here is an op-ed published in the Australian Financial Review, a newspaper. I loved the analysis the author brought to the subject and his liberal use of literary references. I was particularly taken by his observation that there are enough works by women (among other groups) that the syllabus could consist of entirely of them (or of works by men called 'Charles') without compromising its excellence. What the Dickens have they done to the year 12 English syllabus? Charles Dickens, George Orwell and Sylvia Plath will all disappear from the HSC English syllabus in NSW, but their replacements aren’t too shabby. Charles Dickens is among the classic authors who will be dropped from the NSW English syllabus from 2027. Jonty Claypole Dec 24, 2024 – 5.00am Please bureaucrats, I want some more. Some more Dickens, that is. Forget Spotify Unwrapped – the most eagerly anticipated reveal in literary circles at the end of this year was the announcement of what books NSW students would have to study for their higher school certificate from 2027. And I’m afraid it was Hard Times for fans of Dickens, as well as a host of other classic authors, in what is formally known as the NSW HSC English Prescriptions 2027-28. As the chief executive of Red Room Poetry, a non-profit dedicated to fostering engagement with poetry in Australia, and co-host of the Secret Life of Books podcast, imagine my horror at discovering that Dickens, George Orwell, Sylvia Plath and others have vanished from the syllabus. It put me in mind of Winston Smith disappearing into the Ministry of Love in Nineteen Eighty-Four. A generation of students won’t get that reference any more. If you’re wondering why you should care, keep in mind that an English syllabus is far more than a collection of challenging books that most students never go near again. Those books contain stories, history, characters and values. A syllabus is a statement about who we are, what we value, and where we are going. It can be confident and future-facing or it can be reactionary and inward-looking. It is a political statement as much as a cultural one. As a life-long devotee of Dickens – the greatest novelist who ever lived, obviously! – my knee-jerk reaction was outrage. And not just because I love his work. A few weeks ago, I explored the life of the great African-American writer James Baldwin on the Secret Life of Books with my co-host Sophie Gee. Baldwin grew up in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance in 1930s New York, when black writers and artists claimed a central role in the intellectual life of the nation. Yet the writer who inspired Baldwin most was Charles Dickens. He once said that he read A Tale of Two Cities, set during the French Revolution, “over and over and over again”. It was the character of Madame Defarge, a bloodthirsty radical, that spoke to Baldwin the most. “I recognised that unrelenting hatred”, he wrote, “for it was all up and down my street, and in my father’s face and voice.” Dickens’ novel about Paris in the 1790s gave Baldwin a language to explore white supremacist America in the 1930s – and the influence of Madame Defarge’s homicidal rage is evident on every page of his incendiary debut Go Tell It On The Mountain. Dickens’ work, like all great art, transcends time and place. Or at least did, until it ran aground in NSW. My reaction to Sylvia Plath’s banishment was similar. If I had a dollar for every time a poet has told me that it was Plath’s work that inspired them to write, well … I wouldn’t be a millionaire, but I could buy a few rounds at Poetry in the Pub. For a few hours I simmered in rage. Then I looked more closely at the new syllabus, and realised I had missed the bigger picture. Change can be a good thing For a start, it’s apparent that for every classic writer dropped, another has been put in. Goodbye Great Expectations, John Donne and T.S. Eliot; hello Pride and Prejudice, William Blake and Yeats. That swap, I had to admit, is hardly evidence of dumbing-down. The reality is that there are hundreds of classic authors, and the syllabus can only manage a few dozen at any given moment. Maybe the change is good. After all, you only need to read Jane Austen to know that it’s improper to dance with the same partner all night. Undeniably, the new syllabus is also far more representative of our society today. Women, First Nations and Asian-Australian writers are more present than ever before. Anyone who worries that this is mere wokeism – the triumph of identity politics over quality – should bear in mind that the HSC syllabus could feature nothing but women or First Nations or Asian-Australian writers, not to mention writers called “Charles”, without compromising excellence. Our culture is not short of canonical authors. The syllabus is particularly canny when it comes to pairings: when two works, usually a historic and a contemporary one, are studied together to explore connections, contrasts, or shared themes, ideas, and perspectives. Students will now be expected to study the poetry of John Keats, alongside Jane Campion’s brilliant biopic of the romantic poet and his love affair with the literal girl-next-door, Bright Star. Meanwhile poet William Blake is teamed with Olga Tokarczuk’s 2009 mystery novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead with its (deranged) Blake-obsessed narrator. Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is paired with Stephen Daldry’s Dalloway-esque film The Hours. These pairings provide vital context, but make an important intellectual point too. Classics are not hermetically sealed messages-in-bottles washing up on different shores at different times, but are in constant conversation with other writers. Just as Dickens spoke to Baldwin. Or, to use a more contemporary example, as Mark Twain did to Percival Everett in this year’s bestseller, James, which reimagines Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective. The syllabus I was taught at school wasn’t half so sophisticated. The texts we studied were like Shelley’s collapsed colossal statue in the desert. Solitary, grim, devoid of context. More likely to inspire despair than wonder. Golden age for Australian poetry The increased focus on contemporary poetry in the syllabus is also welcome. Australia is going through a golden age for the art form. Poets are winning national awards and slam poetry fills venues. The BBC was so intrigued, it brought its Contains Strong Language festival to Sydney this year (with the support of the ABC and Red Room Poetry) to broadcast six hours of poetry-based programming to millions of people in the UK and around the world. For this renaissance to continue, we depend upon our schools to fire the creativity of students. This means exposing students to a broad range of poetry – as Dante wrote, ‘from a little spark may burst a flame’ – and the syllabus does this well. First Nations poet Ali Cobby Eckermann is among the additions to the NSW English syllabus. Ali Cobby Eckermann, Evelyn Araluen and Samuel Wagan Watson are First Nations poets of exceptional talent. Omar Musa and Ouyang Yu, likewise, speak – unforgettably – to their experience as Asian-Australians. From elsewhere in the English-speaking world, Louise Gluck, Carol Ann Duffy and Raymond Antrobus represent different schools of modern poetry. And even if you are more of a Dead Poets Society type, there is still plenty of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to moon over. Finally, the greater presence of First Nations writers is a sign of a confident society that appreciates its literary uniqueness. Many European cultures do not have an indigenous culture to re-energise tired canons. In aesthetic terms alone, this is a great gift, which is why other countries around the world are looking enviously at current innovations in Australian literature. The impact of Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy, for instance, is not dissimilar to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in the 18th century – it pushes the art form into new territory in a way that is both exciting and unsettling. A syllabus should cast the net wide, with something to engage every student who might otherwise wonder what the point of English literature is. You can quibble about the detail of who’s in and who’s out, but NSW has met that brief. I believe it will inspire not one future James Baldwin, but many. And while I’m sorry to see Dickens go, I’m sure he’ll be back before long. After all, he packed too many of his undesirables off to the then-colony of New South Wales – whether the Artful Dodger or Mr Micawber (not to mention two of Dickens’ own sons) – for us to eliminate him entirely from our history. Jonty Claypole is chief executive of Red Room Poetry and co-host of the Secret Life Of Books podcast.

Everyone knows that LA in conversation (and usually in written text) means Los Angeles [and specifically the one in California, not Los Angeles, IN (Indiana not India) - spoiler I don't think there is one} and not Los Altos or Los Alamos. At least in North America it does, but if I said I was going to LA to some random person in the main street of my rural Australian town, so would they. But some people make merry by ostentatiously misunderstanding such things, and we love them for it!

Only if you leave the cash, if it leaves you it is the parter.

Let's confine our comments to addressing Daniel's situation and not revive any disagreements on other issues.

And did.

Yes, and everybody else is wrong.

The framing of your question is interesting. You ask 'How could they still provide a great service', but then you said that you didn't like it when they revealed they had a partner. So your summary question, 'How could you adjust your guilty feeling to enjoy the experience?' captures what you are actually asking. It's not how they can do it but how can you manage your feelings about it. My answer to the whole question is that if a provider has a partner, they are already dealing with how to manage it. They may still be coming to terms with it and their relationship, or they may have a settled routine and a partner who understands and accepts (at least to a point) their work commitments. Clients probably should not fret about how the provider manages it, and allow them the space to manage their lives as they wish. Providers perhaps need to be judicious in whom they tell as they cannot be sure whether it would be an issue for a client. Whether a client can deal with the idea that their provider is 'cheating' on a partner is something for the client to deal with (and it's really none of their business whether the provider and their partner think they are cheating). If the client can't deal with any feelings they have about a partnered provider, that's an issue for them to resolve, not the provider. But in the end, if a client can't come to terms with the idea they can walk away.

Although not a new subject here (as others have so eloquently noted) but still interesting in some ways. I don't see the point in rehearsing the same 'I never send a deposit' viewpoints, nor do I see any point in a client starting a new thread to ask whether it was a good idea to pay one. No minds will be changed by any of that. What I do find interesting and potentially useful (not necessarily in influencing my behaviour) is to hear from providers who have reluctantly come to the conclusion that deposits might help with a problem they have at the time. Some posters here have noted @Daniel84's reasoning and offered suggestions to address specifically what he's had issues with. I suspect that's more useful than 'Just say no'. There have been other comments restating long held opinions thoughtfully, as replies to his concerns. Any provider who reluctantly start know that it's widely seen as a bad idea, so don't need people to tell them again, loudly. They want their rationale to be understood.

Gentlemen, we are continuing to hide some posts to review them. If we decide that they are appropriate as part of this discussion we will make them available again for members to view. Thank you for your continued cooperation.

'Correct' in this context means 'conforming to appropriate social standards, proper' for a given situation. Obviously the context of being an escort is different from being at a debutant ball (although an escort could mean that they can be 'correct' in any situation).

Almost five years ago, on 30 December 2019, a NSW Rural Fire Service truck being used fighting a fire near the Victorian border went to drive through what the driver thought was a simple wall of flames. There was no 'other side'. Instead, it was a fire storm that overturned the 10-tonne truck and killed Sam McPaul, a young volunteer firefighter whose wife was expecting their third child. What had killed him was a manifestation of fire-generated weather, a phenomenon the extremes of which, fire tornados, had first been observed in the massive 2003 Canberra fires that had destroyed 500 homes and killed four people. This Canberra event was one of several weather events that had been game changers, in what they represented, the science involved or the way in which emergency responses were organised. They are the basis of a new ABC podcast series The Weather That Changed Us. The ABC is also broadcasting them, and the Canberra episode, and specifically a description told by the driver of that truck almost 17 years later was what I woke up to on the radio this Sunday morning. There are six episodes of the podcast, with links from this page (there are links to another podcast series below these six): The Weather That Changed Us with Tyne Logan - ABC listen WWW.ABC.NET.AU Australia experiences all kinds of extreme weather from cyclones and fires to floods and heat. For those who lived... Nate Byrne is the breakfast weather announcer on ABC News TV, and something of a science geek. Here he is with a short video on fire tornados produced by the Bureau of Meteorology: And yes, that's his usual energy level as an announcer. And a news piece about the anniversary of that 2019 event: Five years on, honouring the fallen volunteer firefighters after Black Summer | About Regional ABOUTREGIONAL.COM.AU A memorial and pin oak-lined avenue of honour on a stretch of road that follows the Murray River, near Jingellic,…

Am I alone in thinking that @Vegas_Millennial knows exactly what he has read, understands exactly what the terms meant, and has a specific meaning in mind when he writes here? Or writes 'her'. How some others read the words he puts in his posts seems to miss his intentions in what he writes.

It is! Although I don't recall Sault Ste Marie being on the historic version of the Kangaroo Route. And interestingly, Makassar is more significant for first nations people in the Top End than places like Singapore that were on early versions of the route. When colonists arrived in the region around Darwin in the mid 19th Century, the local people already had a name for white people. It was (and still is) Balanda (or Ballander), which is derived form Hollander, and brought to them by Makassan traders and fishers.

I'm sure civility in your responses to @Cdog123 would always be appreciated, and not just by him, but also by other forum members. Note that the thread has now been moved to the Questions About Hiring forum from the Spa.

There's not really any need to delete it, it will just fade away if no one else posts anything to it. It may have some value as a point of future reference if anyone else were to search the forum for information.

I have to disagree. To start with, completely acceptable is not a subset of somewhat acceptable, they are separate subsets of the total group of people polled. This commentary is talking about one age cohort of the overall number of respondents, those aged from 18 to 29. 'That group' referred to this cohort, not the subset of it that thought his actions were somewhat acceptable. The 41% figure is the total number in that age cohort who made either of those two responses (it's additive of the 17% and 24% for the two responses). So yes, 41% of respondents aged from 18 to 29 thought his actions were either acceptable or somewhat acceptable. This was not a calculation where multiplication of percentages was relevant. If the premise of your 17% of 24% calculation had been correct, 4% would have not have been the proportion of all respondents who thought his actions were completely acceptable. It would have been the proportion of respondents who were both aged from 18 and 29 and found his actions completely acceptable. Perhaps the percentages of all respondents who shared that assessment is different, but that was not the point of the post that was made, nor were any relevant numbers cited.

Weird? I would have said 'normal'. But you laid it on with a trowel this time.

Oh, is it the first of April already?

So saying the link between cooking one's goose and ensuring failure is apt? (I still have memories of my 1979 Christmas attempt.)

In 2020, Dominique Pelicot, a man from a village in rural Provence was arrested for filming up women's skirts. In examining his phone and later his other devices the police uncovered 20,000 videos and photographs of men having sex with his comatose wife of 40 years, Gisèle (his then wife, it should be added). She had no idea that it had happened and police had to work out whether it would even be possible to tell her, with the trauma it might induce. They did tell her. Police identified 50 men who had raped Gisèle at Dominique's invitation. He had drugged her for that purpose over the years since 2011. The day he was arrested for filming those women in public, was the last time Gisèle saw Dominique until the trial. This week the court reached its verdict. All 51 men were convicted of rape and other crimes, Dominique was sentence to 20 years and the other 50 received gaol terms of 3 to 15 years. Gisèle had waived her right to anonymity and sat through the trial, a remarkable ordeal for her to endure, but in the process became something of a global cause célèbre. By rejecting anonymity she has reduced, at least for now, the some of stigma many women face as the victims of such crimes. It's to be hoped that Gisèle can retire into the quiet life she once led, in the knowledge that she was an inspiration to many women around the world. Or if she chooses, become an advocate for a cause that she unwittingly inspired.

No body said he was, the quote was 'If you truly believe that .. then ...' A world of difference.

I've noticed but I don't see the point of it.

Why are you posting this, it's not even Christmas yet!